[Marxism] A marxist composer?

[Ruthless Critic of All that Exists]

April 27, 2008
Music
Maverick With a Message of Solidarity
By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH

IN photographs the American composer Frederic Rzewski resembles an Old
Testament prophet, all high-domed brow, deep-gazing eyes and white,
wind-swept hair. Over the phone from Brussels, his home since the
1970s, he projects a different image: casual, common-sensical, to the
point. Toss him a question sure to prompt the self-important to
pontificate — something about the extramusical associations of old
songs, say, or the consolations of tragedy — and Mr. Rzewski
(pronounced ZHEV-ski) shoots it down. "I don't think I have any more
to say about that," he replies. Or, "I think we're getting into deep
waters here."

Politics is another subject that fails to coax him onto a soapbox.
Yes, his scores are shot through with melodies associated with the
left and often have titles to match. Yes, the blacklisted folk singer
Pete Seeger was a culture hero of his. But Mr. Rzewski is a musician,
not a pamphleteer. None but the naïve could imagine contemporary
classical music as the lever for social upheaval. It was a teaching
job that brought him to Belgium, not the state of the American nation.
"No philosophy," he said recently. "I had a family to support."

More than music is on his mind these days. He turned 70 on April 13,
"and for some reason, it made me go back to Ibycus," he said. He
quoted the poet's haunted lines about falling in love in old age:
"Like the old racehorse, I tremble at the prospect of the course which
I am to run, and which I know so well." Mr. Rzewski reads the ancient
Greeks in the original. Tolstoy too.

On Monday the Gilmore Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., is
celebrating the milestone with a sampler of Mr. Rzewski's music, to be
repeated at Zankel Hall in Manhattan on Thursday. A formidable pianist
with a touch and attack sometimes eerily reminiscent of Glenn Gould,
Mr. Rzewski will play his new "War Songs," arrangements of six
traditional war or antiwar songs written over six centuries, from
"L'Homme Armé" to taps. With Stephen Drury he will also perform a
two-piano version of "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues," from the series
"North American Ballads." The contemporary-music ensemble Opus 21 will
join Mr. Rzewski in "Attica," a response to the notorious 1971 prison
riots in upstate New York. Mr. Drury joins the group for the premiere
of "Natural Things," pieced together from 49 mostly unrelated segments
that run 20 to 25 seconds each.

A prefatory note to the score alludes to the Haymarket massacre in
Chicago in May 1886, which began as a labor rally in support of
striking workers. And it lists household objects to be incorporated
into the percussion section: tin cans, cardboard boxes, bottles and a
bathtub or trash can. "It has to be a large metal container," Mr.
Rzewski said, "like a black hole in the middle of the music."

Once asked if commentators were right to call him a Marxist composer [...]

Full: <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/arts/music/27gure.html?scp=1&sq=rzewski&st=nyt>