Accompaniments (1972)

Accompaniments, for pianist who is also required to sing or chant and play percussion with his feet (drum with pedal and high hat), was written for Frederic Rzewski. This piece marks a break from what preceded, due partly to a growing impatience with what seemed to me the overly introverted feeling in much of my earlier music, with a sense of contradiction between the situation of its players—social, cooperative as well as calling on great individual alertness—and the way the resulting music seemed to affect its audience—as something remote, abstract and "pure." At the same time my interest in social and political questions had intensified and taken a more specific direction, and so I decided to attempt to make a more explicit connection between it and my music.

Accompaniments began that attempt, including a political text and using musical material of a more direct character. The text is from Jan Myrdal and Gun Kessle's book China: The Revolution Continued. It is part of an account of a veterinarian and a midwife, in their own words, of their experiences in a village in the area of Yenan during and after the Cultural Revolution. It was chosen both for its concreteness and for its illustration of the principle of applying a revolutionary political orientation to immediate and practical problems, indicating that these can only be understood and dealt with within such a political framework.

The music is in four parts. In the first, one chord or single note drawn out of a chord accompanies each syllable of the text. The text is sung freely (no pitches are specified), and the rhythm is free but tends to be shaped by the movement of the words of the text. The text is musically formalized by allowing optional repetitions of segments of it. The chords come in sequences of sixteen which make a kind of harmonic progression (though a full sequence may not often occur). In the second and third parts, single line keyboard figures are intended to have a propulsive feeling and accompany freely combined percussion phrases (the drum and cymbals were practical in combination with keyboard and were partly suggested by their appearance in China during mass assemblies and marches). The addition of singing and percussion playing to the pianist's tasks is to extend one player's sound resources and to combine his professional competence with non-professional capacities—which we all have—in using one's voice and making percussive sounds. The fourth part of the piece requires only the use of the piano, and comes as something of a release.