Frederic Rzewski was among the major figures of the American musical avant-garde to emerge in the 1960s, and he was highly influential as a composer and performer.
Rzewski's music helped define postwar American new music. He consistently gave exuberant boyish pleasures of a composer like
Copland within the rigorously experimental framework of a composer like
Cage. Often unapologetically tonal and fun,
Rzewski's music cuts right through the frequent churlishness of avant-garde music. He was also an important educator.
Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts. He earned his B.A. in music at Harvard and later received an M.F.A. from Princeton, where he had the privilege of studying with
Roger Sessions and
Milton Babbit. A Fulbright scholarship allowed him to travel to Florence in 1960 to study for a year with
Luigi Dallapiccola. Except for a five-year period in the 1970s, he mainly lived in Europe. He first came to public attention as a performer of new piano music, having participated in the premieres of such monumental works as
Stockhausen's Klavierstück X (1962). In 1966, with
Alvin Curran and
Richard Teitelbaum, he founded the famous ensemble Musica Electronica Viva (MEV). MEV combined free improvisation with written music and electronics. These experimentations led directly to the creation of
Rzewski's first important compositions, pieces such as Les moutons de Panurge, a so-called "process piece," which also combined elements of spontaneous improvisation with notated material and instructions.
Rzewski's improv-classical hybrids are some of the most successful of the kind ever produced, thanks to the fervent energy at the core of his music. During the 1970s, his music continued to develop along these lines, but as his socialist proclivities began to direct his artistic course, he developed new structures for instrumental music that used text elements and musical style as structuring features. Attica, which includes the recitation of a prison letter, and The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a virtuosic set of piano variations, are his most well-known works of the period. In 1977,
Rzewski was made professor of composition at the Royal Conservatory of Liège, Belgium, teaching there until his death. He also spent time teaching at Yale, the California Institute of the Arts, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and elsewhere.
During the 1980s,
Rzewski produced a number of surprising twelve-tone compositions that helped provide fresh ideas of what could be done with serial systems. The 1990s saw him revisiting, via scored music, some highly spontaneous approaches to composition that recall his inspired experiments of the late 1960s.
Rzewski continued composing into the 21st century, and in 2001, he made his scores available to download for free online. From 2006 until 2010, he composed a series of 56 Nanosonatas and dedicated many of them to friends, such as Hideyuki Arata and
Pete Seeger, and on commission for Milton Schlosser. In 2016,
Rzewski wrote Songs of Insurrection, a sequel to his popular The People United Will Never Be Defeated, which was heard on a
recording by
Thomas Kotcheff in 2021. That year, the
Imani Winds featured
Rzewski's Sometimes, for speaker, soprano, and winds, on its album
Bruits.
Rzewski died on June 26, 2021, in Montiano, Italy.