George Flynn Before coming to Chicago in 1977 to chair DePaul University’s composition department, George Flynn had been studying and teaching at Columbia University. The new-music scene in Manhattan was then divided into two camps: an uptown group associated with Columbia and Charles Wuorinen that focused on 12-tone and serial music, and a downtown group associated with John Cage and Morton Feldman that was more freewheeling and experimental. “I was really midtown,” says Flynn, who hung out with both groups as he wrote his Ives-inspired nonserial music. He says that when he arrived in Chicago “there wasn’t much of anything going on. It was just Shapey’s group,” meaning Ralph Shapey’s Contemporary Chamber Players at the University of Chicago. Within two years Flynn had created Chicago Soundings as a venue outside of academia,
