This interview is excerpted from one that originally appear on the American Music Center's November 2002 issue of NewMusicBox, and is reproduced here by permission of AMC. The full interview, complete with audio and video, can be found at In the 1st Person: Frederic Rzewski.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now we're in an era where all the record companies are all up in arms about the proliferation of file swapping. Everything's going to be free and there will no longer be an economy to fuel the making of recordings. And, theoretically, scores can similarly be swapped, so what is a publisher to do? The models that have been the infrastructure for music are now at a crossroads.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I have very little to do with music publishers and this is something that's always puzzled me because I have spent most of my professional life doing new music, not merely my own, but other composers, yet I've had little or no contact with the world of publishing. I've felt that one of us must be wrong and I've decided it's them.

I can think of very few cases where music publishers are actually helping the cause of new music. In most cases they are obstacles to the dissemination of new music. And quite sincerely I can't understand why anyone would want to be a music publisher in the first place! It must be very difficult to make money with new music. Why would anyone want to do it? I think it would be better if they just disappeared. Besides, today you don't need music publishers, you can be your own publisher.

FRANK J. OTERI: I know so many people in that world who really are true believers in and crusaders for new music.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yes, I know, it has a symbolic value, which still carries a lot of weight. It's somehow a form of prestige if your music is published by a well-known publisher. But as far as I can see, most of these people don't do anything for the music. On the contrary, they just take the money and run!

FRANK J. OTERI: I think there are some important exceptions to this, not just publishers but record companies as well. Take Nonesuch, for example, putting out this seven CD set of your music. That's a tremendous endorsement of you and your work.

It's atypical in our time or in any time. It's a huge statement for them to be making. And I know it's going to be lower priced than a seven CD set would normally be in order to reach more people. A lot of work on their part went into this. And that's true for the other smaller labels that have put out your music over the years like New Albion and O.O. Discs and CRI. And record companies are businesses so this is an investment they've made. But one wonders with what is going on in the record business right now, where this will be ten years from now…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I don't know. I have never understood the music industry. I don't know how it works. I know very little about it. I've had very little contact with it. I've done a number of things for various record companies. But as far as Nonesuch is concerned, this is the first time I've had a contact at a record company that has actually asked my opinion about certain things like: am I happy about the cover, and so forth. I'm very flattered by that. But I don't know how it works. I don't know what they hope to achieve. I'm just glad they're doing it. I don't know anything about the music business.

The Role of the Composer in Society

FRANK J. OTERI: Let's talk a bit about the role of the composer in society. You're an outspoken person about politics and have pretty firm opinions about music making. What should the role of a composer in our society be?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I don't think there's any "should." You could say something about what composers have been objectively in terms of the world around them historically and I think that probably if it's possible to speak about what the role of the composer is, as you put it, today, it's probably not that much different from a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. It seems to me that there it's much clearer, if you look at the second half of the 19th century, you had what were called these national composers: Grieg, Smetana, Dvorak, and of course Wagner is the biggest one. And the role of these composers in my opinion seems to have been to express in lofty terms, with more or less impressive means like symphony orchestras, the national soul as it appears in the mythological history of the nation, the natural beauties of the country, and so forth. And I think that has not changed a great deal.

So today, composers no longer write symphonic poems about national heroes but they still somehow express the aspirations of the national culture. Notice that whenever you see the name of a composer in print it's usually accompanied by an adjective qualifying the nationality of the composer.

FRANK J. OTERI: Which is interesting getting back to you as an expatriate. Do you still consider yourself an American composer?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yeah, sure. There's no way you can avoid it. If you take somebody like John Cage who was certainly one of the most cosmopolitan figures in this field, he was still an American composer and I think there are very few people who can escape from that. This is something that you have around for better or worse.

FRANK J. OTERI: Certainly I hear it in some of your works directly, whether it's the North American Ballads, or Jefferson, where you're setting part of the Declaration of Independence. A composer from Finland or Venezuela wouldn't do that or, if they did, it would be for very different reasons.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yes, I agree. But where does that take us?

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, if you're still an American composer and you say composers aspire to their national myths, does your music aspire to a national myth about America? Should people be thinking about this when they listen to your music?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I don't know. It's true that probably a good chunk of what I've done has to do with some kind of local…Well, I did grow up in North America and I speak the English language. I'm an American even though I've spent more that half my life outside the United States by this time. I'm still very connected with this country's culture.