Frederic Rzewski, a formidable composer and pianist who wrote and executed new music that was at the moment stylistically eclectic and politically committed, died on Saturday at his summer time house in Montiano, Italy. He was 83.
The lead to was cardiac arrest, the publicist Josephine Hemsing claimed in an e mail.
Mr. Rzewski’s anti-institution thinking stood at the center of his songs-building throughout his life. It was obvious in the experimental, agitprop improvisations he produced in the 1960s with the ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva in “Coming Collectively,” the Minimalist typical motivated by the Attica prison uprising and a wide catalog of solo piano operates, various of which have come to be cornerstones of the modern day repertoire.
His strategy was epitomized in his greatest-known piece, “The People today United Will Never ever Be Defeated!,” an expansive and virtuosic established of 36 variations on a Chilean protest music.
Composed for the pianist Ursula Oppens in 1975, the piece, an hour long, is a torrent of creative and uncommon tactics — the pianist whistles, shouts and slams the lid of the instrument — and has been in contrast to canonic operates like Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” and Bach’s “Goldberg Versions.”
“Stylistically, it goes by means of everything,” Ms. Oppens claimed in a the latest interview. “It’s pointillistic and minimalistic and definitely pretty various.” At the very same time, she famous, Mr. Rzewski’s mastery of classic counterpoint was a significant draw for pianists. “There’s a logic to the partnership of the notes to one one more,” she additional.
“The People today United” has captured the imagination of virtuosos including Marc-André Hamelin and, far more a short while ago, more youthful pianists like Igor Levit and Conrad Tao. It is the closest factor to a war horse in the modern day piano repertory.
In 2015, Mr. Rzewski performed the whole get the job done at the Pittsburgh fish current market Wholey’s, a fabled event in up to date songs circles.
Mr. Rzewski’s musical strategy favored intuition around cerebral composition. “The a person point that composers in the 20th century never do is to simply compose down the tunes that are heading by their heads,” he advised the magazine NewMusicBox in 2002. “I just publish down what’s in my head.”
Frederic Anthony Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938, in Westfield, Mass., to Anthony Rzewski, a Polish émigré, and Emma Buynicki, who ended up both pharmacists. He commenced playing piano and composing from a youthful age.
Subsequent the guidance of a instructor, he checked out albums by Shostakovich and Schoenberg at a report retail store and started to immerse himself in musical modernism.
Just after graduating from Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, Mr. Rzewski analyzed songs at Harvard with the tonal composers Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. He earned his master’s at Princeton.
In 1960 and 1961, he examined with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship. In Europe, he obtained renown performing songs by luminaries like Karlheinz Stockhausen and, immediately after a stint in Berlin researching with Elliott Carter, settled in Rome.
The European avant-garde had fallen underneath the sway of John Cage’s experimentalism, and Mr. Rzewski wrote heady music like his “Composition for Two Players,” an unconventional rating that he once interpreted by putting sheets of glass on the strings of a Steinway.
In 1966, he and the composer Alvin Curran assembled a group of musicians, like the digital composer Richard Teitelbaum, to accomplish in the crypt of a church in Rome. The collective became Musica Elettronica Viva, an act that used do-it-yourself electronics setups for visceral improvisations. Mr. Rzewski, for instance, scraped and drummed on a piece of glass that experienced been slash into the shape of a piano, to which he experienced connected a microphone. (“By the grace of God, we did not get electrocuted,” he later on claimed.)
Rejecting the dense, modernist scores of his former educational environs, Mr. Rzewski turned preoccupied with spontaneity.
“The sublime mingled freely with the foundation,” he after wrote of “Spacecraft,” a single of the sets of trippy guidance that guided Musica Elettronica Viva’s performances. “Climaxes of exhausting depth alternated with Tibetan drones, ecstatic trances gave way to demonic seizures in immediate succession.”
The collective gave much more than 100 performances throughout Europe in the late 1960s, and its raucous concert events drew increasingly politicized listeners. As students agitated, the team joined in, inviting audiences to participate in with them in anarchic improvisations — a type of avant-garde Summer of Adore. The group also done in factories and prisons.
