"May as well be a rainbow": Moran and McBride at the Wigmore Hall

Photograph by Richard Cannon.

Jason Moran (piano), Christian McBride (bass). Wigmore Hall, 06.10.2021. 

The first gig in Christian McBride's turn as artist-in-residence at the Wigmore Hall, following Vijay Iyer's turn in 2019, this was, also, as he announced from the stage, his first performance outside the US since the worldwide spread of the pandemic. Less clearly an experimentalist than Iyer--who played two-piano duets with Craig Taborn and brought experimental hip-hop artist Mike Ladd for two duo performances in a single night--McBride nonetheless chose for this opening duo to bring in an artist who straddles the mainstream and a more experimental approach informed by a rethinking of black compositional trajectories from James P. Johnson to J-Dilla and DJ Screw. Jason Moran will be performing with Archie Shepp in their spirituals-heavy duo at the London Jazz Festival next month. In the much larger space of the Barbican, I've found such concerts tend to lose the intimacy vital to their emotional transmission (let alone the hefty ticket prices), but there were no such problems in the Wigmore (with its heavily-discounted under-35's tickets). The Hall provides an ideal medium-sized space for music of chamber proportions, and its acoustics are excellent: the musicians played un-amplified, thankfully losing the artificial thud that characterises too many large-venue jazz performances, with each detail here singing out crystal-clear. And, despite its generally more conservative programming, the Wigmore was, lest we forget, the site of, for example, the fundamental encounter between Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey in 1974, a precedent which was, sadly, presumably unknown to the majority of those in attendance this early October.

I'd also been to the Wigmore for the previous day's afternoon concert had seen young US violinist Randall Goosby playing a programme of violin/piano music by African American composers deriving from his recent album Roots, which aims to re-tell the story of 'American' classical music through its Black presence, from Dvorak's use of spirituals to the contributions of William Grant Still and Florence Price. The most interesting part of that concert, to me, were the 'blue/s forms', solo pieces by Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson, sometime pianist for Max Roach and a composer across film, television and classical idioms, whose pieces take seriously the formal implications of marrying what Mingus called 'folk forms' to modernist harmonic extensions. Such pieces are studies in what it means to vary and extend, to 'worry' a line that move out of the vernacular adaptations by Price and Still heard elsewhere on the programme and towards something approaching the radical repetitions later advanced by Julius Eastman. 

Something of that concern with what it means to repeat, in multiple senses--the single note, the circular rhythmic or harmonic pattern, the paradoxically cyclical-progressive nature of improvisation based on chord changes--informs Moran's work too, as it questions the parameters of bop's harmonic vocabulary as opened up by bop itself, extended by free jazz, and shut down again by the 1980s counter-reaction and its legacies, marrying this to the iterative structures of other forms of black music, from hip-hop to gospel, the instrumental transformation of the voice, the voiced transformation of the instrument.

Upon his emergence into the music in the early '90s, McBride, meanwhile, was positioned as one of the 'Young Lions'--young musicians playing traditional, acoustic, bop-derived music in the wake of Wynton Marsalis and Nationalist-turned-Conservative Stanley Crouch, with some of the resources of American capital at least temporarily behind them. Though he rode that wave during the so-called 'jazz bubble' of the late '80s and early '90s (analysed in Dale Chapman's recent book), McBride came to see the "Young Lions" term as unduly promoting a limited set of musicians and styles at the expense of others. As he commented in Down Beat at the turn of the Milenium:

The whole ‘young lions’ hype, which, unfortunately, I was part of, peaked in the early 1990s. I say ‘unfortunately’ because the hype was so strong, I don’t think any musician from that ‘movement’ will ever be looked upon by certain people as serious musicians. We’ll be looked at as puppets for record companies and managers, or People magazine–type personalities as opposed to, well, Down Beat magazine–type personalities.

And indeed, the marketing and recording strategy pursued by major labels like Verve soaked up the majority of the limited resources available to the broader field of jazz as a whole for what was ultimately a limited, blinkered vision of what the music is, based on a dubious respectability politics and an erasure of the aesthetic and political radicalism that had characterised the music of the '60s and that still suffuses free jazz, which, I would hazard, was in fact the music's major source of continued, politicised investigation and creative extension, and yet which was the principal victims of the Young Lions' success. 

Meanwhile, Crouch's other main target--apart from 'ethnic music'--fusion, both of which he saw as a betrayal of the virtues of acoustic, swing-based jazz, is familiar territory to McBride, who is not averse to electric playing, and is capable of an elastic transformation to seemingly any context. (It was McBride who played bass in the one-off meeting between Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman in 2011 that gathered accolades as one of the performances of the decade.) When playing acoustically, his tendency is to more traditional walking bass patterns, along with bluesy, self-consciously virtuosic solos, each note placed out for maximum effect. But Moran's distinct identity as composer and improviser promised to take things gently away from the straight-ahead territory at which McBride could excel in his sleep, and this duo, while hardly as tied to the music's avant-garde as the Iyer-Taborn duo of 2019, were sure to shake things up, just a little. 

Bass-piano duets have an obscure but storied history in jazz. Mal Waldron and Johnny Dyani, Duke Ellington and Ray Brown, Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, all offer duets with distinct characters and differing approaches to a setting that lacks the rhythmic propulsion of a drummer and in which, if the pianist isn't careful, the bass can be reduced to a mere supporting role. As a bass player who's also a bandleader, McBride is no stranger to negotiating between supporting and leading roles. While Moran and McBride have known each other for years, this was not an established duo, leaving open that crucial element of surprise. And this was their first performance, with 30 minutes of rehearsal, as McBride announced from the stage, even if that sense of spontaneity perhaps belied the careful arrangement of the programme. They began with 'Blue Monk', one of (Thelonious) Monk's catchiest and most relaxed of melodies, and a kind of meeting point for them to test the waters, laughing and calling out in mutual appreciation at a well-timed note or a spin on a jazz cliche. Despite Moran's claim that they'd only rehearsed for half an hour, they had a well-developed programme: just under a dozen pieces, each one lasting nearly ten minutes, over the course of a 90 minute programme, ranging from compositions, mainly of the '60s and '70s, from Monk, Mingus and Wayne Shorter, to Moran's originals. 

The second piece, a Moran original, begins with a moto perpetuo bassline figure, over which a melody is delivered with complexified legato as the piece transitions into a more traditional blues-type figure (Oscar Brown's work of the early 60s comes to mind--it may even have been an Oscar Brown piece.) Moran, sitting in a backed chair rather than the traditional piano stool, goes for a few scampered runs, nearly knocking over the chair, but before he can get into full Cecil Taylor territory, McBride pulls him back, tethering him to the familiar changes. This happens a few times over the night, but by the end, McBride's allowed himself to enter the free zone for a minute or so, and one of the pleasures of the night is watching how he stretches his established virtuosity into less familiar territory. Another Monk piece, the rarely-performed but captivating 'Bright Mississippi', is followed by Wayne Shorter's melting 1960s ballad, 'Miyako', from the underrated 1967 album Schizophrenia. Like Monk, Shorter delights in setting up, then undercutting, harmonic expectations, but the main impact is in the rapturous yet wistful emotional territory the tune suggests. Here, the melody's delivered with McBride's melancholic arco echoing and transforming the memory of Shorter's gently brittle tenor on the original, Moran judiciously lifting the foot off the sustain pedal at just the right point, McBride plucking the same string he's continuing to bow on the final held note as Moran trills octave chords, techniques that might appear like mere display--look, I can do this!--harnessed in the service of the music's understated grace. 

Solo features for each musician followed: Moran's 'how much more terrible was the night' sees him crossing over his hands to play a motorically-repeated figure interspersed with a bass clef toll; as the two hands uncross, Moran plays octave figures, reiterating the theme further down the keyboard, the sense that any part of the structure could be transposed at any point on the keyboard at any time lightly suggesting Cecil Taylor's methodology, if sounding very different in content.  There's something here of the quality of Ligeti's Etudes, an assured, glassy rhythmic assurance on the edge of panic, but in control at all points. McBride's solo takes the standard 'Alone Together', melodic figures moved up and down the fingerboard, with harmonics, single note trills, and bent notes not so much decoration as an integral part of the melodic trajectory. This was a lesson in embellishment and development of a solo line, delivered with poise and poignancy, and humour--from the play on playing solo and in company of the title, to the staggered pauses, well-timed delivery of cliches or their subversion--if, sometimes, a little too much polish. A meditative Moran piece saw McBride reading off sheet music. Though the piece mainly consisted of both musicians playing through the melody, the improvisation lies in the delivery, the dynamics, as much as in the development of independent solo lines. They end with a whispered iteration to silence. The next piece, again by Moran, and more gospelly, cycles in wistful hope. Moran knows he's got an earworm of a melodic line, and whistles out the melody as he continues to play it--I'm reminded of Wayne Shorter leaning into the microphone to whistle out a spooked introduction while playing with his quartet in London over a decade ago--exemplifying the feeling of relaxed camaraderie evident from the beginning, McBride laughing in delight at Moran's audacity, and vice versa.

