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.
[1] The family moved one last time in 1925 to Los Angeles, California, where Amédée became the organist and choir director at St. Vincent de Paul Church.
[2] He was a recurring panel member on the Sunday evening radio quiz show, Are You Musical?, on Los Angeles station KMPC.
In 1934 Tremblay's "long-standing ambition" to study under Arnold Schoenberg was realized when the composer emigrated from Europe to Los Angeles due to the rise of the Nazis under Adolf Hitler in 1933.
[1] Schoenberg, always willing to learn from his own students, supposedly was inspired to compose his Ode to Napoleon (1942) with a row of two symmetrical hexachords after hearing Tremblay's Modes of Transportation (1940) make use of a similar idea.
[1] Several important composers were in attendance, including Robert Russell Bennett, Aaron Copland, Paul Pisk, Arnold Schoenberg, Gerald Strang, Ernst Toch, and Edgar Varese.
Some of Tremblay's notable students are: Alexander Courage, Larry Fotine, Hugo Friedhofer, Earle Hagen, Quincy Jones, Richard Markowitz, Randy Newman, Marty Paich, Mel Powell, Robert O. Ragland, George Roumanis, Jack Smalley, and Mark Snow.
[citation needed] 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.
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.
[1] His wife, Patricia, and Roger Steinman, a student and friend of Tremblay, organized the materials and gave them to the University of Maryland Libraries.