CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Making Music: Frederic Rzewski

Zankel Hall
Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Frederic Rzewski, Pianist
Stephen Drury, Piano
Steve ben Israel, Narrator
Opus 21
Ara Guzelimian, Series Moderator

FREDERIC RZEWSKI Attica
FREDERIC RZEWSKI Spots
FREDERIC RZEWSKI War Songs
FREDERIC RZEWSKI Natural Things (NY Premiere, Co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and Opus 21)
FREDERIC RZEWSKI Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (two piano version)

Carnegie Hall commissions in the 2007–2008 season are made possible, in part, by a grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Program Notes:

By Frank J. Oteri

FREDERIC 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

Frederic Rzewski, Pianist
Born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1938, Frederic Rzewski first studied music with Charles Mackey of Springfield, and subsequently with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Rzewski then went to ltaly in 1960, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and met Severino Gazzelloni, with whom he performed in a number of concerts, thus beginning a career as a performer of new piano music. Rzewski’s early friendship with Christian Wolff and David Behrman, and (through Wolff) his acquaintance with John Cage and David Tudor, strongly influenced his development in both composition and performance. In Rome in the mid 1960s, together with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, Rzewski founded the MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) group, which quickly became known for its pioneering work in live electronics and improvisation. Bringing together both classical and jazz avant-gardists like Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton, MEV developed an aesthetic of music as a spontaneous collective process, one that was shared with other experimental groups of the same period such as Living Theater and the Scratch Orchestra.

The experience of MEV can be felt in Rzewski’s compositions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which combine elements derived equally from the worlds of written and improvised music (Les moutons de Panurge, Coming Together). During the ’70s, he experimented further with forms in which style and language are treated as structural elements; the best-known work of this period is The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, a 50-minute set of piano variations.

A number of pieces for larger ensembles written between 1979 and 1981 show a return to experimental and graphic notation (Le silence des espaces infinis, The Price of Oil), while much of the work of the 1980s explores new ways of using 12-tone technique (Antigone-Legend, The Persians). A freer, more spontaneous approach to writing can be found in more recent work (Whangdoodles, Sonata). Rzewski’s largest-scale work to date is The Triumph of Death (1987-8), a two-hour oratorio based on texts adapted from Peter Weiss’s 1995 play Die Ermittlung (The Investigation).

Rzewski’s most recent recording is a seven-CD box set for Nonesuch Records titled Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works 1975–1999. He has recorded The People United; North American Ballads, and Squares; and the Sonata and De Profundis for hat ART records; Four Pieces on Vanguard; and Bumps, Andante con Moto, and The Turtle and the Crane for Newport Classic.

Since 1977, Rzewski has been Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium. He has also taught at the Yale School of Music, the University of Cincinnati, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California at San Diego, Mills College, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, and the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe.

Stephen Drury, Piano
Pianist Stephen Drury, named 1989 Musician of the Year by the Boston Globe, has concertized throughout the world with a repertoire that stretches from Bach to Liszt to the music of today. A champion of 20th-century music, Drury’s performances of music ranging from the piano sonatas of Charles Ives to works by John Cage and György Ligeti have received the highest critical acclaim. Drury has commissioned and performed new compositions for solo piano from John Cage, John Zorn, Terry Riley, and Chinary Ung, among others. He has appeared at venues including the Kennedy Center, the MusikTriennale Köln (Germany), the Subtropics Festival, the Festival of New American Music, Spoleto Festival USA, and the Angelica Festival (Italy), as well as at the Knitting Factory and Symphony Space in New York City. In 1999, Mr. Drury was invited by choreographer Merce Cunningham to perform onstage with Mr. Cunningham and Mikhail Baryshnikov as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. He has recorded extensively for several labels, championing the music of John Cage, Elliott Carter, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Colin McPhee, John Zorn, and Frederic Rzewski, as well as the works of Liszt and Beethoven. He currently teaches at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he created and directs the school’s Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance and its Enchanted Circle concert series.

