Bang on a Can

The fiercely political American composer Frederic Rzewski composed Coming Together in the early seventies, based on a letter that was published in the New York Times and written by Sam Melville, a prisoner in the Attica Correctional Facility who was later murdered in the Attica uprising. "Rzewski was obsessed with this letter, read it over and over again, and the music reflects his obsession," says Evan Ziporyn. "The sentences evolve slowly, repeat, almost like a gigantic palindrome or a big Escher drawing. The performers are allowed freedom to improvise within the structure, but there is no instruction as to what the effect should be or how you are supposed to feel. It has been performed as an angry, violent piece, but the text is a lot more open-ended than that. One thing we do that is different is move the text around, so that the character of the piece shifts with each voice."