A lesser-known Mingus tune from Let My Children Hear Music sets up an ebulliently sardonic swing over which the musicians overlay the familiar melody to Mingus' Lester Young tribute, 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat'. I'm not sure the overlayering really works--the poignancy of that great melody lost to a kind of technical trick--but Mingus lines give us the opportunity to hear Moran's freer side, with its lineage in the sideman work of Moran's teacher Jaki Byard in Mingus' Jazz Workshop of the '60s and of Don Pullen in the bassist's bands of the '70, as he splashes out a few clusters. Unlike the utter exuberance of his predecessors, though, Moran tends to stick to the middle register, to restrain the energy in near-ironised anticipations and reflexive echoes: playing that's almost--but not quite--in quotation marks. On the other hand, McBride's playing took on suitably Mingus-like timbres--twanging, thick, caustic, voice-like, echoing Mingus' famous 'talking' duets with Eric Dolphy. He even briefly plays 'free' in tandem with Moran, shadowing the latter's parallel motion lines as his fingers leapt across the fingerboard. A final Monk piece, 'Evidence'--probably the most radical of all Monk's compositions--was memorably deconstructed by Anthony Braxton's standards quartet in their London residency just before the pandemic. Moran and McBride play it safer, offering the pleasures of contrast as Moran lets out high-register pings over McBridge's walking bass, opening up the spaces of the melody so that what he plays is as much about what's left out as what's there, the skeletal outline of the harmonic material described and re-inscribed in real time: which is, after all, what Monk had done as early as the 1940s. The piece that sings in the head on the way home, though, is the closing piece from Moran's most recent album, The Sound Will Tell You, 'Toni Morrison said Black is a Rainbow (Shadows)', sees Moran read out a passage from Morrison's Song of Solomon as he plays-"You think dark is just one colour, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black". Black as colour, condition, metaphor, process: blackness in the space of the Wigmore Hall, where, as Moran put it when he played the venue in 2019, "people like me don't play in halls like this". Rapturously received, the duo play an encore. Throughout, they put on a show, and then some. An audience until recently starved for live music were delighted. 

Beyond this, as I overheard someone saying on the way out, "[McBride] was much more weird and wiggly than usual"; often, there you could hear him adapt in real-time, particular on Moran's piece. And it was Moran's pieces that were in some ways the most interesting pieces on the programme, taking them away from the familiar virtuosity on which they--particular McBride--could easily have coasted the entire night. Moran's compositions tend to focus on gospel-tinged chordal progressions and melodic fragments, treated in the manner of a hip-hop sample as looping, lightly-modified figures that lope or stride ahead with a kind of melancholic poise--whose simplicity can at first seem affected, but which, on each repetition, increase in emotional power. Moran is a master of dynamics, in particular, of the hushed diminuendo, repeating the figure until it disappears into silence, into space, and the unexpected--but perfectly-placed--hammered fortissimo in the midst of innocuous explorations of familiar figures. Moran has learned from minimalism. Here I'm thinking in part of the familiar minimalism of Steve Reich, at one point an associate of pianist Anthony Davis (whose opera X is to be revived at the Met in 2023). But Davis broke with Reich over the latter's Reich's rigidity and refusal of emotional texture--a key feature of the Black music and speech he used (and arguably, exploited) in his work, and we might equally trace Moran's minimalism to Davis' gamelan-inspired work such as the 'Wayang' pieces. (At the least, Davis himself must be counted among Moran's peers for his fusion of composition and improvisation and for his extension of (and beyond) jazz's rhythmic parameters.) But perhaps a more important part of the mix is the minimalism hip-hop looping, a post-electronic form of acoustic music in which harmonic fragments sampled from jazz, soul or R&B records get chopped up, turned over on themselves like an ouroboros. On The Sound Will Tell You, Moran employs electronics he calls DrIp to add echoic traces to his notes in a manner he likens to the slowed-down effects of the late, great DJ Screw. But it's the fascination of hearing that acoustic transformation that takes the music from mere imitation of effect and into a consideration of the structural territories opened up by the now-decades old sonic technologies of hip-hop, an inter-genre, trans-historical dialogue that's, of course, very much within the 'changing same' of jazz's (radical) tradition. (Moran reflects further on some of these questions in a recent lecture here.)

In his own pieces, Moran plays patterns, and it doesn't seem to matter whether they're composed or improvised--though of course he'll run off a flurry up the keyboard to remind you of his chops. With McBride on pieces from the tradition, he can step inside the more functional role of accompanist or lead at will, comping and soloing on changes with the best of them. But his real interests lie somewhere to the left of this, investigating the kernel of figures and putting them through their paces. In this he echoes not only Davis but a piece like Roscoe Mitchell's 'Nonaah', albeit in gentler form. In its expansive, self-consciously historical 'modernistic' approach, Moran echoes the catholicity of musicians like Byard, exemplified in Beaver Harris' 1970s formulation "from ragtime to no-time", though there can be something almost arch and self-reflexive about his playing: this is considered music, and while it lacks the expansive re-structuralism of the compositional systems of an Anthony Braxton or a Henry Threadgill (with whom Moran performed in duet at Ornette Coleman's funeral), it merges the formal explorations and historical weight that befalls anyone who plays this music consciously and with good conscience with a moving resilience, a hope we might call spiritual or secular, but which resounds nonetheless. As Morrison puts it, night "may as well be a rainbow", its shades of gradation, of difference, resounding in the neglected, the shadowy, the obscure, brought to Black light, to Black life.

Dominic Lash Ensembles at Café Oto

Photo by Roger Huddle.

 
John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones), Pat Thomas (piano), Dominic Lash (bass), Steve Noble (drums / percussion); Consorts (various musicians—full list below). Café Oto, Dalston, 21.10.2021.

Last year, bassist Dominic Lash began a record label, Spoonhunt, releasing music by three of his own ensembles: on Limulus, a quartet featuring, among others, saxophonist Ricardo Tejero, another quartet on Discernment, John Russell’s final recording alongside John Butcher and Mark Sanders, and a large ensemble called Consorts, heard on a record called Distinctions. Much of this music in turn arose from Lash’s 40th Birthday gig at Café Oto, and so it was fitting that, with the easing of pandemic restrictions, it was at Oto that the releases could be officially launched. The venue isn’t open at full capacity until next Monday, but there was still a good turn-out for what was by no means a flashy or hip gig or something with a visiting act as a draw: an indication of the health of the UK free improv scene, pandemic or no pandemic, and of the respect in which Lash and his music are held.

Given Russell’s passing, and the unavailability of Discernment’s original drummer, Mark Sanders, the quartet that played the evening’s first set had quite a different sound to that heard on the record, with Pat Thomas—originally supposed to be on the original date—replacing Russell and Steve Noble standing in for Sanders. This could have gone anywhere: Thomas sticking to piano, rather than electronics, always promises a certain amount of contained thunder, Noble a perhaps more buoyantly rhythmic approach, but the band might equally well have trod into the more abstract/rhythmically unmoored territory of quote un quote non-idiomatic playing. (By this I mean, a certain idiom that also gets called ‘European free improvisation’, whether that’s meant to imply geography, artistic tendency, style, or genre; usually, some sort of combination of all of those). Expectations of the latter arose in large part thanks to the presence of Butcher, whose earlier work with Russell and Phil Durrant (who was heard in the evening’s second half on electronics) gives his work some affinity with the beginnings of the more minimal school of improvisation that ends up with New London or Berlin silences, while the painstakingly precise multiphonics of his solo saxophone work (latterly, often amplified with electronics or in resonant spaces), suggests a kind of bridge between minimal tendencies and the more reactive scrabble of EFI. This kind of generic hair-splitting, of course, doesn’t go anywhere near to suggest the studious fluidity of Butcher’s playing, or the expansive range of Lash, Thomas, and Noble across numerous contexts. As I say, this could have gone anywhere.

As it turns out, the set—maybe 40-minutes or so in length, though I didn’t check the time—was surprisingly like free jazz. (Surprising, that is, given the tendency of the sectors of EFI with which Butcher would normally be associated to distinguish themselves from ‘energy music’ tendencies.) The quartet didn’t suggest free jazz so much in terms of dividing the music up into ‘themes’ and ‘solos’ or even pulse, but more in certain harmonic gestures and levels of energy/volume, generally initiated by Thomas and picked up on by Butcher, working some way outside his usual vocabulary. This is not, perhaps, Butcher’s preferred territory, but it didn’t show: particular on soprano, which he alternated with tenor, with I think two turns on each instrument apiece, he touched on scalar, declarative iterations that bordered on late Coltrane at its Live-in-Japan woolliest, repeated melodies echoed—not in the rote-repetition that screams “I’m listening and reacting”, but in genuinely surprising and fitting echoes—from musician to musician to musician. Butcher began in jazz when he was starting out in the early ’80s, playing in groups with pianist Chris Burn while studying physics at Surrey University and continuing to play in Burn’s big band while beginning a Ph.D on ‘charmed quarks’ in London. As Burn remarks in an interview with Simon Reynell: “I always joke that what started off as a 22 musician big band playing jazz compositions ended as a free improvisation duo.” (By 1992, the band sounded like this.) And jazz, free or otherwise, has largely left both Burns’ and Butcher’s vocabulary since then, though an unexpected and surprisingly effective duo with Matthew Shipp—convened at the invitation of Trevor Brent in 2010, also at Oto, and followed by an equally unexpected trio with synth player Thomas Lehn—saw a rapprochement of a sort. (A 2016 interview in which Shipp and Butcher sketch out the respective traditions from and out of which they emerge makes for interesting reading: it can be accessed here.) Likewise, one of the highlights of the performance by the Lash-convened quartet was seeing Butcher adjust to a climate that—largely through Thomas’ playing—had more of an idiomatic connection to free jazz than might be expected in this setting. Particularly in a solo context, Butcher plays virtually every note with an extended technique—multiphonics, false fingering, overblowing etc—veering away from any conventionally pitched vocabulary. That certainly figured here, so ingrained is it in his style: notably, on soprano, eerie, ultra-high altissimo, whistle-pitch sounds, or whispered wind ghosts floating through the body of the instrument after the mouthpiece had been removed. Yet these were juxtaposed or combined with melodic and rhythmic shards strongly suggestive of jazz, fragments of stories that Butcher seemed surprised he knew, but which he was able to re-tell, to spin towards and away from, with authoritative relish. What might have been par for the course in the work of more free jazz-oriented group thus attained the genuine “sound of surprise” here because of its variance from the norm of Butcher’s particular idiomatic tendencies, and in any case, I don’t think Butcher, inveterate Cubist that he is, could leave those phrases entirely intact.

