Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues

Program Note:

The music of American composer Frederick Rzewski (b. 1938) often takes a political stance. Having grown up and been educated amongst several of the nation’s leading institutions, including the prestigious Phillips Academy near Boston, Harvard University, and Princeton, Rzewski’s own works often side with anti-establishment causes. Unapologetic about using his musical voice in service of social activism, Rzewski (pronounced SHEF-ski) has dealt with themes from The Price of Oil to the Attica prison riots to unionization and middle-class rights among Chilean workers. In musical terms, Rzewski is a virtuoso pianist whose understanding of the keyboard goes far beyond technical brilliance. By definition, a modern piano is a percussion instrument in which felt-covered hammers hit metal strings. Whatever lyricism and sustaining qualities it can project are illusory or produced by means of pedal affects. Rzewski is often happy to destroy those illusions and focus instead on the piano’s percussive power and timbral variety.
Consider his motoric Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (1980), the last of his four North American Ballads. All of the Ballads take inspiration from protest movements; Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues refers to Crystal Lee Sutton, depicted in the Academy-Award-winning film Norma Rae, and her push to unionize a cotton mill in North Carolina. Rzewski highlights the mill’s relentless mechanical hum, which also symbolizes the oppressive control exerted by some factory owners, with chord clusters that superpose white and black keys. The opening crescendo builds to an unsettling highpoint before changing moods. The second section, while retaining the motoric impulse, begins to introduce more conventional melodic material. The third section, most clearly inspired by the blues tradition, carries the lyrical impulse even further. Rounding off the work, Rzewski brings together elements of the blues theme with the percussive frenzy heard at the beginning. The personal, emotional connection one might feel with the blues melody is abruptly overrun by the mill’s driving chord clusters that push relentlessly to a quiet conclusion.

(c) Jason Stell