Steve ben Israel, Narrator
Actor, writer, and director Steve ben Israel made his performing debut in the late 1950s as a comedian in the Greenwich Village “coffee house renaissance,” working alongside Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. In 1961, he appeared in the Theater de Lys production of Threepenny Opera. Mr. Israel then toured the world with the New York–based experimental ensemble Living Theater, performing in the streets of Brazil, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh. During this time, Mr. Israel collaborated in a number of performances with Frederic Rzewski, including the 1972 world premieres of Mr. Rzewski’s Coming Together and Attica, as well as the original 1973 recording of these works on the Opus One label. In the late 1970s, he returned to comedy with his first one-man show, Nostalgic for the Future. In the last 20 years, Mr. Israel has performed a number of one-man shows, including his current theater piece, Nonviolent Executions, and has also performed extensively with his son, the New York–based hip-hop performing artist Baba Israel. In 2007, Mr. Israel received an Obie Award for his work in the theater.

Opus 21
Honored in 2006 with the Chamber Music America / ASCAP First Prize for Adventurous Programming, Opus 21 has established itself as a truly innovative new-music ensemble, presenting a diversity of “art music” and crossover works geared toward audiences with eclectic, wide-ranging musical tastes.

The ensemble, founded by composer Richard Adams, gave its debut performance at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City in the spring of 2003. Over the past five seasons, the group has continued to grow nationally and has appeared at some of the country’s most prestigious venues, including the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; Symphony Space in New York City; and the Max M. Fisher Music Center in Detroit.

Opus 21’s programming has ranged from the contemporary classical works of William Bolcom, John Harbison, and Steve Reich to the jazz compositions of Dave Brubeck and Fred Hersch; from the art rock music of Frank Zappa to a collaborative performance with legendary Motown pianist Joe Hunter. The ensemble is committed to the creation and premiering of new works by both established and emerging American composers. Since 2005, the group’s ambitious commissioning program has led to 19 new compositions by composers from a wide variety of musical backgrounds, including Eve Beglarian, Martin Bresnick, Chen Yi, Michael Daugherty, Paquito D’Rivera, Fred Hersch, Kamran Ince, Tania León, and Daniel Bernard Roumain.

Opus 21’s underlying mission has been to increase public awareness and understanding of “art music” in the 21st century, introduce the public to works it might not otherwise hear, and build bridges between audiences of different musical backgrounds. In all its activities, Opus 21 is committed to the proposition that great music is without boundaries.

Ara Guzelimian, Series Moderator
Ara Guzelimian was appointed Provost and Dean of The Juilliard School in New York City in August 2006. In that capacity, he oversees the faculty, curriculum, and artistic planning of the distinguished performing arts conservatory in all three of its divisions—dance, drama, and music.

Prior to his Juilliard appointment, Ara Guzelimian was Senior Director and Artistic Advisor of Carnegie Hall from 1998 to 2006. He continues his association with Carnegie Hall as host and producer of the acclaimed Making Music composer series, which has included concerts devoted to such composers as John Adams, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Lieberson, Leon Kirchner, and Osvaldo Golijov, as well as Oliver Knussen, Meredith Monk, George Perle, and Chen Yi. This season, Pierre Boulez, Thomas Adès, and Frederic Rzewski are the featured composers.

Previously, Ara Guzelimian was the Artistic Administrator of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado from 1993 to 1998. In addition, he was Artistic Director of the Ojai Festival in California from 1992 to 1997. He was associated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1978 to 1993, first as producer for the Orchestra’s national radio broadcasts and, more recently, as Artistic Administrator. Mr. Guzelimian is also an active lecturer, writer, and music critic. In the recent seasons, he has been heard both on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and as a guest host on public radio’s Saint Paul Sunday. He is the editor of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Pantheon Books, 2002), a collection of dialogues between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. In September 2003, Mr. Guzelimian was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for his contributions to French music and culture.