G. F. Mlely's work has received awards and international critical acclaim, and been the subject of numerous articles, reviews, and profiles. He has also written for, or performed with, Freddie Hubbard, Oscar Pettiford, Zoot Sims, and The Cunninghams, among others.
The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has given seven annual awards to Mlely in the past fourteen years for his "Contributions to American Music."
His new music compositions for choir and monodic songworks have been received in a dozen concert and liturgical premiers within the past couple of years. He continues to write works for multi-disciplinary instrumental ensembles that combine dance, choir, and solo voices, comprising recitative, spoken and sung word (sprechstemme), in forms suitable for jazz improvisation.
He was a faculty member of the San Francisco Community Music Center in San Francisco, California, where he created and taught a course in jazz improvisation and theory.
Formal education includes classical composition and piano at Danmark Musikskole in Copenhagen, Denmark; orchestration and composition at Sherman School of Music in Los Angeles, California; political science and psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey; and jazz piano and improvisation in private studies with Lennie Tristano in New York. He has been a member of songwriting workshops with the Songwriters Guild of America and Alameda County Community College in Los Angeles and Oakland, California, respectively.
Additional training and experience includes military service as a pianist with the United States Air Force, performing also on most instruments in the percussion section of concert orchestras and marching bands.
He occasionally performs concerts, and currently lives, writes, and teaches privately where he lives with his wife in Honolulu, Hawaii.
NOTE: For additional information about the oM (diminished major), see The 8-Tone Quarto-Modes Concept on the JazCraft Home Page.
TERMS FOR USE OF THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL: Please write for permission to use specific original material in public performance, which is normally granted. Copyright ownership is retained. Please send a copy of any program that indicates original material connected to JazCraft or G. F. Mlely performed in public. Commercial release must show author's name and copyright ownership. For commercial publication, please contact JazCraft regarding additional information. Regular statutory protections and payment remain in effect for any and all copyrighted material. No legal claims or protections not mentioned are relinquished.
G. F. Mlely can be contacted at jazcraft@gte.net.
Cafe Elixir (instrumental leadsheet) reflects my interest in shaping conventional form with asymmetrical structure, mixing and juxtaposing the conventional with the unconventional, and logically related. Its opening bars of three paraphrastic chordal moves connected tritonally - A to Bb, E to F, B to C - obtain from chromaticism rather than from standard scaletone practice. Conventional sensibility is finally relieved in the 6th and 7th bars - B going to E - but only briefly. This is followed by two asymmetrically juxtaposed 2-bar paraphrastic patterns - F- to D7, Bb- to Gb7 to (ah, at last a familiar resolve) BM7 - and so forth. The bridge, though more conventional, echoes in its opening bars the opening bars of Section A, but obvertly by way of three chromatically shifting tritones - D to Ab, Db to G, C to F# - each tritone shift connected by a standard scaletone-related resolve. Try it. Once you have accustomed yourself to its particularities, I think you will enjoy playing it. I do.
Words We Say, page 1 and page 2 (piano/vocal leadsheet). A waltz, Words We Say is formed upon chords set to each of 11 variously arranged tones of the 12-tone chromatic continuum. The lyric looks at the condition of homelessness - specifically, along the boardwalk at the Venice and Santa Monica beaches in California - where men and, sometimes, women and even children live in little tabernacles of cloth and cardboard. Familiar neighbors, whom we, as passers-by, can occasionally get to know. And what can we say? Perhaps appropriately, it is a music monoform, there being no place to pause or return between the beginning and the end.
Threnody for an Unborn Child, page 1, page 2, and page 3. A threnody is a song of lamentation, in this case one without a lyric, and features the lydian. Plato approved of only two musical modes, along with the dancing they inspired. They were the phrygian (War-like and nerving) and the dorian (sobering and tempering). He regarded the lydian as relaxing sweet, and therefore to be forbidden, being among modes that tended to produce mixed pleasures and to loosen the bonds of the human soul. Today, quite the opposite response is more often the case. "Dissonant" is regularly heard. It is easy to see how conditioning and expectation account for most opinion and sensibility. The modern ability to easily mix lydian in with other scales and modes (a thing Plato would definitely frown upon), gives greater scope for its effect. Threnody puts the lydian in with an equal number of standard, mostly suspended, scaletone chords, nearly relieved at two points by dominant chords, only one of which resolves normally, and that to a minor that quickly shifts to a minor with a major 7th. The effect of Threnody is that of nearly constant suspension, a tension in keeping with its title.
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