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NY Times, May 6 2016
The Composer Frederic Rzewski: In His Notes, Protest and Politics
By ZACHARY WOOLFE
It sounds like the setup for a joke: An eminent composer and pianist
walks into a fish market and starts to play a Chilean protest anthem.
But there it is on YouTube: a 2015 video of Frederic Rzewski pounding
out his 1975 masterpiece, an hourlong fantasia on “The People United
Will Never Be Defeated,” on an upright piano at Wholey’s, a Pittsburgh
institution.
“Well, it’s kind of strange,” Mr. Rzewski (pronounced ZHEV-ski) recently
recalled thinking of the invitation from the market, where his son works
as a cashier. “But why not?”
From fish market to floating concert hall: On Friday, Ursula Oppens,
who gave the premiere of “The People United,” will play it at the cozy
Bargemusic, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge in Dumbo, as part of a
rare New York visit by Mr. Rzewski and a weekend-long immersion in his
work, which is both rigorous and eclectic.
And, crucially, political.
Mr. Rzewski, who at 78 is flinty and opinionated yet warm, is one of
many great American composers whom a vast majority of America has never
heard, or even heard of. But of that group, he may be the one with the
most to say to us now. He has, for decades, been making
thought-provoking, heart-wrenching music about issues that dominate the
headlines today: the perils of incarceration, the tension between the
government and the governed, the struggle for gay rights, the decimation
of the industrial working class.
He may be particularly valuable at a moment when the political discourse
produces only an unending, almost unlistenable, screech. Passionate but
not strident, unsparing yet subtle, his work offers something
increasingly rare: a space to be both angry and reflective.
Take “Coming Together,” composed in the aftermath of the 1971 Attica
prison uprising. Lines from a letter written by Sam Melville, an Attica
inmate who later died in the violence, are repeated, like incantations,
over a seething, building din. When I heard it in 2011, performed
outdoors in Bedford-Stuyvesant by the Brooklyn Philharmonic and Mos Def,
it had a terrifying yet seductive force, the words retaining fierce
integrity as the music churned around them.
In “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues,” the melody of a workers’ folk song is
gradually engulfed by music as ruthlessly propulsive as an industrial
engine. Not a word is spoken, but the moral is poignant: A way of life
has been cruelly taken away. “De Profundis,” a setting of Oscar Wilde’s
prison cri du coeur, makes Wilde’s suffering disconcertingly personal
and physical. While playing the dizzying solo part, the pianist also
speaks the text, hits his or herself, whistles and seems to sob.
Rzewski pieces like “Stop the War!” and “No More War” make no bones
about their composer’s politics. But they’re not pamphlets in sound.
They have wit, sensitivity. One of the dozens of what he calls “miles”
that make up Mr. Rzewski’s sprawling solo-piano series “The Road,” “Stop
the War!” bristles with crushing chords, and its performer even shouts
out the title at one point. But the music keeps receding, as if stunned
by the violence and rage it feels compelled to depict.
The son of pharmacists, Mr. Rzewski was born in Westfield, Mass., and
educated at Harvard and Princeton, centers of mid-20th-century
composition. He moved to Europe, became an important new-music
interpreter, and in 1966 helped found the ensemble Musica Elettronica
Viva, which used widely available electronic instruments for exercises
in collaborative improvisation.
He now speaks a bit ruefully of those heady days. “Free improvisation
was going to change the world,” he said of his generation’s 1960s
dreams. “It was going to create an entirely new language, so that people
could come together from different parts of the planet and instantly
communicate.”
He paused. “Well, of course, we were wrong.”
But he hasn’t given up the fight. “This whole Black Lives Matter
movement is very important,” he said. (Of course, ever the good
socialist, he drew a distinction: “It’s not a party, it’s a movement.”)
His influence can be felt in pieces by much younger composers, like
“sweet light crude,” a brooding mock love song to fossil fuels by David
T. Little, who has also performed Mr. Rzewski’s music. When Andrew
Norman, in his “Split,” used a piano concerto to reflect on power, on
how a group (the orchestra) can exert control over an individual (the
soloist), the effect was Rzewskian, even if the sound world was not. Ted
Hearne’s WikiLeaks oratorio “The Source,” a driving and simmering
reflection on the Iraq war that broods without settling for easy
answers, feels as if it were in Mr. Rzewski’s lineage.
Mr. Rzewski practices the progressive ideas he preaches, making his
scores available online and encouraging, rather than blocking, the
dissemination of his recordings on YouTube. He remains, he says, a
revolutionary optimist. Asked if it’s possible actually to affect
politics through music, Mr. Rzewski answered, “Probably not,” before
adding, with a wry smile: “But you have to write as if you could. You
can’t be sure. You might.”
Bargemusic presents Mr. Rzewski and his work on Friday, Saturday and
Sunday, Fulton Ferry Landing, next to the Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn;
bargemusic.org.
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