Frederic Rzewski
Carnegie Hall Commissions
BY FRANK J. OTERI
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 require 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
hourlong 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. His 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 (1984–93), 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.
Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation
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.