Pat Thomas’ approach to the piano is historically rooted yet utterly distinctive. Spaciously hammered, thick, thick two-handed near-cluster; sparingly used and stringently lush ninth chords; repeated figures that are not quite riffs, not quite melodic fragments, more like rhythmic stutters that sound like a succession of mini-hammers. Deliberately so, there’s something beautifully paradoxical about his approach: gracefully ungainly, liquid granite, utterly poised in consciously distorted fashion. It’s immutable, authoritative, declarative, but entirely adaptable; the hyper-arpeggiated, glissandi-thick, rolled and clustered figures he gets in the upper register are nothing like that of Cecil Taylor, with which such playing inevitably gets compared—partly because of Thomas’ very different sense of space, his tendency to play in measured bursts rather than continuous streams (the unbroken sections of playing tend to focus on repetition rather than constant development); likewise, I don’t think any other pianist has quite the control of the lower register that Thomas has; and his use of the pedal is inevitably much subtler than the morasses of sound he conjures up with it might at first suggest. One chord he played maybe half-way through the set saw him release the pedal before the natural stage of decay where others would have simply let the note ring out; like Butcher, Thomas reminded us, in a kind of hyper-materialist, self-conscious meta-gesture, of the sources of sound production, drawing on the power of the gesture—the reverent haze or dramatic cloud the sustain pedal allows—while also drawing attention to its provisional quality (but with none of the studied fussiness that description suggests). Meanwhile, Steve Noble’s scraped or struck, perhaps bowed, small gongs and cymbals, along with other ways of playing the drum kit as pitched more than rhythmic instrument (his kit was out of my eyeline so I could only guess as to the origin of the sounds) kept things texturally open and spacious. And Lash, of course, has it all down—bowed harmonics, free arco hinting at but never settling into walking patterns, careening caterwauls and ship-wreck groans, the perfectly-placed pluck pinging into the space like a falling droplet that sends ripples from the centre to the edges of a body of water, be that puddle or pond.

During the course of the set, there were ‘episodes’, the conclusion of one and the beginning of the next generally signalled by Butcher switching instrument, but they felt more like movements in a suite than the variable incidents of a typical free improv set, moved between as they were with total, fluid assurance. The first such transition, about five minutes in, saw the music suddenly stop—one of those serendipitous pullings of the emergency-brake that generally sees the musicians wryly laugh and the audience begin to applaud, as if willing the music to end there. Here, the silence was sustained, and things immediately moved in a different direction: a focussed adjustment characteristic of the set to follow. Thomas was often the driving force behind the quality of each particular ‘movement’, though his playing was anything but grandstanding: repeated chords suggested, even as they slid away from, a harmonic direction or area. Yet it was above all a collective music, a conversation between equal musical personalities. Take away any one of the parts and the quality would radically have changed. It’s rare to see a purely improvised set of such cohesion, no hesitancies or verbiage or over-staying of welcome, each transition natural and surprising and fitting, everyone in sync, knowing when to sit out and when to step back in, no one treading on each other’s toes but no one hiding around the corner waiting for things to get going either. I trust the set was recorded, and I hope it might see release in some form or other.


Consorts, kind of chamber ensemble-cum-big band which, as far as I know, has only previously performed on the 40th Birthday gig which forms the basis for the group’s Spoonhunt release. Here’s the full line-up, taken from that release’s info sheet.

Douglas Benford - harmonium and percussion
Steve Beresford - electronics
Marjolaine Charbin - piano
Chris Cundy - bass clarinet
Seth Cooke - steel sink and metal detector
Angharad Davies - viola
Phil Durrant - modular synth
Matthew Grigg - guitar/amplifier
Bruno Guastalla - cello
Martin Hackett - Korg MS10
Tim Hill - baritone saxophone
Tina Hitchens - flute
Sarah Hughes - zither
Mark Langford - bass clarinet
Dominic Lash - double bass
Yvonna Magda - violin
Hannah Marshall - cello
Helen Papaioannou - baritone saxophone
Yoni Silver - bass clarinet
Alex Ward - clarinet/amplifier

I don’t think this was entirely reproduced on the night—Lash was playing electric guitar rather than bass; I didn’t see Alex Ward, Bruno Guastalla, Sarah Hughes, or Helen Papaioannou; Seth Cooke didn’t appear to be playing a steel sink and I’m not sure if the objects he was crouched over next to a small amplifier were metal detectors or not—but I think it’s largely representative. And whatever the individual components, the ensemble is in a sense also the piece they play, even if that piece is only loosely structured, certainly not formally scored or even conducted. With this line-up they could conceivably function in any way Lash decided, from the more conventional Improvisers Orchestra format, with its conductions and exercises, to full-on Alan Silva Celestrial Communications-style skronk. Full disclosure—Dom asked me to write the liner notes for the group’s album last year, but was more interested in what I might have to say about the music without knowing the methods that produced it than provided with the nuts-and-bolts of its structure. And I think that concern with what the music sounds like, rather than how it’s structured, is the point: an exploration of large-group texture that deliberately avoids the aforementioned large-group improv tendencies to density and information over-load while also gesturing towards—and departing from—the more minimal tendencies with which Lash’s has been involved in the Set Ensemble and other Wandelweiser-related endeavours.

As I understand it, the Consorts piece is essentially a set of sustained tones building to a crescendo, and those are the only guidelines: no score, no conduction, no other signals. (And in the rehearsal/soundcheck last night, apparently no mention of sustained tones was made.) So in part Consorts can be understood as a sort of exercise in orchestration, a textural experiment. As an exercise in orchestration, there’s a kind of giddy delight in textural variety—I’ll take not one but three bass clarinets, combine a string section with various electronics, ‘small’ or otherwise, round out the bottom end with a baritone, throw in two guitars. The group Lash had chosen is not ‘star-studded’—though who wouldn’t want a violin section with Angharad Davies in the corner! —which is, in fact, all the more index of their dedication in a music that is, after all, at its best, never about egoic fulfilment: players who quietly work away, in London or Cheltenham or Oxford or Bristol, at their craft: Martin Hackett’s inimitable Korg MS10, the tripled bass clarinets of and Mark Langford, Yoni Silver and Chris Cundy; Hannah Marshall’s richly adaptive cello; Steve Beresford in small electronics mode. From my seat, the only musicians in view were Marjolaine Charbin on piano, Mark Langford, the nearest of the bass clarinet players, and Hannah Marshall on cello (with Lash’s guitar popping in and out of view behind her). Consequently, I only realised, for example, that there was a flute in the mix about 30 minutes in, and had no idea Angharad Davies had been in the mix until Lash called out her name at the end. All this meant that I had to concentrate on it as a group sound rather than focusing on the individual sources of any particular sounds. Which is to say that being able to see the individual members of the ensemble perform both does and doesn’t make a difference. The ability to identify by eye, and thus by ear, the individual contribution of a particular instrument/individual helps one pick out one texture in the weave, one dot of paint in the pointillist whole, or any other such metaphor you might choose, but it doesn’t really reveal much more than how the parts are put together—which, as Lash’s reticence about explaining the piece’s structure implies, isn’t really the point of the exercise. Hearing snippets of sound and realising half an hour in that there was a flute in the ensemble, for example, is rendered all the more serendipitous, and the overall texture all the richer.

On Distinctions, the peak crescendo section has something of the quality of the more avant strands of doom metal; the 2021 iteration, while not quite as glass-rattling, certainly reaches for an effect you might call overwhelming, for its sheer, sustained volume, and the thick intensity of its accumulated textural thicket. The groups imperceptibly reaches a massive cataclysm of sound—driven, I think, by Phil Durrant’s very loud electronics, or perhaps it was Seth Cooke’s amp and whatever objects he had plugged into it; or maybe Matthew Grigg was also doing some small-scale Hendrix things with a guitar and amplifier; or Charbin was deploying e-bows, piano strings, and sustain pedals to give similar clouds. Either way, the sound was, thick and immutable, catharsis or textural exploration, followed by a shorter de-crescendo out (though it apparently lasted around ten minutes). Live, as opposed to on record, you can really feel the music fill the space; in providing contrast to the ‘climax’ and a mirror to the opening, the de-crescendo emphasizes the piece’s architectural, or is that architectonic, qualities. It reminded me a bit of taking part in a Michael Pisaro large group piece—also at Oto—back in 2015, in which everyone played ppp so that the overall volume was the strange effect of a very large group playing at a kind of medium volume: like an orchestra with a mute on it. Harry Gilonis also suggested the piece might be set alongside new music exemplars of the crescendoing sustained/repeated tone like James Tenney’s ‘On Having Never Written a Note for Percussion’ or Stockahusen’s Inori, to which I’d add some of Giacinto Scelsi’s orchestral pieces. (Lash himself mentions Phill Niblock, whose music he’s performed and on whom he’s written academically.) The Tenney is an exercise in solo texture and focus, with its own influence on a strand of improvised music—think Mark Wastell’s tam tam or Eddie Prévost’s bowed cymbal—as well as the general ‘swell piece’ structure found in larger groups. It would be interesting, meanwhile, to think what an improvised ‘swell piece’ like Consort’s does that those composed pieces don’t, and vice versa. If Scelsi and Stockhausen’s experiments in the form associated it with a specifically ritualistic quality (in Stockhausen’s case, unexpectedly Messiaen-type sonorities, allusions to the 'Dies Irae' melody, etc), there was almost nothing ‘ritualistic’ about Consorts. Let’s call it a more materialist approach to sustained tones that aims to be a study in texture and group contributions to an overall sound rather than a trance-inducing exercise. (Of course, the whole crescendo thing might also be seen to originate in the serious musical joke that is Ravel’s ‘Bolero’.)

