Recording Fredric Rzewski's Coming Together

I recently recorded Fredric Rzewski’s Coming Together with the San Francisco conductorless chamber orchestra One Found Sound. Coming Together is a minimalist piece and like many of Rzewski’s works, it is political in nature. Coming Together contains narrated text, written by Samuel Melville, a leader of the Attica prison rebellion in 1971. 

The music of Coming Together is based upon a bassline of continuous sixteenth notes, which is maintained for the full twenty minutes of the piece. From that pentatonic line, the performers must choose their own notes according to rules that Rzewski creates for each section of the music. The early sections of the music leave the most room for improvisation and individuality of the performers. As the music progresses, the rules become more unifying of the individual voices, until the final section where all of the musicians are playing in unison. The music is literally coming together over the course of the piece. 

While this piece is partially improvised, the rules of each section of music can be quite restrictive for the performers. That, combined with the repetitive nature of the text and music, makes this piece very trancelike from a performer’s perspective. Where a prisoner might lose track of days and weeks, the performers of Coming Together must maintain hyperfocus to not lose track of where they are in the music. This requires extraordinary mental energy and effort to be sustained for a long period of time.

The text of the piece, which is taken from a letter written by Samuel Melville, is often spoken by a narrator. Because One Found Sound performed this piece as a video project, each performer was able to be both a performer and a narrator. Samuel Melville was one of the leaders of the Attica prison rebellion and the text is taken from a letter that he wrote several months prior to the prison uprising.