NEVER SECOND-GUESSING RZEWSKI
By Kyle Gann
As I sit down to write about Frederic Rzewski, it is announced that Musik Texte in Germany has just published a book of Rzewski’s writings, entitled Nonsequiturs. How perfect is that?
A few years ago I gave a paper at a Charles Ives conference in Berlin, and Rzewski was also invited to speak. His first words were, “I don’t know why they invited me to this conference—I don’t really like Charles Ives’s music.” Back in the 1970s, Rzewski had burst onto the music scene with a recording of minimalist political pieces—Attica, Coming Together, and Les moutons des Panurge. So naturally, we started thinking of him as the “fifth minimalist,” and the next thing we knew, he started touring a complex and highly modernistic virtuoso piano opus, The People United Will Never Be Defeated. What a non sequitur that was! From the impasses of his daily conversation to the twists and turns of his artistic path, Rzewski has devoted his life to confounding expectations.
Now, as Rzewski turns 70 this year, it should be possible to make sense of his circuitous career. Let’s consider The People United, still the work with which he is most closely identified. The theme has 36 measures, and there are 36 variations. Each sixth variation (nos. 6, 12, 18, 24, 30) sums up the previous five, collage-like. Then, Variation 31 sums up all the first variations of each six (1, 7, 13, 19, 25), No. 32 sums up the five second variations, and so on. What an obsessive structural tour de force! (like Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, only more so). And this was in 1975, a point at which the excesses of serialism had given that kind of heavy structural thinking a bad name. The minimalism of Rzewski’s early works was supposed to represent the escape from all that stuff, and here he was, back in the serialist camp.
But wait: first of all, it’s a catchy Latin political tune we’re dealing with. The early variations do take it apart and spread the notes around registrally, serial-style. But one variation is wild glissandos up and down the keyboard; another employs whistling and singing; another delves into jazz before quoting, pianissimo, the Italian socialist banner song “Bandiera Rossa”; and Variation 27, the longest, falls back into minimalism with irregular rhythms over a drone on E and B. What a cornucopia of styles, what a trip through the music of the 1970s, what a brash refusal to align oneself with anything, any group, fighting for dominance at the time! What an effortless pluralism in the years before anyone was even using the word yet. What a cheeky nose-thumbing Rzewski gave the entire polarized world of Uptown-Downtown-European-serialist-minimalist-neo-Romantic music. And despite all that—or maybe because of it—what a popular piece it became.
Rather notoriously nonverbal, Rzewski has never been much given to explanation. But he did, around that time, make a statement that I found evocative. He described his style as “humanist realism,” defining it as
A conscious employment of techniques that are designed to establish communication, rather than to alienate an audience. That does not necessarily mean an exclusion of what’s called avant-garde style, by any means. [But] ... if one is seriously interested in communication, then I suppose that a rigorous, say, formalistic style such as the style of the formalist composers and so on would be at a serious disadvantage.
Elsewhere he said, echoing Aaron Copland,
It seemed to me there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could be understood by a wide variety of listeners.
It’s not much to go on, but we can let the music itself elaborate on what Rzewski meant. The North American Ballads (1979-80, from which Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues is drawn), The Housewife’s Lament (1980), the variations on the worker’s song Mayn Yingele (1988), Kreutzer Sonata based on the murder from Tolstoy’s eponymous story, and even the orchestral homage to Pascal, The Silence of Infinite Spaces (1980), were attempts to communicate, to write music that was new in style and yet dealt explicitly with issues that everyday people, non-musicians, care about. Rzewski’s magnum opus in this respect was his setting of the most heart-wrenching parts of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (1991) for speaking, whistling, slapping, and drumming pianist. “Mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation depending on calculation,” intones Rzewski’s pianist (most effectively himself),
always know where they are going, and go there … [but] people who desire self-realization never know where they are going. They can’t know. To recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.
