Frederic Rzewski, political composer and pianist, dies

Frederic Rzewski, a formidable composer and pianist who wrote and performed music that was at once stylistically eclectic and politically committed, died Saturday at his summer home in Montiano, Italy. He was 83.

The cause was cardiac arrest, publicist Josephine Hemsing said in an email.

Rzewski’s anti-establishment thinking stood at the center of his music-making throughout his life. It was evident in the experimental, agitprop improvisations he created in the 1960s with the ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva; in “Coming Together,” the minimalist classic inspired by the Attica prison uprising; and a vast catalog of solo piano works, several of which have become cornerstones of the modern repertoire.

His approach was epitomized in his best-known piece, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” an expansive and virtuosic set of 36 variations on a Chilean protest song.

Composed for pianist Ursula Oppens in 1975, the piece, an hour long, is a torrent of inventive and unusual techniques (the pianist whistles, shouts and slams the lid of the instrument) and has been compared to canonic works like Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” and Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”

Rzewski’s musical approach favored intuition over cerebral composition.

“The one thing that composers in the 20th century don’t do is to simply write down the tunes that are going through their heads,” he told the magazine NewMusicBox in 2002. “I just write down what’s in my head.”

Frederic Anthony Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938, in Westfield, Massachusetts, to Anthony Rzewski, a Polish émigré, and Emma Buynicki, who were both pharmacists. He began playing piano and composing from a young age.

Following the advice of a teacher, he checked out albums by Shostakovich and Schoenberg at a record store and began to immerse himself in musical modernism.

After graduating from Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, Rzewski studied music at Harvard with tonal composers Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. He earned his master’s at Princeton.

In 1960 and 1961, he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship. In Europe, he gained renown performing music by luminaries like Karlheinz Stockhausen and, after a stint in Berlin studying with Elliott Carter, settled in Rome.

The European avant-garde had fallen under the sway of John Cage’s experimentalism, and Rzewski wrote heady music like his “Composition for Two Players,” an unconventional score that he once interpreted by placing sheets of glass on the strings of a Steinway.