‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, whose music melded genres, dies

Robert Sheff, a composer and pianist who worked under the name “Blue” Gene Tyranny as a solo performer and a collaborator with artists including Iggy Pop, composer Robert Ashley and jazz composer and arranger Carla Bley, died Dec. 12 in hospice care in New York. He was 75.

The cause was complications of diabetes, Tommy McCutchon, the founder of the record label Unseen Worlds, which released several albums by Tyranny, said in an email.

His memorable pseudonym, coined during his brief stint with Iggy and the Stooges, was derived partly from Jean, his adoptive mother’s middle name. 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 directed by David Bernabo released in September.

Music, Tyranny explained in the film, 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.”

A master at the keyboard and an eclectic composer who deftly balanced conceptual rigor with breezy pop sounds, Tyranny was active in modern music as early as his teenage years.

From curating contemporary music concerts in high school, he went on to participate in the groundbreaking and influential Once Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the 1960s. He taught classes and worked as a recording studio technician at Mills College, an experimental- music hotbed in Oakland, California, from 1971 to 1982. Arriving in New York City in 1983, Tyranny worked with Ashley, Laurie Anderson and Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, while also composing his own works.

Tyranny, who had been living in Long Island City since 2002, is survived by a brother, Richard Sheff, and three half siblings, William Gantic Jr., Vickie Murray and Justa Calvin.

He was born Joseph Gantic to William and Eleanor Gantic on Jan. 1, 1945, in San Antonio. When William Gantic, an Army paratrooper, was reported missing in action in Southeast Asia during World War II,

Tyranny related in “Just for the Record,” his wife gave up their infant child for adoption.

He was adopted 11 months later by Meyer and Dorothy Jean Sheff, who ran a clothing shop in downtown San Antonio, and renamed Robert Nathan Sheff.

He began piano studies early in his childhood and took his first composition lessons at 11. By high school, he was performing avant- garde works by composers like Charles Ives and John Cage in an experimental-music series he jointly curated with composer Philip Krumm at the McNay Art Institute in San Antonio.

An association with Ashley, whom Tyranny had met in Ann Arbor and then followed to Mills College, flourished into a close, enduring collaboration. Tyranny’s best- known work likely was the role he created in“Perfect Lives( Private Parts )”(1976-83), Ashley’s landmark opera, conceived and eventually presented as a television series: Buddy, the World’s

Greatest Piano Player. T heir relationship was deeply collaborative. Presented by Ashley with a blueprint indicating keys and metric structures, Tyranny filled in harmonies and supplied playfully ornate piano writing.

“Blue and Bob had this symbiotic relationship from back in Ann Arbor,” Gordon, who also participated in the creation of “Perfect Lives,” said in a phone interview. “The character Buddy is like the avatar for the music of ‘Blue’ Gene.”