18. Coming Together

Frederic Rzewski: Attica / Coming Together / Les Moutons De Panurge (Opus One, 1974); composed by Frederic Rzewski

Art is the accumulated body of practices by which humans combine perceivable elements in such a way that those elements store and radiate more information than they otherwise would – information of what lawyers might term an inadmissible kind. Politics is the brokering of power to withstand perceived threats. Occasionally the two overlap, and the only real difficulty with that is that when it even more occasionally works, it often induces some to believe that art always has a political dimension – or ought to. But like they say about correlation and causation. In September 1971, the state of New York suppressed a prison insurrection by storming the facility and summarily executing and sometimes torturing every prisoner involved as well as inadvertently killing many hostages who had been otherwise unharmed. One of the inmates involved was Sam Melville incarcerated for his involvement in Weatherman bombings. This composition combines recited text from some of his letters, fearful but ecstatic. The words repeat and repeat, and as events careen out of control, the chamber group Rzewski places beneath the words loses its brakes and just rolls. It is the sound of a loose floorboard nail telling the approaching hammer that life is worth living.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).