Robert Nathan Sheff (January 1, 1945 – December 12, 2020[1]), known professionally as "Blue" Gene Tyranny, was an American avant-garde composer and pianist.
"His memorable pseudonym, coined during his brief stint with Iggy and the Stooges, was derived partly from Jean, his adoptive mother’s middle name," wrote Steve Smith, in his New York Times obituary for Tyranny. "It also referred to what he called 'the tyranny of the genes' — a predisposition to being 'strongly overcome by emotion,' he said in Just for the Record: Conversations With and About ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, a documentary film."[2]
Tyranny was born Joseph Gantic in San Antonio on January 1, 1945, to William and Eleanor Gantic. Later that year, after his birth father, an Army paratrooper, went missing in the Asian theater of World War II, his mother put him up for adoption. He was adopted by Dorothy and Meyer Sheff of San Antonio, who changed his name to Robert Nathan Sheff.[3][4][5] Tyranny was raised in the Lutheran church.[6] He studied piano with Meta Hertwig and Rodney Hoare, and composition with Otto Wick and Frank Hughes.
He taught at Mills College from 1971 to 1982, where his students included composer Hsiung-Zee Wong, and also worked at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills. He moved to New York in 1983 and received a Bessie in 1988 and in 1989 a Composer Fellowship from the NY Foundation for the Arts.
Tyranny was a contributor for AllMusic, reviewing albums and creating biographies for many notable contemporary artists.
According to Kyle Gann in the Village Voice, Tyranny had "Cecil Taylor's keyboard energy [and] Morton Feldman's ear." "The most original aspect of [his] works," wrote Gann, "is the way they create continuity: they're tonal, yet rigorously asymmetrical. They satisfy the ear without letting it take anything for granted. They evolve...with the labyrinthine irreversibility of deep psychic forces." In another Voice article, Gann was lyrical in his evocation of Tyranny's virtuosity: "God plays the piano through this man. Science cannot explain the speed with which trillions of inspired brain impulses zip through his...hands, resulting in note-perfect works...the 1988 Kitchen improv-with-delay [The Intermediary Following Traces of the Song]...I called 'the most inspired piano performance I've ever heard.' It still is. At his schmaltziest ("Sunrise or Sunset in Texas") he's like Keith Jarrett on an extremely good day. At his best, it's like listening to Ives improvise 'Hawthorne' from the Concord Sonata."[9]
In October 2020, Just for the Record: Conversations With and About "Blue" Gene Tyranny, a documentary film directed by David Bernabo, premiered at the TUSK Festival 2020.[10] In a review of the film for The Wire, Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote, "Hearing Tyranny talk and learning how he lived his life encourages one to go the same way."[11]
Tyranny died in hospice in Long Island City, Queens, on December 12, 2020, of complications of diabetes.[12][13]
In David Bernabo's documentary film Just for the Record: Conversations With and About ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Tyranny said music was a source of solace, but also a means “of deeply informing myself that there’s another world. Music is my way of being in the world.”[14]
^Kim, Joshua Minsoo(February 2021). "Just For the Record: Conversations with and about “Blue” Gene Tyranny". The Wire. No. 444. p. 75 – via Exact Editions. (subscription required)
