Remembering Scott

 Twelve years ago today

My buddy Brian: “Did Neil Diamond just sing ‘Our freedom isn’t free’? God this song is terrible.”

Me: “Sorry this is how you had to find out, on 7/4”

Reviled and acclaimed,

Your voice wild and simple,

You’re untranslatable

Into any language.

You will walk into oblivion

Like people into a temple.

I bless you for this.

— Anna Akhmatova, 1963

 tr. D.M. Thomas)

Scott Tinney and I were graduate students together at that musically highly peculiar place, the University at Buffalo. He was a piano student of Yvar Mikhashoff’s. Scott’s bravura performance of Gaspard de la nuit is one of the most impressive and pleasant recollections of that peculiar epoch in my life. Decades passed and somehow we reconnected on Facebook. He wound up in Peru (I never did learn just how or why.) He would give impromptu performances on pianos here or there. He expressed a wish for a hyper-short piece (15 seconds long) to serve as a curt curtain line for such a performance en plein air. Once I got rolling (it seeming next-door to pointless to write just one such fleeting piece) I decided to make it a set of 20, Les visions fugitives de nouveau. Though I am alive to the degree to which this post is about what I don't know, the last thing I learnt about Scott is, grossly sadly, that he passed away, far away from the land of his birth, and if not friendless, insufficiently appointed with friends. 
Celebrated Independence Day morning by drawing up a 15-second piano piece (the third, so far) for our Scott Tinney, “Beneath the Clear Sky.” [4 July 2015]