Rzewski, Frederic
Coming Together/atica/les Moutons De Panurge
This milestone of the avant-garde music, published in 1974 by the historic Opus One, was a very significant political awareness. With 'Coming Together' and 'Attica', Rzewski celebrates in music the famous revolt of the American prison in 1971. The texts of Sam Melville and Richard X. Clark make pulsating and alive the invocations of the prisoners; full of pathos, these fragments of life oscillate between a confessional tone and the hymn to freedom, in a touching emblem of compassion. The fixity of the sound images is incisive, unnerving and melancholic, embroidering a solid minimalist repetition. The different combination of the verses produce a psychosis or obsession of a cathartic experience, at the same time emotional, physical and mental. Together with great guests such as Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Garrett List and Karl Beger, Rzewski seems to merge his radical vocation with the most meditative and suffered plots of the spiritual jazz; sealing all with 'Les Moutons Des Panurge', an amazing suite for percussion, a timeless masterpiece of polyrhythmic expertise.