On Demand
Rzewski Takes your Questions
By Terrance McKnight
April 28, 2008
| On Wednesday evening, composer Frederic Rzewski will join me in the studio. On Thursday (May Day) his music is being performed in Carnegie Hall and on Friday it’s heard at the Brooklyn Lyceum. Many of Rzewski’s works are inspired by secular and socio-historical themes, and feature improvisational elements. One of his best-known works is “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”. Read more about Rzewski here and talk to him directly at our blog. | 
Frederic Rzewski
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Comments
Comment from MCD
Date: April 28, 2008, 9:23 pm
Funny how two people can listen to the same piece of music and hear different things–I had the Beetles-Come Together. Interesting!!!
Comment from Curtis
Date: April 29, 2008, 9:12 pm
Hello Terrance,
I hope this is the blog you refer to when you ask people to post a comment. If it’s not, I couldn’t find the other link when I looked.
You’re a great host…chat more soon. Curt
Comment from phil
Date: April 29, 2008, 9:50 pm
what was the Marsalis piece played btween 7:45 and 8 pm tonite? Thnx
Comment from Rita
Date: April 30, 2008, 9:20 am
What was the amazing piano piece you played before the Bartok? I was in my car and not able to write anything down.
Thx.
Comment from Reva Greenberg
Date: April 30, 2008, 2:16 pm
What was the piece and album on the Wynton Marsalis piece Tuesday eve. I was in the bathtub, relaxing, sans a pencil.
I love your program…your background comments, choices and relaxed tone. Thanks,
Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: April 30, 2008, 2:26 pm
Wynton doesn’t know what he’s missing. And, BTW, there is perfect roux in NYC, if you know who to dine with. Most are satisfied with the yellow roux. Or the adventurous red roux. But the finest is the raw nerve of the brown roux and the champion edge of a (not scorched) black roux. There’s some to be found. Maybe even Wynton hasn’t yet, with his titanically busy schedule, found those peak roux’ here. But it’s here. Ya ya.
*
Some questions for Mr. Rzewsky:
A. Every performance is an interpretive project. In approaching musical performance you have reveled in expanding the sequence-structure and sought to play evolutionary freedom into other’s compositions (and your own)at the moment of performance itself. Can you say a little about your own spectrum of interpretive creativity by comparing your “opening up” of (i.e., feeling free to play with) musical scores?
B. Where is the greatest REWARD for you along the spectrum: a) performing expositively (primarily reliant on composed score), b) supplementing the score with interpretive inclusions of material from your studied memory or from “invenzione”, c) free improvisatory creativity, d) overtaking scored material to develop and originalize it by applying your own private creative language, e) authoritatively originating what is genuinely your own composition, in your own aesthetic language (i.e., in structure, in aesthetic material, in divergent etudes of ornamentation), or in virtuosic timbre? Is REWARD somehow correlated for you with CHALLENGE in these areas?
C. Your life has been a powerfully protean enterprise, exploring musical forms, stating new imaginative material, and sharing insistent freedom as an adept teacher. You have unabashedly applied contemporary events and public social controversy in the making of your compositions. In taking up contemporary events in your music WHAT METHODS have helped you see more deeply into the relation between music composition / innovation and other aspects of civil culture? (particularly into the culture’s cruel domination over parts of society in our time.) Do you still feel that music can provoke constructive social change?
Ciao, T
Comment from Felix
Date: April 30, 2008, 4:21 pm
[I think the Wynton piece was “King Porter Stomp” (with Marcus Roberts), but it’s not on the playlist (why not?)]
Comment from Katharine Mukherji
Date: April 30, 2008, 7:53 pm
I am very fond of the Randall Thompson, the Tatum and the Beethoven trio you played this evening and always happy to hear them again. But I wish you would announce pieces and performers before as well as after playing them. And I feel that destroying the integrity of the trio by excerpting movements and inserting other pieces in between ruins the listening experience.
Comment from anne
Date: April 30, 2008, 11:49 pm
Terrance, what was the gorgeous choral piece you played between 9:30 and 10pm tonight?
Thanks
anne
Comment from anne
Date: April 30, 2008, 11:50 pm
Terrance
What was the gorgeous choral piece you played between 9:30 and 10pm tonight?
Thanks
anne
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