These are all open-ended hints rather than a final say on the matter. Suffice to say I enjoyed both halves of the evening very much: unusual in the level of contrast between the sets and the level of focus throughout. But of course, given the calibre of the players, entirely to be expected. Roll on the next series of Spoonhunts!

Autumn

Autumn officially begun on Wednesday 22nd September, so I'm told: a little before that my physical copy of the Anthony Braxton Standards Quartet boxset from New Braxton House--released earlier in the year on the NBH bandcamp site--came through the letter box. Beautifully produced and designed as ever and, for my money, one of Braxton's best standards groups, recorded on a European tour just before the pandemic hit in early 2020. Samples and the digital download here (the physical box contains my liner note essay 'New Whats in the Tradition').

Other recent writing includes: a review of drummer Ches Smith's fascinating jazz / vodou project We All Break at Point of Departure, in which I touch (very briefly!) on the complexities behind the figuration of 'Latin Jazz' and the specific relation of jazz to Haitian music.

A poem in the new issue of UK little magazine Ludd Gang. All proceeds go to the Poets' Hardship Fund, one of the few sustained examples of mutual aid in the small press poetry community of recent years, and a vital service as the creative arts are particularly hit as the effects of the corona crisis are everyday exacerbated by the grasping ruling of a government of millionaires, denialists and bigots. As they put it:

After a decade of punitive austerity and a brutally mismanaged pandemic, the Poet’s Hardship Fund UK provides a channel for getting some money to poets who require it, without the kind of means-testing processes attached to similar kinds of efforts. While the scale of what we’re dealing with far exceeds any of our individual capacities for making change—the problems we’re seeking to address extending far beyond any discernible ‘poetry community’—we see this fund as, at least, ‘a start’. The premise is simple: give when you can and take when you can’t.

An introductory piece on Amiri Baraka's encounters with censorship, from the Floating Bear trial to 'Somebody Blew Up America'.

An obituary for saxophonist and composer Jemeel Moondoc at Artforum.

Also a sad recent loss, Maryanne (Patterson) Raphael has passed away. One of ten children, she grew up in Ohio, while at university joining a Black sorority as the only white student in a protest at racial exclusion, for which she was featured in Ebony and Jet; studied at the Sorbonne; and met poet and journalist Lennox Raphael in Jamaica in 1961. Facing discrimination as an interracial couple, the two travelled together over several continents, living variously in Rio-de-Janeiro, Morocco and Hawaii, and, in New York, joining the Umbra workshop. Raphael had a decades-long career as an author-predominantly of non-fiction--including a biography of her friend Anais Nin, The Voyage Within, a guide to surviving as a freelance writer, and a co-autobiography, with Lennox Raphael, of their life together (here reviewed by Umbra editor David Henderson). Her memoir of mental health, Along Came a Spider: A Personal Look at Madness provides wrenching but measure accounts of her struggles, also suggested in her correspondence with mental health activist Judi Chamberlin. Her work manifested a concern with social justice--whether mental health, the problems of child runaways, in a 1974 book on 'America's Lost Youth', or America's continuing racialised catastrophes. Though her best-known work was in prose, she also wrote poems and translated poetry. The 'Latin / Soul' issue of Umbra magazine, produced from California by David Henderson, Barbara Christian, and Victor Hernandez Cruz in the 1970s, contained the Raphaels' translations of seven poems by Cuban revolutionary poet Nicolas Guillen, whose work had earlier been translated by Langston Hughes. A few of those poems can be seen below.

And here's Raphael's own poem 'Into Iron Cages' from Umbra's second issue, engaging with Civil Rights in the year of the March of Washington, singing across to the concerns of the Guillen translations in lines at once sardonic and social (sur)realist.

Despite the endorsement of Anais Nin, Henderson and others, and despite the strong sales of books like Runaways, Raphael's career never received much attention from literary scholars--a fate suffered by writers associated with Umbra in general, but all the more so the women associated with the group. As ever, the passing of such a life--as with that of Jemeel Moondoc--should prove further spur to the much-overdue work of recovery by which we can begin to re-tell the story of U.S.--and world--culture during the revolutionary years of the '60s and beyond, maintaining its fervid and necessary hopes even in an age of catastrophe. (For what age has not been!)

Summer

The poet Callie Gardner passed away in early July. Callie was author of the book-length naturally it is not., a series of four letters published by the 87 Press a couple of years ago, each one corresponding to one of the seasons. Committed to the kind of work that can be done in a long poem, in this book they construct a kind of essay in verse whose formal structures--a digressive but focused articulation of unfolding argument--shares something with elements of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, particularly Lyn Hejinian, something with Ashbery's longer poems, but is always shot through with a particular and distinctive relation to language, a wry and sardonic yet loving sense of humour, and an urgent concern with how to move through 'nature' and the weather, social constructs whose mythic mismanagement hurtles us toward destruction. For me, some of the sections that resonate most are the pastoral observations of flora and fauna written "from my summerisles"--even as the introduction makes clear that comforting reifications of 'nature' are the sequence's prime target of critique. There's a grace and a beauty of observation, an incisiveness that is a form of clear-eyed attentiveness and love. 

Callie was also author of numerous magazine publications— a scholar of the work of Roland Barthes, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and others—and a devoted and selfless champion of small press publishing, with Zarf magazine and Zarf editions. Given the labour of editing and of maintaining a regular publication schedule amidst precarious labour on the edges of the academy, and elsewhere, that so many poets in the scene have to perform, it's hard for print magazines to be sustained in the UK small press scene—they tend to last sporadically and then fade out. But Callie produced 15 issues of Zarf between 2015 and 2020, ending as the pandemic hit, each one with an editorial that offered a poetics in miniature. Here's the editorial from January 2020 (also pictured at the top of the post):

many people have commented on a noted poet's statement last year that 'poems are rarely on the side of power', but we find ourselves somewhere w[h]ere we must know that the reverse is true. it's a rare poem, in fact, that can not only imagine a world that grows differently from its very roots, but speaks as thought it is already in existence. if you let it, poetry can be the resilient technology of love & liberation, but it's not inherently good. so we should be vigilant about what the world is asking our poems to be and do, and be and do the opposite. if they ask you to be simple, be difficult; if they tell you to be articulate, do not bend nor explain; if they want you only as a soothing voice for the evening, screech shatteringly into the still morning.

Others are far more qualified to talk about this, but to me it seemed that Callie’s work as editor and as poet always manifested this great generosity and dedication: they offered incisive readings of the systems we live under and have to live through, academic and others, but they also exemplified the power of kindness, of taking poetry seriously and taking the communities that develop around it seriously, of maintaining this total commitment to alternative ways of being and organising and living. A recent series of commentaries on contemporary poetry--Nat Raha, Eric Hunt, Rennee Gladman, Tom Betteridge, and others--sought to find a form of writing that would be adequate to the works themselves, neither academic nor sloppily journalistic, but immanent and urgent as Callie felt those works to be. Constructed, like naturally, it is not., as a series of letters, the dialogic nature of these pieces--relaxed, focused, concerned with the mechanics of reading and the inner workings of a poem on the inner workings of its readers, manifest a gentle and exemplary seriousness about reading the work of often obscure contemporary poets in these communities that some of us find ourselves in--communities subject to dispersion, fragmentation and precarity, that have become all the more dispersed during the past year-plus of pandemic. They're models for how we might do criticism, for how we might read, for how we might conceive poetry in our lives. It's the kind of writing that gives you the strength to keep going, writing, reading: a gift.

Callie’s loss, far too young, is that latest blow in what's been an exceptionally grim couple of years. The world needs more people like this, not less, and they will be much missed.

(News for July)

Recently I participated (online) in the Milosz Festival, Krakow, discussing UK poetry and politics in a conversation with Harry Josephine Giles and Luke Roberts at the kind invitation of Marta Koronkiewicz and Paweł Kaczmarski (who host the discussion). The discussion can be viewed here (you'll have to sign up first).

'Occupied Territory and Abolitionist Freeze Frames', an essay on Haile Gerima's Bush Mama, is in the new issue of Senses of Cinema.

And again in Bush Mama – outside the prison per se, but in the carceral circuits that surround it – Dorothy fights back. Gerima’s response to being stopped and searched while filming was to include the footage in his film. Someone was filming. Someone witnessed and documented. This is the beginning of community, of resisting the occupying army. For Gerima, following the theorisations of Fernando Solanas and other Third Cinema pioneers, the film camera was a weapon, a tool in the struggle. But unlike a gun, a film does not run out of ammunition. The camera witnesses and records, but also transforms reality. Cinema itself is, in essence, the projection of still images to create the illusion of movement. A frozen image can be made to move. The cell awaits smashing. Bush Mama’s final freeze frame awaits reactivation.

