"Coming Together", by Frederic Rzewski

Frederic Rzewski is well known as a composer of strong, leftist political convictions. He shatters structuralist convention but calls for social change with powerful use of folk songs, narratives, and politically charged texts.

Rzewski’s masterpiece Coming Together is based on a fragment of text from a letter written by Attica state prison inmate Sam Melville, who was killed in the Attica uprisings of 1971.

The text, repeated numerous times over the course of the work, is as follows:

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time. It’s six months now, and I can tell you truthfully, few periods in my life have passed so quickly. I am in excellent physical and emotional health. There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead, but I feel secure and ready. As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis so am I dealing with my environment. In the indifferent brutality, the incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, I can act with clarity and meaning. I am deliberate, sometimes even calculating, seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others. I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.