Music: Maverick With A Message Of Solidarity

IN photographs the American composer Frederic Rzewski resembles an Old Testament prophet, all high-domed brow, deep-gazing eyes and white, wind-swept hair. Over the phone from Brussels, his home since the 1970s, he projects a different image: casual, common-sensical, to the point. Toss him a question sure to prompt the self-important to pontificate — something about the extramusical associations of old songs, say, or the consolations of tragedy — and Mr. Rzewski (pronounced ZHEV-ski) shoots it down. “I don’t think I have any more to say about that,” he replies. Or, “I think we’re getting into deep waters here.”

Politics is another subject that fails to coax him onto a soapbox. Yes, his scores are shot through with melodies associated with the left and often have titles to match. Yes, the blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger was a culture hero of his. But Mr. Rzewski is a musician, not a pamphleteer. None but the naïve could imagine contemporary classical music as the lever for social upheaval. It was a teaching job that brought him to Belgium, not the state of the American nation. “No philosophy,” he said recently. “I had a family to support.”

More than music is on his mind these days. He turned 70 on April 13, “and for some reason, it made me go back to Ibycus,” he said. He quoted the poet’s haunted lines about falling in love in old age: “Like the old racehorse, I tremble at the prospect of the course which I am to run, and which I know so well.” Mr. Rzewski reads the ancient Greeks in the original. Tolstoy too.

On Monday the Gilmore Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., is celebrating the milestone with a sampler of Mr. Rzewski’s music, to be repeated at Zankel Hall in Manhattan on Thursday. A formidable pianist with a touch and attack sometimes eerily reminiscent of Glenn Gould, Mr. Rzewski will play his new “War Songs,” arrangements of six traditional war or antiwar songs written over six centuries, from “L’Homme Armé” to taps. With Stephen Drury he will also perform a two-piano version of “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues,” from the series “North American Ballads.” The contemporary-music ensemble Opus 21 will join Mr. Rzewski in “Attica,” a response to the notorious 1971 prison riots in upstate New York. Mr. Drury joins the group for the premiere of “Natural Things,” pieced together from 49 mostly unrelated segments that run 20 to 25 seconds each.

A prefatory note to the score alludes to the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in May 1886, which began as a labor rally in support of striking workers. And it lists household objects to be incorporated into the percussion section: tin cans, cardboard boxes, bottles and a bathtub or trash can. “It has to be a large metal container,” Mr. Rzewski said, “like a black hole in the middle of the music.”

Once asked if commentators were right to call him a Marxist composer, he snorted, “Harpo or Groucho or what?” The anarchic streak in his music is as much comic as it is political. Somewhere in his seven-CD box “Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works, 1975-1999” on the Nonesuch label, between fantasias on protest songs and chapters of his mammoth pianistic “novel” in progress, “The Road,” there is a cameo turn for a seriously vocal rubber ducky. Yet what emerges above all is a picture of a pianist enamored of his instrument as handed down by the master builders of the 19th century.

“Rzewski is in the line of the great pianist-composers like Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn,” said Daniel R. Gustin, the director of the Gilmore festival and the prime mover behind the current tribute. “He’s a bit of a maverick, which is fun, and it’s hard to pin him down as to style and approach. But his piano works connect to the great pianistic tradition.”

Mr. Rzewski’s concentration on writing for piano is easily explained. “I tend to work with what is there,” he said. “Opera houses don’t come asking me to write operas. Symphony orchestras don’t come asking for symphonies. But there’s this piano player I see every day who keeps asking me for music. So that’s what I do.”

A friend once suggested that he drop off some scores with the mesmerizing pianist Martha Argerich, another Brussels resident. “I thought, no, why bother the woman?” Mr. Rzewski said. “I have great respect for those who specialize in Schumann or whatever. The classical tradition needs to be kept up.”

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