George Tremblay

George Amédée Tremblay (14 January 1911 – 14 July 1982) was a Canadian (and later, naturalized American citizen) pianist, composer, and author who was active in the United States. Although his works display a broad range of stylistic influences, he is primarily associated with the twelve-tone technique. He is the author of the musical treatise The Definitive Cycle of the Twelve Tone Row. Tremblay was also noted for his unique capacity to extemporize on the piano and frequently performed as an improviser.

Biography Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Tremblay was the son of composer and organist Amédée Tremblay and Rosa Martel Tremblay. As the son of an active composer and performer, young George was exposed to not only the classics, but to more contemporary composers; his father, Amédée, was an early champion of Cesar Franck, Max Reger, and Claude Debussy for Canadian audiences. He was a recurring panel member on the Sunday evening radio quiz show, Are You Musical?, on Los Angeles station KMPC. where he was receiving treatment for cirrhosis.

The Definitive Cycle of the Twelve Tone Row

The Definitive Cycle of the Twelve Tone Row (1974) is a music theory and composition treatise that is the result of Tremblay's studies in the twelve-tone serial technique. The text was originally meant to function as a brief mechanical explanation, but it soon grew in scope as Tremblay realized the wider variety of users and applications to which the book was useful. Tremblay wrote, for example, that the "examples set in these books have proved invaluable to film composers, especially in the exigencies of meeting deadlines, since it gives positive and definitive answers to technical problems of a musical nature."

Tremblay's basic explanation of The Definitive Cycle reads: "By taking a row, or a series of twelve different notes, and permutating the second six notes with the first six notes, twelve rows evolve. Taking the first note of each one of those rows successively we produce a new row, and by applying the same process of interpolating the second six with the first six, we arrive at another series of twelve rows. Each series we designate at a Set. By continuing this process for twenty-four Sets we arrive again at Set 1, completing the Cycle. All of my works since 1965 have been composed on the basis of this Cycle, most of them using an entire Cycle, which incidentally, contains 3456 notes."

Essentially, the treatise realizes "a vast immutable development of the initial row" that eschews traditional methods for developing a tone row (inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion). Two of Tremblay's later works, Symphony No. 3 (ca. 1973) and The Phoenix: a Dance Symphony (1982), were composed in this manner. In fact, Tremblay described his third symphony as "a textbook in actual sound of the process of this technique."

Tremblay was working on a sequel to The Definitive Cycle before his death. The second book was meant to deal primarily with more functional applications of the definitive cycle and included topics such as osinatos, sequences, harmonization of the row, and even 12 bar blues. His wife, Patricia, and Roger Steinman, a student and friend of Tremblay, organized the materials and gave them to the University of Maryland Libraries. The notes are currently held by University of Maryland's Special Collections in the Performing Arts.

Improvisation

Between 1980 and 1982 Tremblay recorded his unique improvisations as a musical autobiography. These unpublished recordings were restored and are now housed in The George Tremblay Collection at Special Collections in Performing Arts at University of Maryland. Some of the improvisations are based within a particular style (such as jazz or Baroque) while others are based upon a preexisting theme or commemorate the death of a fellow composer.

Additionally, Prologue Records released an LP containing Tremblay's improvisations on a few original themes (DL-103).

Major works

Orchestral Symphony in One Movement, 1949 Symphony No. 2, 1954 Symphony No. 3, 1973 The Phoenix: A Symphonic Ballet, 1982

Chamber String Quartet No. 1, 1936 Modes of Transportation, 1939 Wind Quintet No. 1, 1940 In Memoriam, 1942 Serenade for 12 Instruments, 1955 Five Pieces for Four Players, 1964 Sextet, 1968

Piano Prelude and Dance, 1935 Two Sonatas, 1938 Piano Sonata No. 3, 1957