New from Materials, Alli Warren's Another Round: Selected Poems. This is Warren's first UK publication and is available here. Here's the official write-up:

Dear Comrades

don’t get it twisted

This Selected Poems, Alli Warren’s first UK collection, presents work from her first three full-length books: Here Come The Warm Jets (2013), I Love It Though (2017), and Little Hill (2020). Shot through with clear-sighted hope, yet intensely attentive to the specific cruelties of our present epoch, Warren asks “who is permitted unhindered breath”. This work aims to “study the past to denaturalize the present”, to reverse the mirrored and self-perpetuating notions of nature and culture, human and animal. Warren knows that poetry can’t sing from beyond mediation, but insists that poetry can acknowledge mediation’s more mendacious disguises and bring them out into the open. Carried through by a prosody alternately razor-sharp and capaciously crowded, in lines and sentences harshly yet lovingly aware of the “possible future in the tender measure”, poet-as-ventriloquist throws multiple voices to see what’s revealed under poetry’s light. With glamour and imagination and biting humour in abundance, Warren seeks to walk to the end of the world-system, “the terror of the totally plausible future” at once post-apocalyptic and utopian—“When I said I was going / to the bar I meant / no death, no death”. Such work may “begin from economic fact”, but it’s where you go from there that matters. Operating within the flows and constraints of racialised capitalism—a space of horror, shared with monsters—Warren’s poetry also throws up multiple pleasures, guilty and otherwise, and glimmers of collective possibility, of possible futures we can sometimes glimpse and live within. This is poetry written from community, poetic and otherwise, living and dead and otherwise: from Oakland, El Cerrito, San Francisco; from the meadow, from the street, in a car; marching to shut down the port, walking to breathe in a charged air everyday and Orphic, “buoyant” and “forked”. These poems give us the measures, the strength, the breath to propel ourselves through the circumscribed day. 

ALLI WARREN is the author of Here Come The Warm Jets (City Lights, 2013), I Love It Though (Nighboat, 2017), Little Hill (City Lights, 2020), and numerous chapbooks. She edited the literary magazine Dreamboat, co-curated the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, and co-edited the Poetic Labor Project. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2005.

Finally, I have some copies of 'Umbra magazine (1963-1974) An Introduction and Bibliography', the fifteenth pamphlet from the University of Buffalo's Among the Neighbors bibliography series. The 40 page pamphlet consists of a timeline and a short essay, along with a bibliography of the five issues of Umbra magazine. If you'd like one, just leave a comment below this post with your email address.

"The Last Octave": Variations on Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021)

[Shorter and more formal obituary now at Artforum]

“All this business about ending a piece in a long silence, what B.S. The piece is not about that. You play the last octave, you close the music, you leave, life goes on.” (Rzewski to Igor Levit, quoted here)

Frederic Rzewski died last week in Italy at 83. 

We could, if we were so minded, see Rzewski’s passing as the end of an era—an era of politically-committed art, of revolutionary hopes, epitomised in his work with Musica Elettronica Viva in the summer of 1968 or works of internationalist solidarity from the 1970s such as The People United Will Never be Defeated. But Rzewki’s work was always concerned with the beginning of new intersections, new grounds for resistance and survival. And though his late work frequently addresses the melancholy of defeat, or personal isolation, or historical erasure, it does so with humour, with clear-headed pragmatism, and above all with the utopian hope that never left him. Music, as the texts to some of his piece suggests, provides—or could provide—a model that is antithetical to militarism, to empire, and anti-war sentiments were a key focus for later works such as ‘Stop the War!’ or ‘War Songs’. At the same time, he was realistic about the negligible effect of his own music on actual politics. Conceived as it was within the sphere of the ‘classical’ concert hall, with its class-specific ambiance, such work was faced with a fundamental contradiction: left-wing music produced within often right-wing, bourgeois contexts (donors, funders, concert halls, the mechanisms of that musical world: a dilemma of course not exclusive to classical music by any means). The People United has by now assumed the status of a repertoire ‘classic’, virtuosic, monumental, thrilling, in the grand tradition of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and other classics of the piano. Its series of variations on the Chilean revolutionary song served at the time as index of very recent events, but they can easily stand in for continuing moments of resistance in the present, that continuing legacy of American empire. At the same time, Rzewski was aware of the risks of heroizing the effort of the solo performer, the individual composer, alone on stage translating collective struggle into a model dominated by the ideology of bourgeois individualism. His advice to Levit—just after a performance of The People United—insists that music is part of a broader whole: this is both what makes music—all music, not just overtly ‘committed’ music—political and what necessitates a realist evaluation, that music is context-dependent: that, as he told an interview, to lie down in front of tractors or tanks (as he had) or to go on marches or picket lines (as he had) were different things to writing a piece of left-wing concert music, that its audience and its effects are different. Yet, for Rzewski, music might still serve as an experimental model for types of society, ideal or not; both diagnostic and utopian, an acknowledgment of worse and a hope for better.

I saw Rzewski perform his own work in London three times: the world premiere of his Piano Concerto at the Proms in 2013; his De Profundis, alongside works by Julius Eastman (a collaborator in the early ’70s) at the London Contemporary Music Festival in late 2017; and most recently, back in January 2019, with his son, saxophonist Jan Rzewski, at Café Oto, a set in loving tribute to Rzewski’s late collaborator Steve Lacy resplendent with touches of theatre—Jan Rzewski walking out of the venue doors, still playing, his sound coming faintly through the glass—moments of comic, extra-musical dialogue when Jan’s mother insisted from the audience that he and Rzewski speak in English for the benefit of the audience, rather than the Italian in which the two were conversing. Rzewski’s was a music that could feel monumental, but that sense of intimacy, of music written to be played and heard by its dedicatees and comrades, made in the home or the street as well as on the concert hall stage, was central to his work. I never saw him play The People United himself, though I heard it rendered by a fine team of younger pianists (Mihály Berecz, Julian Chan, Harry Rylance and Jonas Stark) at the Royal Academy of Music on Halloween 2019 alongside the poet Erín Moure, who read later that week and with whose cross-cultural aesthetic, deeply attuned to the relation of culture, language and politics, serious but with a sly humour, has certain kindship with Rzewski’s own. At the start of lockdown last year, Levit performed the piece in his live streaming series, recorded from home: on an uncertain internet connection, with dubious sound quality, the piece nonetheless, at that point in time, had more resonance than as a repertoire warhorse, a fragmented tribute to resilience and survival rather than display of bombast, skill and display. (Levit has been one of the most prominent recent champions of Rzewski’s music, emphasizing its open, utopian qualities.) The People epitomizes a technique I associate perhaps most of all with Rzewski’s music, that of the variation form: not on the basis of a patron’s tune, as per Bach’s Goldberg or Beethoven’s Diabelli, but of militant song, Sergio Ortega to Bandiera Rossa—and Rzewski’s own melodic counter-figure that equally forms a linking device between the movements, a counter-theme, a dialectical interplay. These notes will be variations of their own on Rzewski.

 

Based on Ortega’s Allende-era song, which Rzewski had heard on the radio in Italy, The People United was written for Ursula Oppens to play at a Bicentennial Concert in order to bring the effects of Latin America to the heart of ‘North American’ culture. In its original context, it was a political intervention; as a repertoire piece—now programmed alongside the pieces by Beethoven and Bach that were its predecessors, and so place firmly within the tradition within which it works and from which it departs—the piece (or what has been done with the piece) encapsulates some of the contradictions of Rzewski’s music. On the one hand, Rzewski was early on immersed in the European avant-garde, studying at the Darmstadt summer school in 1956, where he met Christian Wolff, and coming under the influence of Dallapiccola and Stockahusen, whose work he performed. Then of course there are the other aspects of the American avant-garde, both related—Elliott Carter—and apparently competing—John Cage and David Tudor, the latter a highly significant influence on his own approach to the piano. Though these approaches were both perhaps equally formative, Rzewski would come to rebel against the strictures involved in this music (as, indeed, did a number of its best-known practitioners, not least Stockhausen). Instead, he found his way to the social aspects of music-making that would always preoccupy him through the often improvisatory, egalitarian, leaderless ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva, which he co-founded in Rome with Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum and others including Carol Plantamura and Ivan Vando. The group morphed in form over the years—its character in particular changing with the addition of Steve Lacy in the 1980s—but at its inception took its place alongside very different groups from the European avant-garde (AMM, with whom they shared one side each of an LP, and Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, also based in Rome) to American free jazz (the Art Ensemble of Chicago) in its exploration of new ways of conceiving the musical ensemble. Performance context and musical form were in constant, sometimes volatile interaction, M.E.V. performing others in crypts, in prisons, in hospitals, on, as the title to Rzewski’s text score ‘Spacecraft’ suggests, to outer space. The group believed, Rzewski later asserted, that free improvisation would change the world, like a kind of literalized Chomskian universal language: M.E.V. “was going to create an entirely new language, so that people could come together from different parts of the planet and instantly communicate.”

