Pianist, recording artist, and educator George Flynn is universally regarded as one of America's most intense and sophisticated vanguard composers. His original works delve into America's unruly collective unconscious while simultaneously aspiring to transcendence. Flynn has composed over 150 works across all media, including more than six hours of solo piano music and voluminous compositions for orchestra, chamber groups, vocal choirs, and soloists. As a composer, he is widely celebrated for his equanimous openness to all aspects of modernism that he employs in fragments and juxtapositions. Many of Flynn's compositions reflect extra-musical interests: American Rest, Pieces of Night, and Songs of Destruction all meditate on America's Vietnam experience. Others, including American Voices, American Enchantment, American Summer, and American City, explore diverse images of history and life in the United States. His solo piano works that comprise the album Trinity (Wound, Kanal, and Salvage) seek to expand the limits of gestural, technical, and poetic elements found and explored in creative expression. Since 2001, Southport Records has issued recorded documentation of Flynn's works. They include Pieces of Night: Three American Nocturnes (2002), Trinity (2007), American City (2009), and Poetry and Music (2016, which included a chamber music setting for Allen Ginsberg's Howl). As a pianist, Flynn has performed and recorded throughout the U.S. and Europe. He chaired Musicianship and Composition at DePaul University for 25 years, directed the contemporary performance series "New Music DePaul" and the "New Music at the Green Mill" series, and co-directs the new music series "Chicago Soundings." Flynn was born in Miles City, Montana, and raised in Washington state. In 1960, he began attending Columbia University in New York City, working under the guidance of Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, and Jack Beeson. While attending university, he published his earliest compositions including 1965's Mrs. Brown (for chamber orchestra and tape) and 1966's First Symphony: Music for Orchestra. He also composed the solo piano work Wound. Flynn achieved his doctorate in 1972 and was active in New York's modernist movement, which put him in close and frequent contact with composers John Cage, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown. Flynn made his debut recording for Finnadar Records in 1974 performing Wound and Cage's Winter Music. He relocated to Chicago in 1977 to direct the Department of Composition at DePaul University, where he taught for 25 years. Though immersed in his duties as an academic, Flynn composed prolifically. During the 1980s, he published his Second Symphony, the chamber work American Rest (1982), the solo piano work Kanal (whose recorded premiere was issued by Finnadar as an album of the same title in 1987), and 1989's Who Shall Inherit the Earth? He wrote and published dozens of works during the period including his Alexander Scriabin piano tribute Toward the Light. Between 1995 and 1998, Flynn composed one major work for each of DePaul's School of Music ensembles: the chorus/chamber choir (St. Vincent's Words, 1995), the orchestra (The Density of Memory, 1997), and the wind ensemble (American City, 1998). Flynn signed a deal with Southport in 2000. His label debut was 1995's Derus Simples, a 17-movement tribute to the composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji performed by Geoffrey Douglas Madge. Two years later, Flynn performed and recorded Pieces of Night: Three American Nocturnes. In 2005, the composer issued Together, a duo offering with violinist Katherine Hughes. In 2007, pianist Fredrik Ullén recorded Trinity, comprised of Flynn's three solo masterworks: 1968's Wound, 1976's Kanal, and 1993's Salvage. Two years later, the pieces Flynn had composed for DePaul's three major ensembles were recorded in the school's concert hall by its faculty, students, and alumni, and released as American City. In 2010, pianist Carlo Grante recorded Flynn's seminal Glimpses of Our Inner Lives alongside works by Ferruccio Busoni, Michael Finnissy, and Ernest Bloch for the album Visions on Music + Arts. In 2012, Flynn issued String Fever for Southport. The release featured the composer playing piano in original composition duos with three string players dating from the seventies. Remembering (Solo and Chamber Music by George Flynn), which included three solo piano works, appeared in 2013. Fuguing and Toward the Light were both performed by the composer, while Remembering was performed by pianist Heather O'Donnell. Also included were the solo Forms of Flight played by clarinetist Larry Combs, and American Summer performed by violinist Hughes, cellist Peter Szczepanek, and pianist Stuart Leitch. In 2015, American Forms (Solo and Quartet Music by George Flynn) was issued by Southport. Its works included Chicago Quartet, the solo Forms of Flight (performed this time by clarinetist Cory Tiffin), the solo viola work Forms of Friction, and the string quartet American Enchantment. The following year saw the release of the acclaimed Poetry and Music; it included Chicago Poets Sing!, a nine-movement composition that set the works of Windy City writers -- Art Lange, Nina Corwin, Kathleen Lombardo, and George Drury among them -- to chamber. Flynn performed the work with soprano Leila Bowie. It also featured a radical and ultimately highly regarded musical setting for a narrator and string quartet behind Allen Ginsberg's disembodied voice reading the immortal poem Howl. In 2017, Flynn recorded Piano Alone. The set was comprised of recent solo works including Glimpses of Sid Kleinman, Northern Lights, and Into the Night. Flynn has served as visiting lecturer/composer at many music institutions throughout North America and Europe, and has contributed articles to numerous American trade publications. He is the recipient of awards from several organizations, among them the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, ASCAP, and Meet the Composer. ~ Thom Jurek