by Daniel Hathaway

Composer-pianist Frederic Rzewski, who has embraced experimental and classical music with equal enthusiasm throughout his career, comes to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Friday, March 19 to play Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words and his own The People United Will Never Be Defeated. We reached him by phone at his hotel in Los Angeles.

Daniel Hathaway: You studied at Harvard with Walter Piston and Randall Thompson? Was there a certain moment when you made a switch in your musical style?

Frederic Rzewski: I hope at least one moment, probably many.

DH: But it’s a long way from Walter Piston and Randall Thompson to what you’re doing now.

FR: Well, I never wrote music like Randall Thompson or Walter Piston. But especially Randall Thompson was important to me. He was my teacher of counterpoint — modal counterpoint. And I think a very good teacher, also. He certainly understood and loved it, which seemed to me the most important thing about teaching counter-point: you actually have to love it. It can be very boring. But one thing I remember about that class is that he made us sing our exercises. It wasn’t enough to write them — we had to sing them. He always insisted on that.

DH: That might have been painful for some people to do.

FR: No, I don’t think so. But for him it was important. Of course, he wrote all this choral music, so he understood it from the inside — it wasn’t just a dry academic exercise. [Read more…]