As the group's title suggests, live electronics were one part of this. Rzewski had early on made experiments in musique concrete. As he later explained, the obscure 1965 piece Zoologischer Garten, composed while a guest of the Ford Foundation in East Berlin, was a purely “formalist”, serial piece whose title nonetheless contains an implied political statement at the ‘zoo-like conditions’ of the divided city and its border regime, and which samples the voice of the daughter of Jacob Taubes, Rzewski’s professor at Harvard, at one point recalling her mother saying “we’re going to kill De Gaulle”. Musique concrete—or even ‘purely’ electronic sound which sounded like musique concrete—which enabled one to bring the sounds of the outside into the concert space and to experiment with the way sound was perceived in that space, both in the tradition of and going beyond the orchestral tradition. Likewise, Ricahrd Teitelbaum had likewise been intensively working on his own modifications to Moog synthesizers. But the American expatriates found it initially hard to access music studios with the requisite equipment. Instead, composer David Berhman sent circuit diagrams that M.E.V.’s members would use to build their own instruments, attaching contact mics to pieces of available junk, emphasizing electronic’s capacity to alter the sound of everyday objects, an innovation they shared in some respects with AMM or with the ‘little instruments’ multi-instrumentalism of the AEC. This was both a practical and polemical gesture. In M.E.V., Rzewski would sometimes replace the piano with a glass sculpture parodically shaped like a piano, from which other members recall him producing sounds through scraping and striking that sounded like wild animals or a Javanese gong, all overlaid with a heavy distortion that—as with contemporaneous playing in rock music—distortion was central. This conceptual gesture—the liberation of any instrument as a potential sound-making device—soon extended to the constitution of the musical group itself. The group began by playing composed pieces, but soon evolved to text scores and guided improvisations. Rzewki’s ‘Sound Pool’, for instance, sought to replace the closed group as such, inviting any and all audience members to bring sound making equipment of their own. Here, the process of musicmaking is as important as the result. The music is, quite literally, made in collaboration between performers and audience, in the process seeking to erase the distinction between them. The group built their own performance space in Rome’s Trastevere district, performing nightly and inviting anyone to join, ultimately evolving into a pool of around twenty performers including Steve Lacy, Jon Gibson, Anthony Braxton, Maryanne Amarcher, Cornelius Cardew of AMM and others. Though there are a number of recordings, including a multi-decade boxset, this was very much a live group—much is lost in the translation simply to audio. Above all, this was music as social environment, with something of the Thoreauvian anarchy of John Cage’s Musicircus experiments of the 70s but with a greater faith in the role of intention within improvisation, rather than pre-ordained chance encounters set up by an overarching composer figure.

Alvin Curran later recalled: “It mattered little who played what when or how, but the fragile bond of human trust that linked us all in every moment remained unbroken.” Rzewski’s score for ‘Spacecraft’ allegorises the process that must be actualised in the making, each player imagining themselves in a labyrinth, being dictated to by a master voice, synecdoche for the force of ossified tradition. As the work unfolds, each player must attempt to ‘fly’ out of that labyrinth with falling into stereotype or floating alone. The piece is about individual voices finding both themselves and each other beyond existing strictures, its utopian aspirations indicated by the title with its echoes of Sun Ra, of the MC5’s ‘Starship’, as a kind of anti-space programme. Such pieces challenged the concept of the musical ‘work’ as fixed entity. In Rzewski’s words:

If the rules and the scaffolding of serialism, of composition and written music in general, in all the six or seven centuries of its history, were what made the simulated flight of the artist possible, then he must abandon them all in order to make the passage to true flight; he must jump into space.

As Amy C. Beal notes, another of Rzewki’s statements—that the group sought to “make music with whatever means are available”—“strips away the layers of training, technique, and talent traditionally demanded by Western art music, taking universality as a springboard”. This is certainly utopian, and in some ways naively cross-cultural, seeking to do away with difference, inequality and privilege by force of desire. Yet, as there always would be in Rzewki’s work, there was a strong practical dimension at play here too.  Rzewski’s ‘Plan for Spacecraft’ further has it that “the difference between magic and work is one of duration.” At certain points, a coherent group identity may be formed as if by magic, almost instantaneously—call it swarm intelligence, the unifying rush to a shared goal, an anarchic, revolutionary act which moves beyond, or in advance of organisation (electoral politics, the concert hall, etc)—improvisation as Walter Benjamin’s “left-handed blow”. But the statement doesn’t imply that magic is infinitely sustainable or preferable to work—they interact dialectically. This is of course music that emerges from the atmosphere of May ’68. Luigi Nono sampled sounds from the streets in ‘Non Consumiamo Marx’, as he had sampled the factory in ‘La Fabricca Illuminata’; M.E.V went to the streets themselves. Rzewski gives a good account of the utopian hopes of this period in a 1969 interview by Monique Verken published in The Drama Review, describing the

experiments in street music carried out during the summer and fall of 1968, in the course of which fixed-electronic sounds were combined with mobile-nonelectronic sound- sources. [...] ‘Form’ and ‘content’ are variable, changing from one performance to the next, depending upon the particular characteristics of the performance space, the objects used (usually about half of the sound-sources employed consist of objects found on the spot, amplified or not), and the individuals present. 

Rzewski tells Verken that he sees M.E.V.’s music as moving away both from serialism’s strictures and from Cageian indeterminacy, “the controlled use of chance operations”. Instead, improvisation can operate freely, “based on ‘friendship and trust”. This process is allegorised in pieces which direct players to move in the direction of the softest sound they can hear, though the opposite impulse is equally present. For Rzewski, the experiments—as with related endeavours in the UK such as Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia—enacted the true potential that Cageian indeterminacy and rock music promised but never delivered. For Rzewski, rock concerts disavowed audience participation: dominating and martial, the band, high up on stage, deified, exhorted the audience but never granted them autonomy or freedom. By contrast:

when, as has happened on numerous occasions in the Sound Pool, one hundred and more people are grooving together, making free music together, in harmony, it is like no other sound; you know that you are experiencing something new and revolutionary. It is like New Year’s Eve or the Birth of Gargantua.

Making a quasi-Situationist argument, Rzewski argued that music-making was destined to disappear as separate artform and to become simple one other activity like gardening or cooking. If Rzewski’s prophecy might seem to be fulfilled in the constant availability of music in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction, this happens on the sphere of consumption, rather than production, which is vaster, more profitable, and more exploitative than ever. And M.E.V.’s utopian model ultimately couldn’t be sustained at the same pitch—materially or otherwise. I’m reminded of a comment made by free jazz pianist Burton Greene, who predeceased Rzewski by just a few days: “We played atomic energy music twenty-four hours a day man, and we exploded like the Fourth of July”. In the 70s, Rzewski returned to the States, unable to support a family on the money he made from making experimental music. 

In his subsequent career, it might appear that Rzewski abandoned the utopian hopes of the M.E.V. era, which he would put down as naïve. For sure, in reacting against the strictures of serialism, of the deification of the composer and the concert hall within Western bourgeois art music contexts, Rzewski and his comrades perhaps overlooked the role of that music had and has played outside the Western concert hall or largescale Western pop music in other parts of the world. As what Teitelbaum called Ivy League ‘drop-outs’ (in fact, most of M.E.V.’s American founders had qualified with degrees in hand), M.E.V. had strayed from the fold but found themselves back within it. Rzewski later stressed the nature of Western classical music as based on the artistic valorisation of conflict—with the principal of counterpoint in itself a kind of military principle—while equally, and in contradictory fashion, fetishizing certain notions of harmony and conformity. This might apply as much outside the music, to its social contexts of production, as to the music itself. Rzewski’s later work consciously worked within this dialectic. He didn’t abandon utopianism or the challenge to existing conceptions of audience, performance and hierarchy--for instance, he made his scores available for free online, encouraging the online sharing of his music, refusing to work with what he saw as exploitative publishing companies. (A virtually complete set of digital scores and recordings of his compositions is readily available here). And he memorably played the entirety of The People United at the fish restaurant where one of his sons worked as cashier.

Rzewki’s own early compositions outside M.E.V. worked these concerns from slightly different angles. His questioning of the notion of counterpoint saw him reach back to earlier forms of Western music, to practices such as the medieval and Renaissance cantus firmus and to the interest in other forms of repetition then taking the name ‘minimalism’. Jefferson, written for soprano Carol Plantamura just after the Kent State shootings, sets a Founding Father’s calls for revolution against the America they are taken to enshrine, sung (almost declaimed) in non-accentuated, vernacular-inflected form over a cantus firmus figure. It was, however, Coming Together, written the following year following the Attica uprising, that would represent Rzewski’s most enduring political statement besides The People United. Once again, the vocalist declaims—either speaking or singing—over repetitive melodic-rhythmic material (either for keyboard player or an ensemble of 8-10 instruments). The piece is in two movements, the first setting words from a letter written by political prisoner Sam Melville, shortly before he was killed during the Attica uprising.

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time. It’s six months now, and I can tell you truthfully, few periods in my life have passed so quickly. I am in excellent physical and emotional health. There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead, but I feel secure and ready. As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis so am I dealing with my environment. In the indifferent brutality, the incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, I can act with clarity and meaning. I am deliberate, sometimes even calculating, seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others. I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

A combination of multiple registers—the discourse of lovers, “the experimental chemistry of food”, the languages of health, of brutality, of clarity—the piece is a kind of survival guide. Rzewski claimed that extending and separating out the words aimed at an insight into the psychology behind revolutionary dedication instead of, or in addition to, the more general political statement of Jefferson. 

In his infamous diatribe Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Cornelius Cardew asserted that this focus on psychology served to mystify the piece’s politics, an assertion that denies a reality central to the carceral experience and to the real, affective, experienced effects of the State beyond the Stalinist party line characterisation of the way that individuals and forces operate. The piece is not, though, a conventional piece of psychological realism or music theatre. It focuses profoundly on the details of body, rendered in words, in a manner that is both individual and generalisable. Just as the optimism in Melville’s letter is overshadowed by our knowledge of his subsequent fate, so the final movement sets the ambivalent words of another prisoner later released from Attica. When asked by a radio interview how he felt now that his imprisonment was over, now that Attica was behind him, Richard X Clark replied, “Attica is in front of me”. This is still the truth we must confront head-on—the carceral future against which abolition’s horizon sets an alternative course. Just as Sam Melville was both isolated and, as the piece’s title has it, in the process of ‘coming together’ in various ways to resist his isolation; just as Clark had both escaped and not escaped: so the piece moves to and away from coherence—in its insistently repeated bass figure, which the other musicians of the ensembles play within and around, subtracting and adding figures to it in various ways; in the way the speaker splits up the syllables of the text; in the way its repetitions never quite build to the resolution they promise. The work exemplifies the virtues of Rzewski’s oeuvre: that of continuing political relevance and of simple, but enormously effective use of innovative formal means as aesthetic form and frame. Nothing feels forced. The music is a breath of fresh air, like breathing, within and against confinement, in a spirit of solidarity and transformation.