The cold objectivity of Rzewski’s techniques sets off the pathos of Wilde’s imprisonment for homosexuality, and the listener can’t help but be touched. No composer has written a more searing indictment of homophobia.
But wait again: some of Rzewski’s communicative pieces are nevertheless enigmatic. His Piano Sonata of the same year is based on well-known tunes, too: “Ring Around the Rosy,” “L’homme armé,” and “Give Peace a Chance.” But here the tenor is playful, tongue-in-cheek. In 1977, Rzewski was asked by French composer Henri Pousseur to join the faculty of the Conservatory of Liege, and the music of his European period increasingly tended back toward abstraction, such as the structuralist piano pieces called Ludes (1991) and Fougues (1994) and much of The Road, his mammoth eight-hour “novel” for piano (1995-98).
It is typical of Rzewski that he has refused to be limited by even the humanist realist aesthetic that he created. Like Stravinsky, he has shown contrarian fearlessness about walking away from styles his music has made popular. Natural Things, his new work for the Opus 21 ensemble premiering tonight, seems to roll all his proclivities into one. There are vocal sections with political commentary; quiet static parts; rambunctious passages, tonal and atonal; and a kitchen sink-full of ad hoc percussive objects, plus a megaphone. It looks like his most ambitious series of non sequiturs yet.
All this makes Rzewski a difficult composer to sum up. His reputation has grown slowly because his trajectory has been confusing, but at the same time his ongoing concern for consistency invests him with an aura of multidimensionality and sincerity. One knows better than to pigeonhole him or jump to conclusions about his next piece. Driven by his immense pianism, his career echoes that of the 19th-century masters; critics have compared him to Liszt and even Beethoven. Try to hold him to any such reputation, though, and he will probably feel compelled to surprise us again.
Kyle Gann is a professor of music history and theory at Bard College. He is the author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995) , American Music in the 20th Century (Schirmer Books, 1997), and Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (University of California Press, 2006).
By Frank J. OteriFREDERIC RZEWSKI
Born April 13, 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts.While it is difficult to make generalizations about the work of American-born and Belgian-based composer-pianist Frederic Rzewski—whose musical output seamlessly encompasses minimalism, serialism, indeterminacy, improvisation, and arguably even neo-Romanticism—it is almost always provocative and socially conscious, frequently politically charged (many works requite performers to recite texts in addition to playing their instruments), and virtuosic both in structural design and ideal interpretive realization.
Rzewski was compositionally trained at Harvard and Princeton (where his teachers included such 20th-century American luminaries as Randall Thompson, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt). But his aesthetics were ultimately shaped in his formative years as a new-music pianist based in Europe in the early 1960s and his encounters at that time with John Cage and Christian Wolff; the latter became a lifelong friend and occasional collaborator. As the co-founder—along with composers Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum—of the seminal late ’60s live electronic music ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), Rzewski, in his earliest mature works, was already eroding the boundaries between composition and improvisation. After a brief return to New York in the early 1970s, Rzewski returned to Europe to teach composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium, where he is based to this day.
Given Rzewski’s prodigious talents as a concert pianist—he gave the world premiere performance of Stockhausen’s mind-bogglingly difficult
Klavierstücke X—solo piano composition has formed a major part of Rzewski’s output. His hour-long set of 36 piano variations,
The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975), based on the Chilean revolutionary song “¡El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!,” is something of a modern-day “Goldberg” Variations and is now widely hailed as a classic of contemporary piano music literature. Other major piano works include
North American Ballads (1979), the
Mayn Yingele variations (1989), a series of 24
Ludes (1990-91),
De Profundis (1992), a setting for talking pianist of an Oscar Wilde letter written during the author’s imprisonment, and an eight-hour piano “novel” called
The Road (1995–2003).
