Interview with Frederic Rzewski

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Revista de pensament musical

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Interview withFrederic 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

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

Frederic Rzewski

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SonogramaRevist a de pensament musical

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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.

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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

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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

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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. One very nice thing about music is that it’s very difficult to hurt

anybody with it. This is quite a difference from, let’s say, architecture, where the dangers

are clear. In music, you can perform various crazy experiments if you want to, without

worrying too much about whether somebody is going to get hurt. You can’t do that,

for example, in dance. Well, there are of course improvisational techniques in dance,

and so forth, and a certain amount of risk is taken. But, you can’t go too far with your

experimentation because somebody might get knocked out. In music, that tends not to

happen, although there are exceptions (laughs).

JaP: How do you feel that the aesthetic differences between the US and Europe are

different now than those from the sixties and seventies?

Fr: Well, on the one hand, there has been a progressive uniformization of the

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culture over the entire planet, as we know, like with things like Internet, etcetera. On

the other hand, and on the specific field of new music, it varies. The degree to which

one culture absorbs material from another culture, and the degree to which a culture

defends itself from that other culture goes up and down with time. In the 1950s, a bunch

of people in Europe got together and started Darmstadt, and this was for a while a very

cosmopolitan occasion for people to come together from various countries and exchange

ideas. Then, it later changed.

JaP: What do you think about Darmstadt today?

Fr: I think that in a way it has gone backwards; it has gone back to nationalist culture.

So now, you have probably less information within Europe about what is going on in

outside your own country, than you did in the 1960s. It takes a long time for German

music to travel to France, and Italian music to England. It’s quite complex but I think that

there has actually been a sort of regressive tendency in recent decades to return the so

called “serious music” to an earlier state in which nationalist interests prevail over the

common interest. But, these things go up and down. In a way, this kind of tendency to

revert to nationalism is a sort of defense against the general lowering of the standards,

which comes from a kind of uniformed culture, which we hear all the time in the media.

So, the Germans are doing their kind of exotic, very ethereal things, with a lot of silence

and so forth, while the ducks are exaggeratingly reproducing out-of-tune brass bands

(Laughs). So, in a way, each country is developing its own style again. I personally don’t

think this is very interesting; all I’m cared about is whether the music is good or not, and

well, you can say it’s not as good as it used to be, but who knows what will happen next

week!

JaP: How do you think music can contribute to social progress? Is music in general or

at least the music that is written by Western composers, helpful for our society? To you,

what is the main point of writing music nowadays?

Fr: I would say it’s impossible to say. There are many theories about that, starting, for

instance, with Wagner’s theory, which was very influential. Wagner’s idea was that music

can actually influence to soul; that it speaks directly to the soul because it functions on

a lever deeper than language. And, who knows? He may have been right. On the other

hand, I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re doing in this area; it’s very much a

question of try-and-see.

JaP: So, it’s just like an experiment?

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Fr: You can’t do an experiment unless the conditions of the experiment are controlled.

Unfortunately, we are working on a constantly changing chaotic situation, where there is

no way to tell whether an experiment has succeeded or not. I can’t tell and I think that

perhaps it’s something of a waste of time to indulge in speculation on this area, when the

important thing is to get to work done. Whether it’s going to improve the world or not is

not something you can know. You try to do the best job you can, and it might help if you

think that you should write as though the future of humanity is in danger; this could be a

useful way of getting into a higher state of mind, or, you just write better music. On the

other hand, it could also be dangerous to fool with such ideas because they are sort of

insane. The danger of this métier is that there are potential hazards associated with any

kind of work. For example, truck drivers get kidney disease. In the case of composers,

they spend the largest part of their lives alone in a room, and this gives a tendency to

feelings of persecutions and paranoid delusions —we all know examples of that. So, this is

a danger. I think it’s a mistake to get carried away by such grand ideas.

JaP: These ideas might be too much for composers to think about.

Fr: Composers have a job to do. Their job is to write the best music they possibly can,

and it’s not important whether music changes the world or not, the only important thing

is to write good music. You can’t exclude the possibility that it might have some kind of

influence on people’s behavior, but nobody knows. Nobody knows what the world would

be like today if Mozart had not written The Magic Flute, maybe it would be different

but there’s no way of proving that. And also, there’s another reason why we should be

very careful in this area. These ideas were very widespread in the beginning of the 20th

century, in Russia, for example, but also in Germany. There was this rather crazy idea

that you could change human nature, that you could create a new type of human being;

for example, “socialist man”, motivated by generous impulses. And, these were very

far-out ideas that turned out to be wrong in many cases. If you think that music can

change human nature and that you are able to use it in a way that you think is the best

for human nature —especially if you think as the Russian did in the 1930s, that acquired

characteristics could be genetically transmitted -the case of Lysenko, the biologist—, you

put all those things together and you come out with some dangerous stuff. For example,

people who write the “wrong” kind of music or the “wrong” kind of poetry should be

isolated because they have some kind of genetic disease. And, we all know where that

goes. Perhaps it’s best to leave these questions to future generations. There may be

some scientific research in coming centuries, which throw some light on that. But,

until that happens, I think composers should stick to writing good counterpoint.

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JaP: Whenever I go to a contemporary music concert, I usually see composers,

performers and very few non-musician people in the audience. What is the future of

contemporary music?

