Sunday, June 19, 2005

Frederic Rzewski: Composer-in-residence for Piano Institute

A couple of posts back I mentioned Frederic Rzewski's Winsboro Cotton Mill Blues. Well, here's a little more Rzewski for your pleasure. He is will be the composer-in-residentce at this year's Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance.

The Boston Globe has a nice write-up on Rzewski. Among the interesting things his quoted as saying in the article is this:

Rzewski cherishes the immediacy of performance, and he has a corresponding disdain for recordings and the current state of the record industry. ''I think the days of recording are numbered," he says by phone from Cincinnati, where he's participating in a new-music festival. ''When the Beatles were around, there were hundreds of smaller record companies. Now there are about three. So the music industry has transformed itself in 20 or 30 years into an enormous mega-monopoly." He hopes recordings will eventually be rejected as ''a sort of counterfeit money. I think there is an awareness now that something else must happen."

Read the rest of it here. I thought his remarks interesting in light of some of the conversation about classical CD's at The Overgrown Path.


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