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Interview with Frederic Rzewski

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Interview with Frederic Rzewski núm. 006 Revista de pensament musical any2010 Interview with Frederic Rzewski > JOAN ARNAU PÀMIES Born in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1938, Frederic Rzewski studied music at first with Charles Mackey of Springfield, and subsequently with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton universities. He went to Italy in 1960, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and met Severino Gazzelloni, with whom he performed in a number of concerts, thus beginning a career as a performer of new piano music. Rzewski’s early friendship with Christian Wolff and David Behrman, and (through Wolff) his acquaintance with John Cage and David Tudor strongly influenced his development in both composition and performance. In Rome in the mid-sixties, together with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, he formed the MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) group, which quickly became known for its pioneering work in live electronics and improvisation. Bringing together both classical and jazz avant-gardists (like Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton), MEV developed an esthetic of music as a spontaneous collective process, an esthetic that was shared with other experimental groups of the same period (e.g. the Living Theatre and the Scratch Frederic Rzewski Orchestra). The experience of MEV can be felt in Rzewski’s compositions of the late sixties and early seventies, which combine elements derived equally from the worlds of written and improvised music (Les Moutons de Panurge, Coming Together). During the seventies he experimented further with forms in which style and language are treated as structural elements; the best-known work of this period is The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, a 50-minute www.webdemusica.org 1 Sonograma núm. 006 Revista de pensament musical any2010 set of piano variations. A number of pieces for larger ensembles written between 1979 and 1981 show a return to experimental and graphic notation (Le Silence des Espaces Infinis, The Price of Oil), while much of the work of the eighties explores new ways of using twelve-tone technique (Antigone-Legend, The Persians). A freer, more spontaneous approach to writing can be found in more recent work (Whangdoodles, Sonata). Rzewski’s largest-scale work to date is The Road, an eight-hour “novel” for solo piano. The Triumph of Death (1987-8) is a two-hour oratorio based on texts adapted from Peter Weiss’ 1965 play Die Ermittlung (The Investigation). The Scratch Symphony for orchestra was performed at the Donaueschingen festival in October 1997. From 1983 to 2003 Rzewski was Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium. He has also taught at the Yale School of Music, the University of Cincinnati, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California at San Diego, Mills College, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, and the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2009 received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Liège. 2 www.webdemusica.org Sonograma núm. 006 Revista de pensament musical any2010 JOAN ARNAU PÀMIES : Since our journal Sonograma is mainly focused on the relationships between music, society and education, I think that it would be good to start this interview by asking you the following question: do you think that music composition can be taught? FREDERIC RZEWSKI : Well, yes. It depends on who is teaching whom. In a way, the answer could be yes and/or no. But, I think it might be difficult to teach it the way it was taught in Mozart and Haydn’s day. At that time, they were traded secrets. So, the art of composition was taught by one master to one disciple, in private. The secrets of the métier were transferred from generation to generation just like in all crafts. Mozart had secrets. People would ask him “how did you do such and such” and he would laugh and tell a joke; he wouldn’t tell the secret! Beethoven had secrets too. But today is different: there are no more secrets. JAP: What do you mean by “there are no more secrets”? FR: I don’t think that the métier can be equated with what it once was. For instance, even a hundred years ago, composers had some kind of function within the society. Many composers in Europe wrote symphonic compositions, which were supposed to evoke natural beauty of the country or the national mythology —I don’t need to give examples, because it’s too well known. And, in a way, they still have this function sometimes. For example, when Boulez comes out with some piece, which has a lot of electronics, it’s a way of showing how French culture is state of the art. So, in a way, it is still linked to the idea of that of the “national composer”. But, by and large, this has disappeared from the scene, so composers don’t really have that kind of objective function in the society anymore. So, obviously, the way you would teach composition today would be different. JAP: Tell me about your experience as a college student. What did or did not you learn? FR: When I was at Harvard, that college did not have a very distinguished music department. It never did, even though it was the first university in the country to establish a music department. It remained theoretical; for instance, you couldn’t study the cello at Harvard. That was a limitation at school; the music was a theoretical thing. It was not a practical activity. It was meant for gentlemen of Yankee good families who had plenty of money and didn’t need to make a living and studied art history, poetry, or classical philology, or something like that: the bourgeois type of people. So that was something of a limitation. As it happened, when I was a student at Harvard —that was in the 1950s—, there were a lot of interesting people floating around. Some of 3 www.webdemusica.org Sonograma núm. 006 Revista de pensament musical any2010 Frederic Rzewski the most important people in my life I’ve met when I was there, for instance, Christian Wolff or David Berhman. We kind of took control of the music club and we put on concerts of new music, so we had Cage, Tudor, and Feldman come. We even played a recording of Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, which was probably the first time it was heard in the United States. But, of course, that was completely outside of the music department. Therefore, that draws attention to the double function of schools. Schools are on the one hand places where older masters pass on knowledge to younger students, but they are also places where these younger students gather together and exchange ideas among equals. And, in a way, this is the most important function of the two, and that is certainly what happened at Harvard at that time. Whether it could happen today, I don’t know; I suspect not. I learned perhaps something from the teachers, like Walter Piston and Randall Thompson, and then later I was two years at Princeton, and I learned something from Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, but mostly I think I learned from the friendships that I made outside of school. However, on the other hand, they wouldn’t have taken place without school. So, it’s complex. Does that mean that schools are a good thing or 4 www.webdemusica.org Sonograma núm. 006 Revista de pensament musical any2010 a bad thing? Well, I think nobody will ever agree on this question. The reason I think this is because there is a fundamental contradiction in the notion of schools. Schools were started in the 1st century Athens, by a bunch of people known as sophists­­­ —Socrates was a sophist. Those were people who were hired to teach the sons of rich families the secrets of power, to transmit them from one generation to the next. The secrets included things like rhetoric —how to speak in public—, but also, whatever was known as science at that time: geometry, music was also part of it, philosophy, inner dialogue, and etcetera. These are things that you need to know if you’re going to hold the keys of power. In order to do this, the sophists devised various disciplines, which were methods of teaching these things. If you read the Meno of Plato you can see how it’s done. He, without telling to a slave boy anything, leaves him to discover on his own the Pythagorean Theorem. Now, this systematization of knowledge, such as was practiced by people like Hippocrates, was supposed to make it easy to teach these things, but, at the same time, it made them potentially accessible to a large number of people. And these two things are in contradiction. Science has a double effect, it works on the service of the ruling class, but it also puts knowledge into a form that can be accessible to masses of people. These two things are incompatible, and therefore, people will never agree on what is the best kind of school: an exclusive elite school or a democratic school, which is open to everybody. This debate will go on forever. JAP: Maybe both types of schools are the solution. FR: I don’t know. There are good reasons for restricting certain kinds of knowledge to smaller groups of people: for example, how to build an atomic bomb. It’s a good thing that not everybody knows how to do it in their kitchen! Whether the same applies to music, it’s doubtful.
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