Tim Story (composer)
Tim Story is an American composer of Ambient, Electronic, Neoclassical, and jazz music. Hailed as "a true artist in the electronic medium" and "a master of electronic chamber music," Story has received international acclaim for his haunting compositions, which BLEND orchestral acoustic INSTRUMENTS and elegant electronics.
Early life
Tim Story was born in 1957 in Philadelphia, Pennsylovania. Apart from some early guitar lessons, he is a self-taught musician and composer. Story's idiosyncratic approach to the piano lent itself to the new breed of electronic music instruments that were evolving in the early 1970s. His affinity for synthesizers and electric guitars is evident in his earliest recordings.Story's intensely personal style as a pianist, synthesist, and composer developed from years of experimentation in his home studio, as well as his pure love of composition. After working as a recording engineer and a studio musician, he turned his energies to composing in 1981. He released his first album on the Norwegian label Uniton in 1982.
Windham Hill and Hearts of Space
After several innovative but commercially unsuccessful albums in the early 1980s, Story's music attracted the attention of Windham Hill Records' Will Ackerman, who would release two of Story's most successful albums in the late 1980s. His album Glass Green won universal acclaim.
Another review called the album "utterly accessible, yet timeless and profound." Ackerman also included Story's recordings on several of Windham Hill's very successful CD samplers. Stoy's intimate style and approach to composition that seemed to open cavernous sonic spaces eventually caught the attention of Hearts of Space, which released what is considered to be his masterpiece, Beguiled, in 1991.
Story's careful and innovative juxtaposition of acoustic instruments with electronic TEXtures are common threads running through most of his work. Though his melodies are often expressed with "uncommon delicacy on grand piano," Story uses broad synthesized brushstrokes in "hazy, enigmatic veils of color" to frame that delicacy. In addition, he incorporates a profound sense of ambiguity into his compositions, suggesting "emotions for which there are no words."
The music
Tim Story's work has earned an international following for its "haunting elegance and meticulous compositional detail." Story often spends months carefully working and refining his compositions until he "achieves the desired emotional and intellectual effect." His music is deceptively simple and distill harmonic and melodic IDeaS that are often quite complex.
{{quotation|I like to work with a finite palette of sounds and keep paring things down to a pure, though often ambiguous, expression. Simplicity shouldn't imply simplemindedness. I think of the deceptively simple, ironic pieces of Erik Satie, or the lovely yet challenging piano music of Debussy. The very best of these pieces appear so effortless and perfect that they seem as if they've existed forever.
The appeal of Story's sonic landscape is undeniable. His "unsentimental blend of still-life piano and eerie synthetics conjures without explaining" and his music "comes at the listener subtly yet subversively." His MusicAL influences are diverse, ranging from classical music of Bela Bartok and Arvo Part to the jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the Ambient and Electronic innovations of Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt.
{{quotation|A goal of mine is to get the listeners to put something of themselves into the music. I want to prod the listener to find his or her own feelings AbOUT a piece, even if those feelings are sometimes uncomfortable. As Charles Ives said, 'Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair.' I like to think of good music as a sculpture or a Japanese garden, where you can never experience the whole from any one point. Music that insinuates, you must move through it, live With It for a while, before it yields its secrets.
Films and collaborations
In addition to his solo albums and compilation appearances, Story's music has appeared on numerous television and film soundtracks, including the original score for the popular NPR documentary In Search of Angels (1994), and Caravan (2005), a feature-length documentary from the acclaimed Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar. Story's music was nominated for a Grammy award for 1988's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a children's recording with Glenn Close, and a NAIRD Best Album award for Beguiled. He has also been involved with several successful collaborations, including three acclaimed albums with Dwight Ashley, and his album with Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Lunz, which was named by the editors at Amazon as one of the year's Top 5 albums.
Over the years, Tim Story's music has consistently met with critical acclaim, and his three most recent solo releases were called "one of the finest trilogies in contemporary instrumental music" Tim Story continues to compose, record, and perform his music. He currently lives in the small river town of Maumee, in northwest Ohio.
Discography
- 2006 buzzle
- 2005 Standing and Falling (Ashley and Story)
- 2005 Caravan (Film Soundtrack)
- 2002 Lunz (Story/Roedelius)
- 2001 Shadowplay
- 1997 Drop (Ashley/Story)
- 1996 Abridged
- 1994 In Search of Angels
- 1994 The Perfect Flaw
- 1992 A Desperate Serenity (Ashley/Story)
- 1991 Beguiled
- 1987 Glass Green
- 1987 Wheat and Rust
- 1985 Three Feet From the Moon
- 1984 Untitled
- 1982 In Another Country
- 1981 Threads