“The most vital detail was the link of neighborhood and the political,” the composer and scholar George E. Lewis, who executed in later iterations of the collective, claimed in a current job interview. “Music gave men and women selections and selections, and collectively producing tunes with each other permitted absolutely everyone to rethink their predicaments.”
In 1971, Mr. Rzewski moved to New York and resumed a more regimen concert life, actively playing recitals of new music and becoming a member of the downtown improvisation scene.
And he began to deliver his politics to bear on functions he created alone. “It is fairly obvious that the storms of the ’60s have momentarily subsided, offering way to a period of reflection,” he wrote that yr. First was “Les Moutons de Panurge,” which asks an ensemble to participate in a challenging, at any time-shifting 65-note melody. “Stay collectively as long as you can, but if you get shed, continue to be dropped,” the rating impishly signifies.
Then arrived “Coming Jointly,” in which a speaker recites a letter written by Sam Melville, a leader of the 1971 Attica jail rebellion, about a chugging, minimalist bass line as instrumentalists add quasi-improvised interjections. Mr. Rzewski would from time to time carry out “Coming Together” himself, participating in and speaking concurrently.
The new music is at when calculated and urgent Mr. Rzewski described the Attica revolt, in which 43 persons died, as an “atrocity that demanded of each and every accountable human being that had any power to cry out, that he cry out.” Its a lot of interpreters have bundled the efficiency artist Steve Ben Israel, the composer-performer Julius Eastman and Angela Davis, the professor and political activist.
Throughout this interval Mr. Rzewski grew to become concerned in the Musicians Action Collective, a coalition that structured gain concert events for United Farm Staff, a defense fund for Attica inmates and the Chilean solidarity movement.
He was soon drawn to the track “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” which experienced become an anthem for the Chilean resistance through performances by the exiled group Inti-Illimani. Composed by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún, the tune served as the foundation for Mr. Rzewski’s set of variants, commissioned for the United States Bicentennial and very first performed by Ms. Oppens at the Kennedy Middle in Washington in 1976.
“People always say, ‘Well, how can songs be political if it has no text?’ Mr. Rzewski instructed an interviewer that 12 months. “It does not involve a textual content. It does, even so, need some sort of consciousness of the active partnership in between music and the relaxation of the globe.”
Returning to Europe in the late 1970s, Mr. Rzewski split his time in between Italy and Liège, the place he was a professor at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique right up until his loss of life, and he built frequent visits to the United States to carry out and instruct.
Immediately after “The Persons United,” Mr. Rzewski largely centered on solo piano songs, like the “North American Ballads” (1979), which convey with each other Baroque counterpoint, minimalist improvisation and leftist folk track. Subsequent big solo works involve the theatrical “De Profundis,” in which a pianist plays though reciting Oscar Wilde’s infamous prison manifesto the polystylistic, 10-hour-moreover cycle “The Road” and a sprawling collection of miniature “Nanosonatas.”
“Opera residences really do not occur asking me to write operas,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “Symphony orchestras don’t arrive asking for symphonies. But there’s this piano participant I see just about every day who keeps inquiring me for tunes. So which is what I do.”
Considerably of the songs encourages improvisation, and, in performances of canonic is effective like Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Mr. Rzewski would generate his possess elaborate cadenzas.
He remained true to his iconoclastic roots. In 2001 he released his scores as no cost downloads on the online, and lots of are now accessible on the on-line Petrucci Songs Library.
There was, although, a darker side to his ornery character. Mr. Rzewski could be exceedingly severe to college students in educational settings. Immediately after his dying was declared, a number of musicians mentioned on Twitter that he experienced a popularity for inappropriate flirtation and sexual innuendo towards younger women.
Mr. Rzewski married Nicole Abbeloos in 1963, and they later on separated. His lover for lots of decades was Françoise Walot they divided about 2008. Survivors include things like six little ones, Alexis, Daniel, Jan, Noemi, Esther and Noam, and five grandchildren.
Wary of the existing, Mr. Rzewski also refused to dwell in nostalgia. “Free improvisation was likely to adjust the world,” he told The New York Periods in 2016, referring to his early times with Musica Elettronica Viva. “It was going to generate an solely new language, so that people could arrive alongside one another from diverse pieces of the earth and instantly talk.”
Just after getting a defeat, he added, “Well, of course, we had been mistaken.”