But this multifaceted composer has also created a significant body of repertoire for a variety of ensembles of all shapes and sizes. From his early minimalist forays scored for variable ensembles—such as
Les Moutons de Panurge (1969),
Coming Together, and
Attica (both 1972)—to his quasi-serialist
Antigone-Legend for voice and piano (1982), his four collage-type compositions created for the Minneapolis-based new music ensemble Zeitgeist (1984–1993), his massive two-hour oratorio
The Triumph of Death (1989), and the smaller-scale poly-stylistic
Pocket Symphony composed for eighth blackbird (2000), Rzewski’s output is as unpredictable as it is prolific. The five works featured on this all-Rzewski concert, which span four decades and include two New York premieres, offer a representative cross-section of his ongoing compositional concerns. (For an overview of Rzewski’s overall compositional trajectory, please read Kyle Gann’s essay placed earlier in this program.)
Attica (1972), the earliest work on tonight’s program, is also one of Rzewski’s earliest compositions to feature an overtly political message. A lush repetitive tonal sequence is punctuated by a narrator’s intoned text, gradually expanding one word at a time; the sequenced is derived from a statement made by Richard X. Clark, one of the organizers of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, upon his release in February 1972: “Attica is in front of me.” Although
Attica is being presented on its own this evening, it was originally conceived as a companion piece to the more visceral
Coming Together, whose narration is based on the words of a less fortunate Attica inmate, radical antiwar activist Sam Melville (“Mad Bomber” Melville), who was killed by police during the uprising. However, longtime Living Theater member Steve ben Israel, who served as the narrator in the world premiere performance of
Attica, will reprise his original role in this performance with Opus 21.
Spots (1986), the second of Rzewski’s four compositions for Zeitgeist, is largely an open score. Thirteen one-minute pieces are played in any order by four players performing on unspecified instruments; in addition, the score’s pitches can be transposable to any octave. According to Rzewski, the form of the work was inspired by television, which he describes as “the Greek theater’s modern equivalent.”
In
Natural Things (2007), a new work composed especially for Opus 21 and co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and Opus 21 (with support from the Chamber Music America Commissioning Program), Rzewski attempts to mirror the sonic realities of the real world in which spontaneous things simply happen. According to Rzewski, a total of 49 events—sometimes related, sometimes not—“come out of nowhere and point to nowhere” as in “a sequence of unanticipated household events: a telephone call, a child’s tantrum.”
It is fitting that this work is receiving its New York premiere on May Day (May 1), the annual holiday held around the world in support of workers’ rights, since the work is also inspired by the origins of May Day—the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago on May 1, 1886 which erupted after laborers struck seeking an eight-hour work day. In portions of Rzewski’s composition, musicians recite texts from speeches made in support of workers rights by a group of demonstration organizers, known as the Haymarket Martyrs, who were wrongfully sentenced to death for the massacre: for instance, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” At one point in the score, one of the percussionists is asked to speak through a megaphone as though at a labor rally.
Rzewski will himself perform the brand new
War Songs (2008) for solo piano, also making its New York premiere tonight. The compositional material for this collection of short pieces comes from a group of six anti-war songs spanning over half a millennium: the Crusades-era “L’homme armé”, which inspired countless Medieval and Renaissance composers; the 17th-century Irish songs “Siul A Ruin” and “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye”; “Le départ du conscript,” which dates back to the Napoleonic Wars; “Die Moohrsoldaten” from the Nazi prison camps; and “Taps.” According to Rzewski,
Writing these things was a little like doing crossword puzzles; I would first guess which tunes would go together in which keys, and then try to stitch them all together into one metatonality. Since they are all about war, the clash of tonalities somehow makes sense; but at the same time, I wanted to find a way through the clash to some kind of higher order: a feeling of sadness, across time.
The concert concludes with
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (1980), for two pianos. A re-working of a solo piano composition, the fourth of Rzewski’s
Four North American Ballads,
Winnsboro is based on an anonymous protest song from the 1930s describing working conditions in North Carolina’s textile mills. According to Rzewski, they are “probably not too different today than they were then.”
New York City–based composer Frank J. Oteri is the Composer Advocate at the American Music Center and the Founding Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org.
Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation