Rzewski, Frederick

Born in Westfield (Massachusetts), in a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland ^[1] . Studied at Harvard and Princeton. In 1960 he went to Italy, where he studied with Dallapiccol for a year. At first he attracted attention as a performer of new piano music. Rzhevski met with John Cage and David Tudor , who influenced his formation as a composer and pianist. In 1966, Rzhevsky founds, along with other musicians, the band Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), where free improvisation is combined with electronics.

Rzhevsky continues to move in this direction, but the socialist views of the musician also make themselves felt. In support of the Chilean people’s struggle against the dictatorial regime, he writes The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975), a series of 36 piano variations on the theme of the Chilean song by Sergio Ortega . This work of Rzhevsky is sometimes called the Goldberg-variations of the 20th century. Most of the work uses the musical language of the Romantic era , but there are also elements of modern music up to serial technology .

In a number of plays 1979-1981. Rzewski is experimenting with graphic notation.

From 1983 to 2003, Rzewski was a professor of composition at the Royal Conservatory in Liege ^[2] .

In the works of the 80s shows new ways of using 12-tone technology. In 1987-1988, Rzewski wrote a two-hour oratorio “The Triumph of Death”, devoted to the Holocaust (to the text of the play by Peter Weiss), as well as variations for piano on the melody of the song “מײַן ייִנגעלע” ( Mine Ingele - my boy) by American Jewish poet Maurice Rosenfeld (1862-1923).

The 90s were marked by an improvisational approach to composition, recalling his experiments of the late 60s.

Among the works of the 2000s, Cadenza con o senza Beethoven (2003) and Nanosonates (2006-2010) are curious. In the first of these, Rzewski inserts his cadences into the Beethoven musical form. One of the iconic works of the beginning of the 21st century in Rzhevsky’s legacy is “The Fall of the Empire”, which embodies the “concept of life and death, somewhat related to political moments, with disagreement with the US ruling structures at that time, revealing its own the composer’s vision of the philosophical foundations of human existence. Since the work consists of eight acts with an introduction, the genre definition may look like this: “chamber opera for the instrumentalist.” The composer includes verbal Halo, referring to the texts of literary classics, fictional fairy-tale characters whose quotes from the people are known in the modern world, to the statements of politicians and philosophers, compiling them or adapting them to the present, resorting to composing their own texts. that belong to different eras and are provoked by different stimuli, are related thematically " ^[3] .

• Petrov V. O. The cycle “The Road” by Frederic Rzhevsky for a singing pianist: on the issue of the interaction of music and words // Musical semiotics: prospects and development paths: Collection of articles on the materials of the III International Scientific Conference November 13-14, 2013 / Gl.red . - L.V. Savvina, ed. - V.O. Petrov. - Astrakhan: Publishing House of ShAOU JSC DPO "AIPKP", 2013.
• Petrov V. O. Synthesis of musical and verbal lines in the piano opus “De Profundis” by Frederick Rzhevski [1]
• Petrov V. O. On the interaction of music and words in the cycle "Road" by Frederic Rzhevsky for a singing pianist // Israel XXI: music magazine. - 2015. - No. 5 (53) / Electronic resource: https://web.archive.org/web/20160805123433/http://21israel-music.com/Rzevski_Road.htm
• Petrov V.O. The Fall of the Empire Frederick Rzhevsky: chamber opera for the instrumentalist [2]
• Petrov V.O. Frederick Rzhevsky: the way of updating traditions: Monograph. - Astrakhan: GAOU JSC DPO "AIPKP", 2011. - 100 p.
• Information on the website of the St. Petersburg Center for Contemporary Academic Music
• http://www.sonograma.org/num_06/articles/sonograma06_Frederic-Rzewski-interview.pdf
• http://www.pytheasmusic.org/rzewski.html