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George Flynn, page 4

BD: If you didn’t have to do what you do to earn the money; if you could concentrate just on the composing. Or would you simply keep your
life the same way, with the balance of teaching and administrating?

GF: If I won the lottery?

BD: Right.

GF: What would I do if I had lots of money? The idea of teaching appeals to me. Perhaps maybe not as much as I am teaching right now, but
I would certainly want to keep my hand in. I think it helps keep you fresh, and you have contact with colleagues. You sort of keep
up with things. But at the same time, I also have to say that I would probably want to focus more on my composition, which is a feeling that
I’ve had more and more as I go along. So it would be probably a slight change in the balance of activities, but I would keep essentially the same activities.

* * * * *

BD: Is composing fun?

GF: Oh, yeah, sure! Sometimes it’s a headache, but basically it’s fun, yeah. Sometimes you say, “Oh, damn it! The ideas just
didn’t work and I wasted all this time on something or other.” Or, “I don’t know how to get from here to there,” and then you have to
go worry about it. Often times, however, that very thing can also be fun. Yeah, it’s fun. Even the mechanical part can be fun
now that we have Finale, because you get these lovely scores coming out. I really don’t like copying by hand, so that hasn’t been fun
as you become more and more mechanical. You start off with a hundred percent creative stuff, and then gradually — or rapidly — you
work down to where you’re spending a great deal of time with mechanical stuff, copying. With Finale, you still spend a lot of time, but —
at least for me — you produce such lovely scores that it makes you feel good!

BD: Finale is a computer program?

GF: Yeah, software. It’s the high end program. We all use it now, and the students are learning it all the time.

BD: I asked you earlier if you were pleased with performances. Have you been pleased with the recordings? They have a little more universality.

GF: Sometimes the quality of the sound, and even in the case of Kanal, the quality of the
piano, will leave something to be desired. It is our hope to reissue all of that piano music, the two piano solo albums, and we’re going to see
if we can do some changing in terms of frequencies, elevating, boosting, some of the midrange areas.

BD: So this has nothing to do with interpretations, just the pure sonics?

GF: Yeah, it’s just sonics. In terms of my performances of my own piece, I would give myself about a B-plus, between a B and B-plus. I
don’t think it qualifies to be in the A category yet.

BD: Yet?

GF: Yeah.

BD: So, you’re always striving!

GF: Yeah. However, I have to tell you that I’m the only person who has tackled these pieces. Nobody else has played them; nobody
else has tried. For one thing, hardly anybody knows about them, and again, that’s a problem of my lack of being sufficiently concerned
with getting them out there. I haven’t even put these pieces into the software yet. All the software piano pieces are ones that
I’ve written recently; pieces that either are just being performed now, or will be performed next calendar year. For example, the most
recent of my piano piece, which is called Derus Simples, is about
forty-five to fifty minutes of music.

BD: That’s a long piece.

GF: Yeah, it’s a single-movement piece that has already been premiered by Geoffrey Madge in Europe. He did that this fall, and he’ll be
playing it in Chicago at Northwestern University as part of their Visiting Artist Series. That piece is in Finale. There are
probably some changes that will have to be made. I’ve already found a few scribal errors, and for a piece that’s eighty pages long,
it has tons of notes in eight hundred and some-odd measures. So there’s just bound to be mistakes there, and I’ve found a few of them
already. I’ll find more as I get into that piece more as a performer. Then the piece that I wrote just before that for piano
is called Salvage. That was finished about a year and a half earlier, and that’s around thirty-five minutes — another single movement
piece. I’ve taken a crack at that a couple of times in public, and of course I found a number of errors in the process of going
through it as a performer. There were a lot of F’s without the proper sharp in front because the software just eliminated them in the
process of going through it. So they had to be reattached to the note, and I will redo that page. But that piece has been
performed and somebody else might take a crack at that. A piece that Stuart Leitch is going to play next year is fifty minutes
long. It’s called Pieces of Night, and it consists of five pieces: three
Nocturnes, and two Myoclonuses. A myoclonus is that muscle jerk you sometimes have when you’re going to sleep at night; it sort of wakes
you up a little. So I have two pieces that deal with that. All five of the pieces add up to about fifty minutes. He will
play the whole thing, either late spring or probably in the fall, next year.

BD: Good luck to him! [Laughs]

GF: Well, he has learned all but one of them, and he has played all but one of them in public. So he’s doing it on the installment plan.
[Both laugh] And he does a terrific job! He’s a terrific pianist! He is the only pianist in Chicago that I can think of
right now who has actually tackled any of my piano solo music.

BD: Aside from yourself...

GF: Aside from myself, yeah.

BD: That might encourage more people to tackle it.

GF: Well, maybe. He has excellent technique. He’s played my ensemble music off and on for a number of years, so he’s pretty used to me
and what I do, and he knows what to expect. There are a lot of good pianists in Chicago, but he’s the only one who’s tackled them.

BD: Thank you for being a composer.

GF: [Laughs] I enjoy it, though some people may not thank me like you have! Some people would say, “Thank you for not being a
composer.” I’m not sure whether the world needs more composers. However, I enjoy doing it and I enjoy being here and
being able to talk about it. And I appreciate your interest in it.

George Flynn chaired Musicianship and Composition at DePaul University (Chicago) for 25 years, and
continues to direct DePaul's professional contemporary performance series, "New Music Depaul" as well as Chicago's "New Music at the Green
Mill" series. He has composed over 100 works in all media, including over five hours of piano solo music, the latter performed by international
pianists Geoffrey Madge (Derus Simples), Carlo Grante (Glimpses of Our Inner Lives), Fredrik Ullén (Trinity), Winston
Choi (American Icon), Heather O'Donnell (Remembering), and Eteri Andjaparidze (Toward the Light) as well as Chicago pianists Stuart Leitch and Frank
Abbinanti (Pieces of Night, Kanal). His music is performed internationally, and has appeared on several recordings, including four recent CD's on the Southport
Composers label, available on several internet sites and in selected retail outlets. As a pianist, Flynn has performed and recorded new music for many years
throughout the US and Europe.

George Flynn received his BA, MA, and DMA degrees from Columbia University, New York City. He has served as visiting
lecturer/composer at many music institutions throughout the country and Canada, and has contributed articles to several American publications,
including The Musical Quarterly, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Program Guide, and Christian Century. He is the recipient of awards from
many individuals and organizations, among them the Alice B. Ditson Fund, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, Paul Fromm, Illinois Arts Council,
the Polish Arts Club, DePaul University, ASCAP and Meet the Composer. Flynn is a member of ASCAP, and is entered in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
Baker's Biographical Dictionary, Maurice Hinson's Guide to the Piano Repertory as well as several national and international Who's Who in Music.

© 1996 Bruce Duffie

This interview was recorded in Chicago on November 23, 1996. Portions (along with recordings) were used on WNIB two months later, and on WNUR for two different
programs in 2003. This transcription was made and posted on this website in 2009.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment
as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM,
as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

Used by permission.

Listen to George Flynn playing Trinity: https://www.classicalconnect.com/Flynn/Trinity/2276