The People United Will Never Be Defeated: for Piano (Zen-On Piano Library) [Paperback] Review

this is a great work to try to sight read,play it with the "Diabelli Variations"; the musical language draws on the entire vocabulary of the 20th Century piano, Busoni, Prokofiev, Boulez, Stockhausen,minimal, folk and Rzewski-himself; he was often very fond of the displaced fifth ascending or descending in half steps, F#-B-Bb-Eb-D-Db-Gb-F. It has a haunting-misterioso like resonance, he uses it also in "No Place to Go but Around", the variations that preceeded this, from the early Seventies.
This piece is difficult to perform for the attention to quick textural and expressive changes,and you must always have an enlivened-like electric piano sound;much like the experience from playing Prokofiev,or Stockhausen; there are stopping points however as the percussive open basso; like a lamento or dirge for those murdered in struggle. Rzewski recapitualtes every 6 variations in capsule gesture, this is rather difficult but his creativity and inclination for structuring his materials comes from improvisation The music then tries to see what will come/become of the music down-stream;To project always forward.

There are also repetitive patternings moments or variations, more folkish however, and none really lasts for large durational spans.These are more like structural "bridges" to more violence.

The end mounts to impressive power the rolling B-C#-D, patterns in thirds, beginning very soft, pp then building. There is then a space for improvisation,so the piece can be much longer than one hour. Too much however would skew the expressive gestures, Rzewski's music does have a classical shpae to it, it works best when goal oriented, compact, and predictable.

The content of the music need no introduction, the original powerful song by Sergio Ortega is like an anthem,a point of solidarity to those who work, who are exploited, degraded, dispossessed,whose homes are bull-dozed out of existence, of migrants, of sex slave trade, of maquil workers, working for $1.00 dollar a day; and of course murdered in the process of all the above; a growing number within the neo-liberal order everyday it seems.Although a piano solo cannot be that subversive if it was sold here.

I think the piece succeeds in that a work of art unpretenciously is suppose to re-define its own previous history, and this work certainly does that.

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The People United Will Never Be Defeated

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