C6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020Political-protest traditions have shaped the
career of the composer and pianist Frederic
Rzewski over the last half-century. This
streak in his art is clear in works like his
1975 classic, “The People United Will Never
Be Defeated,” an hourlong set of variations
on that Chilean workers’ anthem.
But another aspect of Mr. Rzewski’s ac-
tivist spirit is more, well, administrative. He
has long allowed his scores to be distributed
freely, including online. (While they are free
to download and learn, the composer-
granted license does restrict public per-
formance rights.)
This progressive approach to intellectual
property has, along with his simultaneously
brainy and passionate music, endeared Mr.
Rzewski to a younger generation of pian-
ists. That includes Thomas Kotcheff, 32,
who released the first commercial record-
ing of Mr. Rzewski’s 2016 set of piano pieces,
“Songs of Insurrection,” in November on
the Coviello imprint. The album emerged
with Mr. Rzewski’s permission, but also his
aesthetic blessing. The promotional ma-
terials include testimonials from him: “It’s
superb” and “I love your improvisations!”
Mr. Kotcheff handles the piece’s globe-
spanning allusions — this time, Mr. Rzewski
has adapted resistance tunes from Ger-
many, Russia, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Ko-
rea and the United States — with flair. The
album deserves a place next to this com-
poser’s own authoritative recordings of his
music.
In a recent interview by phone from his
home in Los Angeles, Mr. Kotcheff de-
scribed the challenges of “Songs of Insur-
rection,” including Mr. Rzewski’s instruc-
tions to pianists about their improvisation
choices. These are edited excerpts from the
conversation.
What piece of Mr. Rzewski’s turned you into
a devotee? What about his music has stood
out, to you, over time?
At the Peabody Institute, where I went to
undergrad, I heard “The People United”
performed. And I couldn’t believe it. I
thought, “I want to play some of this com-
poser on my senior recital.” I went out and
started searching, and I found this piece
“Mayn Yingele.” Amazing variations. And
when I played it, I felt an instant connection
to Rzewski. I think improvisation was my
gateway in. Because I love to improvise; it’s
been part of my compositional process from
the beginning.
How did improvisation inform that recital
performance?
I remember, at the end, each measure has a
fermata [pause]. He says, “The fermata
that comes next should be longer than the
previous one,” through the entire last sec-
tion. When I sent him my recording, he re-
plied, “Fantastic performance, but at the
very end, that last fermata, you should hold
it for as long as physically and mentally pos-
sible, and do it for a little longer.”
So for me, when I listen to Rzewski’s mu-
sic, I just always feel that sense of more.
Like, you do everything you can, and that’s
still not enough. There needs to be more.One place where it sounds like you’re giving
your all on this new recording is during the
third movement, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody
Turn Me Around,” a spiritual that later be-
came a civil rights anthem. The second half
of the track includes one of your longest
improvisations of the album, right?
Yes, it lasts for about five minutes. On the
opening pages, the score says you shouldn’t
pre-decide to take improvisation or not. But
with that third movement specifically, it’s
the only one where he indicates there’s anoptional improvisation on the theme. Which
to me spoke to the kind of American sound
of it.
The blues sound is in there, the hymnal
sound. And that really stood out to me as an
interpreter of the piece. Then I started
thinking about the larger framework of the
piece; I really see the first three move-
ments as being its own little set. It felt right
that the third one would be the pinnacle.
If you see other recordings that are out
there, online, of this piece, by either
Rzewski or another pianist named Bobby
Mitchell, they get to the third movement im-
provisation and they just do, like, a bar.
Then they go on. So my five-minute thing is
a real decision. But to me, there’s no other
version of that piece that could exist in my
mind. Probably against Rzewski’s instruc-
tion, I do it that way almost every time, with
that kind of gesture of density.
I noticed that, since the improv section on
the recording is broadly similar to your
livestreamed take during a recent album-
release concert. It sounds like, no matter
how dizzyingly dense the rest of it is, your
patiently doled out, low-register motifs are
imperturbable. Is this a musical depiction of
marching?
I think you really heard the piece the way I
heard it, too. When he presents the theme,
at the beginning of the movement, he
presents it with a descending, chromatic
bass line. In my mind, he presents it as a
passacaglia, in a way. And so that is wheremy mind went to. Like you said, it just con-
tinues on, it keeps going and going, until I
have nothing left to give the piano. I’m just
spent.What are some other highlights?
I really like the second movement, the “Ka-
tyusha,” from Russia. The way, in the open-
ing, that the theme is presented with this
chorale. And in the middle of the piece, he
just goes straight up tonal, all of a sudden. It
affects me; I really like it. It’s strong and
passionate.
You can also just kind of get lost in the
weeds in the big, entire piece. It has this fan-
tasia quality: spinning and going and
changing gears and moving on. You look at
the fourth movement — Ireland’s “Foggy
Dew” — and it’s changing fast. And the
sixth, too: “Los Cuatro Generales,” from
Spain. The sixth and fourth are so hard: Ev-
ery two measures, we’re somewhere differ-
ent. We’re moving.What do you gain by listening to this com-
poser play his music — either this piece, or
past ones?
I actually get so empowered by watching
him play, because he interprets his music
like crazy. He will add accelerandos, add ri-
tardandos; he will change things in his own
piece. And when I hear that, it also empow-
ers me. Because I go, there’s nothing on this
bar that says to do what he just did, but he’s
doing it. So he’s giving, in my mind, the
other performers carte blanche to make
that bar their own.The Music of More
Thomas Kotcheff has a new
recording of a set of piano
pieces by Frederic Rzewski.
