Composers » R » Frederic Rzewksi (1938)

Frederic Rzewski (Westfield MA, 1938) studied music with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton universities. He went to Italy in 1960 to study with Luigi Dallapiccola and there began a career as a performer of new piano music. 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, approaching music as a spontaneous collective process. The experience of MEV is felt in Rzewski’s early compositions, and during the seventies he experimented with forms in which style and language are treated as structural elements (notably, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!). Rzewski’s largest work to date is The Road, an eight-hour “novel” for solo piano. Rzewski has taught at a number of institutions, including the Conservatoire Royal de Musique (Liège, Belgium), Yale School of Music, Mills College, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and the Hochschule der Künste (Berlin). His work can be freely downloaded at http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer/Rzewski.php.

[eContact! 13.3, 2011]

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