Coming Together of course has status as one of Rzewski’s most frequently performed pieces, in large part due to its combination of an accessible musical language, in common with the Glass-Reich variety of minimalism, and the drama, pathos and politics of its spoken word part. Initially recorded by Living Theatre member Steve Ben Israel, the piece has been performed many times since. Julius Eastman’s is sadly unrecorded. No less than Angela Davis—herself a political prisoner when the piece was written—performs as speaker in a 2016 version recorded two days before Donald Trump’s election. (She was subsequently dedicatee of Rzewski’s piece ‘Demons’). Moor Mother is the latest in a series of artists to take on this role, in an upcoming video performance recorded within the Eastern State Penitentiary historical site.

Despite its fame, however, Coming Together is perhaps not the most representative of Rzewski’s pieces. To be sure, it picks up key focal points—politics, the use of spoken or sung text, a combination of composition and improvised elements. But its simpler version of minimalism, likewise heard in Jefferson or Les Moutons de Panurge, was a stage Rzewski passed through, rather than the (often dreary) endpoint it would become in the less creative, mainstreamed examples of minimalism (Rzewski’s minimalism was far closer in spirit to that of Eastman, with which it combined an interest in improvisation, theatricality, and fresh, morphing ensemble texture). In the years to come, Rzewski’s focus would increasingly be on something perhaps unimaginable at the height of the M.E.V. days, circa 1968 street music: the concert hall tradition of the piano recital.

Le Monde’s obituary has it that:

la musique de Rzewski fut un peu à la seconde moitié du XXe siècle ce que celle de Chopin fut à la première moitié du XIXe : l’art de tout dire avec un piano.

Likewise, the notice in Het Parool calls him “a monster of a pianist”. This status was, though, a double-edged. For Nicholas Slonimsky, Rzewski was “a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument”. Was Rzewski a wrecker of the piano or the fulfilment of the virtuoso composer-pianist, capable of playing across any idiom? Having parodied the piano’s status with his glass sculpture in the M.E.V. days, Rzewski decided not to destroy it or distort the piano, as had George Brecht and La Monte Young and Nam June Paik with Fluxus and Cage and Tudor with the prepared piano, as had Nancarrow with his player piano; neither did he make extensive use of electronics. Instead, he worked within the instrument’s history—heavy doses of Romanticism (though often as filtered through jazz, a side of his playing that can be heard best in his relatively obscure work on discs of Steve Lacy compositions)—formal elements from earlier forms of classical music, melodic material from blues, folk, protest music, and so on. For Rzewski, this music may take place in the concert hall--and The People United was written to make its bourgeois audience, giddy with the nationalism of America’s bicentennial celebrations, in some way cognisant of what was going on in Latin America, of other traditions of being and resistance—but it was also written with other spaces in mind, notably that of the home, the domestic space, of of playing with and to and for friends, ‘Nanosonatas’, songs with or without words that you could work and play through at home. Etudes, essays, trying things out. (In this regard, one of his last completed pieces, composed during the pandemic and premiered by Ursula Oppens, was called ‘Friendship’). And perhaps that’s not so different from the ongoing, large scale improvised negotiations of his other pieces. As he put it:

Reality is both rational and irrational. The universe has a structure with elements that can be predicted, but there are things that have no structure and that cannot be predicted. 

Kyle Gann suggests that Rzewski’s turn to the piano and to use of ‘folk material’—notably of political songs—followed the recent work of Cardew in the same vein, noting that Rzewski’s The People United followed a year on from Cardew’s much less well-known Thälmann Variations, which Rzewski himself would later record.  Cardew would move from seeing the radical potential of music as based in the forms surrounding it—the social experimentation of the Scratch Orchestra—to emphasizing political message over the notion of form-as-politics. The music’s purpose was to clearly communicate a political line. While Cardew’s Maoist work has been almost universally dismissed for prioritising politics over aesthetics, to the detriment of the latter, Rzewski later argued:

He was one of the first people to realise that one of the core problems of new music was the problem of language. His decision first to study and then to apply the principles of Socialist Realism were, I think, motivated by a perception that the idea of Socialist Realism was not necessarily based on any kind of Marxist aesthetic. [It] was primarily a question of language, of presenting ideas in a form which could be understood by large numbers of people. 

I think that his work in this area was genuinely experimental [...] I think that the Thälmann Variations, We Sing for the Future and the Irish folk songs are genuinely experimental.  They are based on attempts to create a kind of fusion between the great models of the past, notably Beethoven — much of this music is in the language of late Beethoven — combined with different folk-based traditions and later on with some of the early English keyboard music.

Rzewki’s later performances of these pieces (one of which is embedded above) are perhaps definitive. And he would—to an extent—join Cardew in this endeavour, both musicians turning to the piano and to stylistic idioms drawn from Beethoven or from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (that’s to say, ambivalent encounters with national traditions). Of course, Rzewski takes the variation form further than Cardew would, refusing to abandon atonality, the avant-garde, and so on for predominantly tonal material, and instead freely mixing them. This further reflects his thinking on the changing of tradition which earlier had taken more overtly radical form. This was always the question: how to build from the ruins of tradition without falling into nostalgia or irrelevance. In part, Rzewski did this by drawing on a wider range of traditions than did Cardew. Cardew drew on English, Irish and Chinese folk songs—Rzewski, though maintaining an international cast, did some of his most effective work with North American idioms, exemplified in the four North American Ballads (1979), commissioned by the great queer pianist Paul Jacobs, who’d die of AIDS four years later. But again, just as The People United was Rzewski’s great response to the jingoism of the Bicentennial celebrations, so too, these Ballads were written around the time that Rzewski relocated to Belgium for a teaching position. We might well recall that Rzewski has always been a European musician as much as an American one, and that his music is firmly internationalist at all points.

For me, the Ballads are up there with Rzewski’s best work, deeply moving and a fitting tribute to the source material on which they spin their variations. That said, there are of course questions of appropriation, of form, of social context, of race and class and gender behind all of this that can’t be easily resolved. My friend Richard Owens, a poet and himself a deep thinker on the ballad tradition, wrote to me a few years ago:

I was a little troubled by at times, by [Rzewki’s] WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON a little somehow wrenched from the thrust of its making -- separated out, formally so, through the music, from the laboring bodies it calls to. 

For Owens, there’s a risk that Rzewski “abandon[s] the flesh of the singing body for the piano object [...] so what does this mean -- homage or damage, and always both at once with the best of intentions -- and of course I would say the conversation as such, signals some sense of the advance [Rzewski] make[s]”. At the same time, in spinning variations on songs which were themselves adaptations of, variations on existing, anonymous melodies—as is the case, for instance, with Florence Reese’s ‘Which Side Are You On’, written during the Harlan County Labour struggles on the basis of earlier tunes the basis for the second movement—Rzewski is operating firmly in their spirit, rather than simply placing bourgeois classical techniques (Bachian, Beethovenian, etc) on top of working-class material). As an operative principle not just for this particular piece—though I think it’s one of Rzewski’s most important—but for Rzewski’s later work in general, the endless spinning of variations works here as productive, the process of incremental development which always turns into itself—collective, not only in terms of an ‘audience’ or a current community, but that whole community, stretching back to the dead. There’s a dialectic at work here: the variegated nature of the music is constantly drawn back to its point of departure (the theme) yet constantly draws that point of departure out of itself into more variation. Perhaps all music, in this sense, could be understood as variation. (Rzewski would later write a series of variations “Fourteen Variations Without a Theme by Beethoven”).

 

Rzewski’s piano music may not have deconstructed the instrument as had Fluxus-Cage tradition, as had. Cecil Taylor’s 88 tuned drums, but it did manifest a sustained thinking through and live engagement with the history and present of the piano as instrument. The piano tradition itself is not single or monovocal, and neither was Rzewski’s adaptation to and of it. in a review of the Nonesuch boxset of Rzewski’s piano works in Tempo, John Warnaby suggests that Rzewski’s pianism draws equally on two apparently competing strains--the focus on miniatures, on formal elegance, on solo music whose setting is the interior (Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier) and the concert hall grandiloquence of the 19th century virtuoso tradition, of Alkan and Listz at their most showmanlike. Drawing in popular material through the variation form is a way of breaking open that tradition but also raises question of how exactly this material stands in relation to its new context. The North American Ballads make a clear argument about the American labour movement, contrasting songs of resistance to the inhuman or inhumane conditions in which they were produced (as in the mimetic echo of factory machinery in ‘Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues’), a method Rzewski called “humanist realism”. By contrast, as Kyle Gann suggests, the multiple pieces that appear in the final movement of the Piano Sonata—from the late-Medieval ‘L’homme Armé’ to ‘Three Blind Mice’, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ to ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’—seems less to make an argument as to work by ear. For Rzewski, there was not one method or approach. For Gann, Rzewski’s ear and compositional sense make it relatively easy to characterise individual pieces, but his refusal to remain tied to any one style or approach make it impossible to generalise about his oeuvre as a whole. Above all, when it comes to Rzewski, the distinctions we’re used to making as regards ‘classical’ or ‘avant-garde’ music—indeterminacy, serialism, tonality, atonality—are shown up as only tools, rather than schools, that can be used as and when they fit, not removed from social consideration, but certainly shorn of much unnecessary ideological baggage. Far better-informed musical minds than mine have analysed the ways in which his pieces freely traverse tonality and atonality within the same piece--not as fore-grounded eclecticism but simply a way of thinking, natural as finger on keys, as breathing.

