Frederic Rzewski

Pianist/composer Conrad Tao's third Warner Classics album, entitled American Rage, traces the roots of rebellion from the 1930s Harlan County labor disputes, through the trauma of 9/11, to the deep divisions of the present day. Bookended by two expansive works by Frederic Rzewski - Which Side Are You On?, based on Florence Reece’s 1931 protest song, and Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, an industrial folk song that reflects the unjust factory working conditions - the album centres on Julia Wolfe's Compassion, written in the wake of 9/11, and Aaron Copland's elegiac Piano Sonata.

In tribute to her longtime mentor and friend Frederic Rzewski, the intrepid, iconoclastic and politically active pianist-composer who passed away in 2021, pianist Lisa Moore presents five poignant performances of his most lyrical work. Taking its title from the vibrant, lush and melody-rich No Place to Go But Around (composed in 1974), the recording is of a piece with Moore's wide-ranging 2016 Cantaloupe release "The Stone People" (the digital version of which featured a bonus track of Rzewski's Piano Piece No. 4, re-recorded in a new performance for this collection), and finds her once again embracing an adventurist streak as she digs deep into the nuances of Rzewski’s timeless music.

Wikipedia
Rzewski (pronounced zheff-skee) attended Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt. In 1960, he went to Italy, a trip which was formative in his future musical development. In addition to studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, he began a career as a performer of new piano music, often with an improvisatory element. A few years later he was a co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum. Musica Elettronica Viva conceived music as a collective, collaborative process, with improvisation and live electronic instruments prominently featured. Bringing together both classical and jazz avant-gardists like Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton, MEV developed an aesthetic of music as a spontaneous collective process, one that was shared with other experimental groups of the same period such as 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.

To the uninitiated it is hard to describe the musical world of the American composer Frederic Rzewski. A pianist himself, Rzewski initially made a name for himself as a champion of the avant-garde, performing everything from Cage to Boulez. In the '70s his own music took a much more populist turn as his political beliefs drove him to find a much more approachable language, basically tonal and incorporating much quotation from popular music. It is music of this period that is recorded here.

*Premiere Recording* Never stop or falter, always play loud. Stay together as long as you can, but if you get lost, stay lost. Do not try to find your way back into the fold. Thats the instruction legendary composer Frederic Rzewski gave for his 1968 piece Les Moutons de Panurge. Songs of Insurrection (2016) is Rzewskis sequel to his masterwork "The People United Will Never Be Defeated".

Lisa Moore plays five pieces by Frederic Rzewski: De Profundis and North american ballads