Music, Not Manifesto
Frederic Rzewski Isn't Running For President
by Mic Holwin
originally appeared in American Composers Orchestra Quarterly Vol. II No. 1 Fall 1997
A sledgehammer dropped on a stage is a political statement. True or false?
If you were imagining you were American expatriate composer Frederic Rzewski, you would choose true. If you actually were Frederic Rzewski, however, you'd pick false.
Contrary to categorization in books and reviews, Rzewski does not see himself as a "political composer." In spite of his writing pieces like his best-known The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, based on a Chilean protest song, Rzewski claims he doesn't write to make social statements.
"I don't know why this label has stuck to me over the decades," says the articulate Rzewski, speaking from the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liege, Belgium, where he's taught composition since 1977. "I'm as political as the next person--I'm not unpolitical by any means--but on the other hand, I know some composers that are a lot more political than I am, and it doesn't seem to impress people that much.
"Let's take some jazz musicians, like Sunny Murray, for instance. When he goes out on stage, people don't go 'oh, Sunny Murray, the political musician.'
"Music communicates emotions. Music is not good for communicating ideas. If you want to communicate ideas, words are much better. If I want to make a political statement, I'll go write a manifesto."
And not drop sledgehammers on stages, which is the sound Rzewski has in mind for the New York premiere on ACO's season-opener November concert of the rarely-performed A Long Time Man. Written for orchestra with piano (played by the composer himself on this concert) in 1979, it is based on a Texas prison work song, sung by chain gangs, which Rzewski found on an old record.
"It makes a long time man feel bad," a prisoner serving a life term sings. "He don't get no letters / He can't hear from home / It makes a long time man feel bad." The song, sans words, is collaged in a series of variations, which are suddenly interrupted by what Rzewski calls a "cadenza for orchestra with piano accompaniment."
Making tangible a perceived connection between orchestrated work, like swinging hammers to lay a railroad, and an orchestra, Rzewski has the musicians assume the role of a chain gang. In slow periodic rhythm, several players drop heavy objects on the floor.
Of course, a sledgehammer makes the perfect resonating "whump" sound, but the composer defers to restrictions of the Carnegie Hall stage.
The soloist improvises freely over this rhythm and the orchestra, but even so, A Long Time Man is "very constricting, actually," says Rzewski, "'cause it is about being in prison."
That sounds political, almost.
Yes, but the words and genesis of A Long Time Man are not the point to Rzewski. "There are many songs which are about a political or philosophical question, but it's not the words that make the difference," he insists. "It's the music that carries the message."
Born in Massachusetts, Rzewski started on the piano when he was five, becoming well-versed in the vocabulary of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. In spite of being touted as a figurehead of the avant-garde, Rzewski's roots are firmly in the classical tradition, even though he admits to having been deeply influenced by jazz composers like Anthony Braxton.
"I feel that I'm more in the classical tradition doing new music than people who are only playing old music. What they are doing is a distortion of the classical tradition, because what the great masters of the past did--and what I want to do--is play the music of their own time. And so I think I'm carrying on the classical tradition, and the people that are--although I have nothing against the people who are--playing Bach and Mozart are not in the mainstream of the classical tradition because that's not what those people did."
Rzewski went on to study music and philosophy at Harvard and Princeton, making Rome his home base in the '60s, where he helped found a live electronic music performance group, Musica Elettronica Viva, before moving on to New York in the '70s and finally landing in Brussels.
In these last several decades, Rzewski has written in every style from serialism to minimalism, romantic to aleatoric. Has he not found "his style" yet?
"I've giving up on style," he declares. "It used to bother me a lot that my music had no style, and I've just decided that that's the way it is and it doesn't bother me anymore."
He quickly adds that composers are the last people to judge their own work, just as they are also not necessarily the best interpreter of their own music--though Rzewski's highly-regarded work as his own best pianist makes him "nothing less that a Franz Liszt for the 1990s," in the words of a San Francisco critic.
"Clearly, I have a vested interest in promoting myself as a performer," Rzewski says about his parallel career as a pianist. "That's how I make my living."
While he may have sequentially perused all styles, one thing he hasn't done is fuse styles like some younger composers, who can throw even rock, pop and jazz into the stew with elan.
"I know that mixing it all up is very fashionable, but I have some skeptical misgivings about fusion. I'm not sure it's really a desirable thing. Everything evolves, but one should be careful about keeping the fire going in case it's needed in a couple of centuries. All of these traditions are like biological species. Once they die out, there's no recovering them.
"After all, if language was intended to be uniform, why, we certainly would have a world language by this time. Language seems to tend more toward speciation than towards fusion. Music is similar."
Rzewski turns 60 next year. He hopes no one will notice so as to escape a retrospective. After all, he laughs, "60 is nothing these days--you have to be 80 before people start paying any attention. Or 100 like Eubie Blake."
His current project is a long-term one, an extensive cycle of piano music called The Road. "I think of it as a novel, in the sense that it is really meant to be played at home." He cites Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words as examples of "home music," an interactive way of experiencing music.
"I don't often go to concerts myself because I don't enjoy the concert situation all that much. I prefer listening to music at home. And actually, the way I prefer music is playing through it myself. I want to hear Beethoven, I take it out and play it."
Like tossing a football with friends instead of watching the pros on Sunday, Rzewski is adamant that music is not a spectator sport. "I feel strongly we need to remind people that music is a kind of activity," he says. "It's not something that you are subjected to passively."
SIDEBAR:
Rzewski on a Plane
"I finally found an answer to the dreaded question that always gets asked on airplanes, 'What do you do?' and you say 'Musician.' 'Well, what kind of music?'
"I used to stammer and blurt out something and finally I found the answer, which stops the questioning right there. I say that I do traditional music.
"And everybody just says, 'Oh, that's fine. That's very good. Very interesting.'"
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