Tigertail Productions

The highly respected composer and virtuosic pianist Frederic Rzewski [pronounced zheff-ski] is recognized both for his innovative works and for his strong political convictions. A founding member of the groundbreaking improvisational collective MEV, Rzewski's pieces often bridge the gap between classical music and avant-garde jazz. Now based in Brussels, this major figure will make a rare appearance in the U.S. for a single Miami concert. Rzewski studied composition with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, with composer Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence, Italy and with Elliot Carter in Berlin. In 1966 in Rome, Rzewski co-founded the seminal ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) with fellow American composer-musicians Richard Teitelbaum and Alvin Curran.

Mr. Rzewski has entitled this program Music of Resistance (piano pieces based on great revolutionary songs of the 20th century). See the concert program below.

Here is the tentative concert program, with Frederic Rzewski's notes:

Music of Resistance

Arrangements of and variations on great revolutionary songs of five centuries

PROGRAM

1. Ballad No. 6, 1980

(Life Is A Toil, or The Housewife's Lament)

A song written in the 1850's by Mrs. Sara A. Price of Ottawa, Illinois. It describes a dream in which she is submerged by the waves on an island as she vainly attempts to sweep them away with her broom. One of the great feminist songs of the 19th century.

2. Mayn Yingele (1988)

This song, written in 1887 on a traditional Yiddish ballad by the New York sweatshop poet Morris Rosenfeld, served as a theme for 24 variations that began wriiting on the 50th anniversary of "Kristallnacht" (the beginning of the systematic persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany).

3. Ain't Goinna Let Nobody Turn Me Around (Songs of Insurrection No. 3, 2016)

This is surely a 19th-century gospel song, but became known in the 1960's as an anthem of the civil rights movement.

4. Foggy Dew (Songs of Insurrection No. 4, 2016)

Probably the best known song to have emerged from the Irish "Easter Rising" of 1916, which led to Irish independence.

5. War Songs (2010)

Ten short pieces based on several antiwar songs from five centuries, all heard simultaneously in different keys: the French "L'Homme Armé" (The Armed Man); the Irish song "Siúil A Rún", about the Irish young men conscripted to fight the English wars – also sung by the American farmers drafted into the Revolutionary War, known as "Johnny Has Gone For a Soldier"; "Le Pauvre Conscrit", about the peasants drafted by Napoleon in 1812; "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye", another Irish song of the 18th century about a woman who sees her lover return from war with no arms and no legs; "Die Mohrsoldaten", the German communist song from the concentration camps; and "Taps", the song played over the graves of dead soldiers.

6. Wake Up! (Dreams No. 8, 2014)

A children's song by Woody and Marjorie Guthrie in "Songs to Grow Big On".

7. The Peat-Bog Soldiers (Die Mohrsoldaten), 2015

Probably the most famous antifascist song of the 20th century, written in the Nazi camps in 1932 by the prisoners themselves. At the first performance it proved so popular that the Nazi guards (who also thought of themselves as "peat-bog soldiers") joined in the singing.

8. El Pueblo Unido Jamás Sera Vencido (The People United Will Never Be Defeated,
1975, finale)

By the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega, written a few months before the coup d'état of 1973.