George Flynn

George William Flynn, American composer and pianist, was born in Miles City, Montana, on 21 January 1937. He trained at Columbia University, where he earned his doctorate in music in 1972 and where his teachers included Ussachevsky, Luening and Beeson. His work is associated with the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, a period in which he collaborated with John Cage and Dick Higgins and helped define what the Fluxus movement called "music of danger".

In 1977 he was appointed director of the department of musicianship and composition at the School of Music of DePaul University in Chicago. From then on he combined teaching with a prolific output, in which his works for piano stand out, an instrument he played himself with remarkable virtuosity, especially in his own compositions.

His music rests on the repetition, at different timescales, of similar gestures articulated around specific pitches or aggregates of pitch classes. These gestures relate more to bodily movements and postures than to visual images. His piano pages demand great physical activity, such as the body-driven trills in the second of his Preludes (1965, revised 1994). Flynn also shows a preference for broad forms and a rejection of notational complexity, traits that align him with Sorabji and Cecil Taylor rather than with Xenakis or Ferneyhough. A good part of his output responds to political and historical events.

His catalogue includes symphonies, choral works, chamber music and numerous pieces for keyboard, and his principal publisher is Imprimis. His legacy lies at the intersection of the American experimental heritage and a piano writing of great physical demands.