Biography
Frederic Rzewski emerged during the 1960s as one of the leading voices in the American musical avant-garde and exerted lasting influence through his dual roles as composer and pianist. His output helped shape the contours of postwar American experimental music by blending the buoyant, youthful exuberance associated with Copland inside the disciplined experimental discipline modeled by Cage. Frequently direct in its use of tonality and openly playful, his work sliced past the habitual sourness found in much avant-garde repertoire. He also proved a significant teacher.
Born on April 13, 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts, Rzewski completed a B.A. in music at Harvard before earning an M.F.A. at Princeton under Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. A Fulbright grant took him to Florence in 1960 for a year of study with Luigi Dallapiccola. Apart from a five-year stretch in the 1970s, he resided primarily in Europe. Recognition first arrived through his performances of contemporary piano literature, including his participation in the premiere of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X in 1962. In 1966 he joined Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum to establish the ensemble Musica Electronica Viva, or MEV, which fused free improvisation, notated passages, and electronic elements. Those explorations directly prompted his earliest major works, among them the “process piece” Les moutons de Panurge, which likewise merged spontaneous improvisation with written material and directives.
Rzewski’s hybrids of improvisation and classical form rank among the most compelling examples of their kind, animated by the intense energy at their center. Throughout the 1970s his language continued to evolve along similar lines while socialist convictions began steering his direction, prompting new formal strategies that incorporated textual elements and stylistic references as organizing principles. Two of the decade’s most prominent results were Attica, which recites a letter from prison, and the virtuosic piano variations The People United Will Never Be Defeated. In 1977 he became professor of composition at the Royal Conservatory of Liège, Belgium, a post he held until his death; additional teaching took him to Yale, the California Institute of the Arts, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and other institutions.
The 1980s yielded a series of unexpected twelve-tone pieces that offered renewed perspectives on serial procedures. In the following decade Rzewski returned, through fully notated scores, to highly spontaneous compositional attitudes that echoed his late-1960s experiments. He kept composing well into the twenty-first century. In 2001 he placed his scores online for free download. Between 2006 and 2010 he wrote a cycle of 56 Nanosonatas, dedicating several to friends including Hideyuki Arata and Pete Seeger and fulfilling a commission for Milton Schlosser. In 2016 he completed Songs of Insurrection, conceived as a sequel to The People United Will Never Be Defeated; Thomas Kotcheff recorded the earlier work in 2021, the same year the Imani Winds included Rzewski’s Sometimes, for speaker, soprano, and winds, on the album Bruits. Rzewski died on June 26, 2021 in Montiano, Italy.
Born on April 13, 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts, Rzewski completed a B.A. in music at Harvard before earning an M.F.A. at Princeton under Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. A Fulbright grant took him to Florence in 1960 for a year of study with Luigi Dallapiccola. Apart from a five-year stretch in the 1970s, he resided primarily in Europe. Recognition first arrived through his performances of contemporary piano literature, including his participation in the premiere of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X in 1962. In 1966 he joined Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum to establish the ensemble Musica Electronica Viva, or MEV, which fused free improvisation, notated passages, and electronic elements. Those explorations directly prompted his earliest major works, among them the “process piece” Les moutons de Panurge, which likewise merged spontaneous improvisation with written material and directives.
Rzewski’s hybrids of improvisation and classical form rank among the most compelling examples of their kind, animated by the intense energy at their center. Throughout the 1970s his language continued to evolve along similar lines while socialist convictions began steering his direction, prompting new formal strategies that incorporated textual elements and stylistic references as organizing principles. Two of the decade’s most prominent results were Attica, which recites a letter from prison, and the virtuosic piano variations The People United Will Never Be Defeated. In 1977 he became professor of composition at the Royal Conservatory of Liège, Belgium, a post he held until his death; additional teaching took him to Yale, the California Institute of the Arts, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and other institutions.
The 1980s yielded a series of unexpected twelve-tone pieces that offered renewed perspectives on serial procedures. In the following decade Rzewski returned, through fully notated scores, to highly spontaneous compositional attitudes that echoed his late-1960s experiments. He kept composing well into the twenty-first century. In 2001 he placed his scores online for free download. Between 2006 and 2010 he wrote a cycle of 56 Nanosonatas, dedicating several to friends including Hideyuki Arata and Pete Seeger and fulfilling a commission for Milton Schlosser. In 2016 he completed Songs of Insurrection, conceived as a sequel to The People United Will Never Be Defeated; Thomas Kotcheff recorded the earlier work in 2021, the same year the Imani Winds included Rzewski’s Sometimes, for speaker, soprano, and winds, on the album Bruits. Rzewski died on June 26, 2021 in Montiano, Italy.
Albums