Not tradition, but traditions, plural, as Rzewski liked to put it. And if we’re thinking of the ‘tradition’ associatd with a particular instrument, we might also recall that the term ‘instrument’ has as its other sense the sense of the tool, of instrumentalising something, using something of a conduit for some other action. The piano, as orchestra in miniature, as at once the grand piano concert hall or the domestic small instrument, is poised between social forms. Its meaning and context is inherited but might also be changed, exists, as Rzeswki’s music as a whole, at a point of constant arrival and departure. The other key element here—bringing us back to ‘Coming Together’ and, even more so, to ‘Jefferson’—is the role of speech. The People United and the North American Ballads take sung material and instrumentalise it (in the various senses of that word). But Rzewski continued to make use of speech, notably in a piece like the Brechtian The Price of Oil (1980), which stages a dialogue between an investor and a worker in the context of North Sea oil rigs by a group of speaking percussionists. And in his piano works, Rzewski would often score it so that the pianist not only plays but speaks texts, rhythmically staggered in time with the music, rather than sung. The text comments on the music and the music comments on the text or they operate in parallel or entangled planes—returning music to its basis in a real performing body, opening up a dialogic, social space. Rzewski quipped that in musicals people are speaking and then suddenly break into song—so why not the other way round?  The pieces might also play between what can be said and what cannot be said: the testimony of things that cannot be imagined (his setting of Peter Weiss’ work on the Nuremberg trials in The Triumph Of Death); the body that remains social even in isolation in the profoundly moving De Profundis, a setting of excerpts of Oscar Wilde’s famed prison letter. When the elderly Rzewski himself played De Profundis at the performance I saw in 2017— seen from above in a large(ish) post-industrial venue in a bourgeois neighbourhood of London, emblem of gentrification, cousin of the Wildeian prison—the sound of his amplified speech and breath, of his chest or legs or arms struck, tapped, rubbed, gave visceral presence to the body, not simply of a performing, deified machine, but an old man, paying tribute to a victim of the State, in an act of solidarity that felt open and generous, more reflection than call to arms, sad and enraging and beautiful.

In De Profundis, amplification emphasizes the intimacy of body and instrument even within a larger space that otherwise forecloses the intimacy enabled within domestic performance. And in Rzewski’s solo works, the grand style of concert hall flash combines with another tradition that’s easier to overlook: the Nanosonatas, for family and friends, The Road, modelled on Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, music as diary or serial ‘novel’, in progress and process, at once monumental (The Road in its entirety lasting ten hours) and incremental, even modest in its ambition. So there was always an intimacy to Rzewski’s virtuosity. If the quotation of political songs is a way of bringing the broader social world into the more closed world of high art, it’s not so much appropriation—the replacement of unacknowledged labour for the visible labour of pianist-composer-performer-maestro—as soldiarity and homage, a refusal to forget what lies behind and beneath the edifice of culture. The Housewife’s Lament serves as a late addition to the North American Ballads: a shorter example of the variation form on an 1850 song, begins with material only a trained pianist could perform, taking the tune through multiple keys and techniques. But the piece ends with a cadenza in which the pianist sweeps the piano keys as with a duster. 

Imagine the cleaner in the concert hall after the virtuoso has packed up and gone home, after the guests have gone to the millionaires’ cocktail party. This cadenza presents the ideal of freedom—the virtuoso, improvisatory cadenza—is ironised as a form of labour: the cleaning of the instrument, that which touches but never depresses the keys, except by accident, that touches the keys but can never sound them, invisible and unheard, now rendered as noise, as avant-garde clusters, as defiance. Likewise, Rzewski comments of the piece:

Perhaps the ideal instrument would be an old upright piano of the kind that could be found in middle-class homes across America in the early part of the century.

The piece challenges the format of the piano recital in various ways, grounding these in the gendered lament of the original song. As a conceptual act, the ‘cleaning’ cadenza acts, again, as a form of variation: taking what’s there and modifying it, developing it, taking it somewhere else. Theodor Adorno noted that in serialism, everything in the music could be said to be a variation performed in advance (the music as rearrangements of the tone row). If this is variation as total stricture, as the real reflection of unfreedom, Rzewski returns to the dream of subjective, improvisatory freedom while acknowledging its social distortion, refusing heroics and pointing to the edges of a tradition in which he finds other traditions, other possibilities, glimpses of utopia.

In such pieces, the solo piano might both embody and counteract the class stratification built into the concert hall. Certainly, for Rzewski, the piano served as contrast to what he distrusted in the orchestral tradition. In 1979, the same year as the North American Ballads, he was composed to write a piano concerto to be premiered in Texas. Long Time Man was based on work songs from Texas prisons, and at one point, the orchestra echoes a chain gang—where the rhythms of labour prompt a music that is both testament to imprisonment and song of survival, dialectic. Rzewski pondered:

Why did I write this piece? I’ve always had ambivalent feelings toward the symphony orchestra, with its rows of string-infantry, woodwind cavalry, and brass artillery. Beethoven’s symphonies seem to me like musical descriptions of Napoleonic campaigns, best understood by reading Clausewitz. I like Chopin and Schumann because they dealt awkwardly with the form. I don’t like the orchestra’s social organization, the oppressive work conditions, and the subservience of many individual gifted artists to a commanding, often non-musical authority. At the same time the thing is there, it exists, and for the purpose of creating beautiful music, which is something it certainly can do. This piece is an attempt, perhaps only half-successful, to express the life of the orchestra in its contradictoriness.

As far as I can tell, no recording of the piece in its original form exists (though it was later revised as a fifth North American Ballad for solo piano): Rzewski’s “only half-successful judgement” seems to have precluded it assuming much of a place in his oeuvre. Several decades on, a Piano Concerto—relatively unusual in containing no explicit programme and few, if any, musical quotations—premiered at the BBC Proms. For Rzewski, the piano concerto had effectively died after Mozart, with occasional peaks--his own he wryly described as a ‘trough’. As he told the BBC, the piece was written for a classical orchestra; he felt that if the orchestra had any future it would be the classical era orchestra, rather than the large scale of 19th century. In the piece, his orchestration focuses on clarity rather than intricacy and detail, generally maintaining a clear delineation between foreground and background. You can hear how all the parts fit together—there’s no mystification here, no monumentalising. Likewise, Rzewski’s Scratch Symphony (1997), written in memory of Cardew, seems to unite two opposite poles of ensemble approach—the M.E.V.-era refiguration of the ensemble as overlapping and radically heterophonous, melancholically echoed in the first movement, in which each player sounds out 81 notes or rests corresponding to each individual player’s breath, with “no co-ordination with other players”, “very soft throughout”—and the organised unison of the that final movement, in which pianist “leads the orchestra, in the manner of the 17th century”, in melodic lines played in an eerie tutti. 

In the Piano Concerto, Rzewski makes a few tactical addition to the small orchestra—“asses’ jaw, singing saw, tuba”. The asses’ jaw surely alludes to Sampson—going into battle with the minimal resources—and as a kind of ironised memento mori. In the slow movement, the skull (very much visible in live performance) registers as a background percussive scuttling, the piano’s melancholic high lines and melodies for horn or oboe accentuated over a kind of scored silence. Perhaps we could read this as a joke about living and dead traditions. But Rzewski’s later music was certainly preoccupied with death, with the sadness and melancholy of personal loss and political defeat: the symphony in tribute to Cardew, brief piano pieces for John Cage (‘A Life’) and for Howard Skempton’s late wife, Sue (‘Flowers’, its text taken from Dickens’ ‘Little Dorritt’). Contemplation amongst the ruins has often been mode of the political avant-garde from the 70s on (think Nono’s Fragmente-Stille, a piece whose concern with ‘silent text’ has some connections to Rzewski’s own work with sounded text). In 2019 I saw Rzewski perform the final piece from the late cycle Dear Diary. Entitled ‘Thanks’, the piece is a moving tribute to isolation and to the process of writing. The piece is about the self-reflexive gesture of writing to the thing one writes in, that which will listen or be present when loved ones will not, even if it will not care; but the very act of composition, of making private fragments public, and, moreover, spoken, privileges the speaking of social, sense-making words, written in a private diary but now enunciated. The score instructs that each word be enunciated as if in the process of being written—a social negotiation even in isolation. Once more we think of De Profundis or of Coming Together’s iconic portrait of survival and resilience in and after Attica.

Rzewki’s music continued to be explicitly political. Stop the War!, one of the pieces from the enormous late cycle, The Road; Bring them Home, for two pianists and percussion. Songs Of Insurrection (2016), borrows its title and epigraph from Whitman—“vivas to those who have fail’d!” Each movement based on a particular moment—Soviet and Italian anti-Fascism, the Easter Rising, the Civil Rights struggle, the Carnation Revolution, the Gabo Peasant Revolt—the piece seeks to channel the memories of revolution, celebrating hopes, rather than only mourning defeat. The spoken words in the penultimate piece of The Road place such concerns in more individual terms:

Nowhere, that’s where I am. Why be anywhere? Here is where I am. In the middle of nowhere I sit and look around me. A grey mist and sometimes, a burst of sunshine. Even though: the toilet still leaks, my back hurts, my friends have died, I failed to make the revolution, et cetera, and still I’m not finished.

The piece indeed lasts another page after the end of the text. And we’re back to that quotation from Igor Levit with which we began. “You play the last octave, you close the music, you leave, life goes on”. You close the music; “and still I’m not finished”—the two seem in apparent contradiction. But Rzewski’s music makes that contradiction immensely productive. His music was about more than individual, egoic display, but it was also about individual and more-than-individual resilience and survival: the survival of all of those abjected and rejected, the wretched of the earth; the survival of all those who continue to resist, who hear in the last octave, in the final variation, the return to the theme, and in the opening theme the scope for its transformation.