Fr: Not much. In a way, it’s quite surprising that these institutions still continue, more

or less unchanged since Schoenberg and Webern started their little concerts a hundred

years ago in Vienna for the Society for Private Musical Performances. Contemporary music

concerts are still rather private; in fact, they resemble more like private clubs than public

events. This is a problem but I don’t know how to solve it. I’m afraid that it’s one of

these things that one has to put up with. I don’t see any use in trying to change it; I don’t

know what the solution is. It’s not very encouraging, I agree. And yet, there have been

exceptions. In the 60s and 70s, there were all kinds of experiments made with carrying

and bringing music to ordinary people. In Italy, for example, the Italian Communist Party

decided that they needed to get the young people on their side and that the way to do

it was to bring them to various kinds of culture, which the official culture was not paying

any attention to. They organized lots of big events. For example, they invited poets to

come and read their poems. So, some friends of mine were touring in Italy and reading

their poems in front of 20,000 people. They organized lots of jazz concerts with the most

experimental jazz: Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, and so on. And, they also

paid some attention to contemporary music, especially because Luigi Nono was a member

of the central committee. For example, there were performances of Nono’s music in

factories. I myself participated in a number of these things, and it seemed quite exciting.

Of course, there have been adventurous festivals; the Warsaw festival was for the time

quite experimental. There also were some other festivals in France and in Germany. Even

I played for 10,000 people in Germany in the late 70s. But these things go up and down,

and there’s no reason why that couldn’t return. In fact, you have examples of that in

other countries, like the Orquesta Nacional de la Juventud in Venezuela; this has been

spectacularly successful. However, I don’t see it happening in most Western capitals,

and now, in a way, it’s going backwards. In the 70s in Italy, for example, the only thing

that happened of experimental nature was in the large cities: Milano, Roma, and a few

other places. Nothing happened into provinces. Now, I would say the opposite. Nowadays,

whatever experimental activity is going on it’s going on in smaller places —like in the

South of Italy. In the large centers, you just have this more or less uniformed official

modern music culture, like you have in all large cities. So you have Philip Glass or Steve

Reich. But this changes all the time, of course.

JaP: In Catalonia, we find that most of cultural activities are funded by the

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Catalan government; therefore, with public money. At the same time, most of these

cultural activities are not significant and don’t seem to have an important role to the

Catalan society. Nowadays, in our country and even though our government calls itself “

from the left-wing”, culture has become politics and in most cases there is not an actual

aim to improve our human condition using culture: most of our politicians fund culture for

their particular reasons rather than doing it for the benefit of people. Do we still have to

have faith in states or politicians funding culture and art?

Fr: I wouldn’t have faith in anybody, especially not politicians. But I don’t think it’s

a question of faith. This question is rather complex because there are many possible

motivations for funding culture and art. They can be positive or negative, depending

on the circumstances —it’s impossible to generalize from one country to another. I have

some opinions about this question in certain places, not in others. As far as Catalonia is

concerned, I know absolutely zero about what the situation is there, so I can’t possibly

say anything. I can only sort of answer in a very general level. I see countries where a lot

of money is spent on culture and the results are not particularly interesting. There are

countries that spend relatively little on culture, such as England. England has a level that

tends to be quite high, especially in the theater or the opera. The quality of actors and

singers is very high, even though they don’t earn very much money. However, in Holland,

the funding is quite large and lots of people are receiving funding for producing works of

art and yet, the level doesn’t seem to be very high. So, I don’t know what conclusions you

could draw from that, because the reasons for funding culture may have nothing to

do with producing art; may have other reasons. For example, the Orquesta Nacional

de la Juventud in Venezuela, as far as I understand it, was begun because people

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thought that giving to these young people classical instruments and introducing them to

this kind of discipline will bring the crime rate down, and it did! So, there’s a case where

the music was, in fact, good for something. But, whether the same argument would apply

if it were done in Berlin, who knows? It could be just a waste of public money, or maybe

not.

JaP: In terms of your own music, do you feel that your pieces have changed a lot from

The People United Will Never Be Defeated to Natural Things?

Fr: Yes, it seems to me that I’ve spent my whole life looking for some kind of style that

I can’t find. So yes, it changes all the time. I just decided a long time ago I don’t have a

style.

JaP: I think this is a good point. Otherwise, you might become like, since you

mentioned them before, Steve Reich or Philip Glass, who are doing a very similar thing

than twenty years ago.

Fr: I don’t know. Look at John Cage and Morton Feldman, they were very close to each

other and shared many ideas. John Cage all his life was experimenting with things, and

it’s very difficult to say what style he was in, because it was all kinds of styles, whereas

Morton Feldman clearly arrived quite early at a very distinctive sound, which was uniquely

his. They both did very well. So, I don’t think it’s either good or bad; both things are

possible, as long as they’re good.

JaP: What do you expect from a musician, in general?

Fr: (Laughs) Let me think, I haven’t quite asked myself this question before (Laughs

again). I don’t think I expect anything! What do I expect? (He thinks for a while without

saying anything) This is a trick question, and I’m afraid I don’t have any idea about this

subject. Next question! (Laughs).

JaP: Who is Frederic Rzewski?

Fr: This question is not for me to answer. If I knew, I would tell you.

Joan arnau Pàmies

sunday, october 18, 2009

Interview with Frederic Rzewski

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