By SETH COLTER WALLSPHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESTODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMESThe pianist Thomas
Kotcheff, top, handles the
globe-spanning allusions
of “Songs of Insurrection”
by the composer Frederic
Rzewski, above, with flair.BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY THINGSto say
about Susan Taubes’s remarkable 1969 nov-
el “Divorcing,” and many of those things
concern the grim side of both real life and
life in the book, I’d like to start by saying
that it’s funny. It’s not a comic novel, by any
stretch, but neglecting to mention its humor
would shortchange it and deform one’s ini-
tial idea of it.
Much of this humor comes at the expense
of psychoanalysis. It’s possible there is
more talk of analysis in “Divorcing” than in
the entire filmography of Woody Allen. “Be-
fore you do anything,” one doctor in it says,
“you need at least seven years of analysis.
Minimum five; absolute minimum.”
While conversing with his sister-in-law,
another man thinks: “How could he explain
to Olga, who hadn’t read Freud, that his wife
wasn’t really unfaithful,” that “it was her
neurosis, she couldn’t help it.” Students at a
medical school joke that Freud’s theory is a
“technique grown-up men use to talk to ju-
venile girls about dirty things.”
If you’d heard of Taubes before this novel
was recently reissued by New York Review
Books, there’s a good chance it was in con-
nection with Susan Sontag. Taubes and her
husband, the philosopher and religious
scholar Jacob Taubes, were among the clos-
est friends of Sontag and her husband, Phil-
ip Rieff. After Susan Taubes committed sui-
cide in the ocean off Long Island in 1969,
Sontag identified her body. (Sontag’s son,
David Rieff, contributes an introduction to
this new edition of the novel.)
Taubes had suffered from depression and
previously attempted suicide. “Divorcing,”
her first and only book, was published a
week before she drowned. It received one
notoriously dispiriting review in this news-
paper, an aggressively chauvinistic assess-
ment by Hugh Kenner, an acclaimed writer
on literary modernism who sniffed at the
“mild rewards” offered by “Divorcing” and
said that its fleeting best qualities sug-
gested that Taubes could have written in-
stead a better, “very old-fashioned” book
that “transcends the with-it cat’s cradling of
lady novelists.”
“Divorcing” draws deeply on Taubes’s
own life. Benjamin Moser, in his biography
of Sontag published last year, offered this ef-
ficient description of Taubes, which doubles
as a description of Sophie Blind, the novel’s
protagonist: “Torn from Europe but es-
tranged from America, alienated from the
Judaism of her grandparents but uncon-
vinced by the Freudianism of her father.”
Sophie, like Taubes, was born in Hungary,
the granddaughter of the chief rabbi of Bu-
dapest and the daughter of an atheist psy-
choanalyst. Sophie and her husband, a
scholar named Ezra who resembles Jacob
Taubes, meet in New York, marry, agree
that they won’t be so bourgeois as to sexu-
ally limit each other, and then travel the
world, Ezra lecturing and doing research
for a book he’s writing. Sophie eventually
relocates with the couple’s children to Paris,
where Ezra visits from time to time. At one
point, she mentally catalogs her various
lovers: one a married man, one an “outright
bastard and pervert” (a candor she finds
“positively refreshing”), another a bore
who improves the circumference of her so-
cial circle and so on.
Ezra can’t believe she wants a divorce,
given all the freedom she has, but for years
she tries to convince him that it’s over. “The
thought of being married to you drives me
insane,” she finally says. (He immediately
recommends she see an analyst.)
To back up and ask a fundamental ques-
tion: Is Sophie alive or dead? In the opening
pages, she tells us she’s been killed, hit by a
car after leaving the hairdresser. One short
section near the middle of the novel, format-
ted like a play, presents a kind of afterlife
tribunal in which Ezra and Sophie’s father
argue with orthodox Hungarian rabbis for
possession of her soul. Meta moments like
these in “Divorcing” more frequently feel
like feints toward experimentation than an
impediment to understanding. This is espe-
cially true in the novel’s second half, whichmore conventionally recounts Sophie’s
early life in Budapest; her voyage, in 1939 at
10 years old, to live in America with her fa-
ther; and a return trip to Europe later in life.
Introducing Sophie in her adult distracti-
bility and distress and then going backward
to show her family’s life in prewar Europe is
a rewarding strategy. What could have
seemed like a clever but shallow way to do
some Freudian searching is much richer, a
kind of historical novella within the novel,
amplifying Sophie’s character and offering
a detailed view of the world that made her.
“Her sense of the matter was that things
were generally hopeless and that there was
no place for her anywhere,” Taubes writes
of the adult Sophie. “The world in which she
would have wanted to live had ended — be-
fore Hiroshima, before Auschwitz.”
In Budapest, we see Sophie’s family gath-
ering to celebrate Passover despite none of
them being particularly religious. “Religion
was something old and shabby; it was a
dusty ugly piece of furniture you were
ashamed to have in your own house, even in
the back room, but you couldn’t get rid of it
any more than you could get rid of Grand-
mother.” We sit alongside relatives swap-
ping family lore, like the story of the aunt
who “escaped from Budapest at the time
when they were shooting down all the com-
munists, leaping on a moving train in her
nightgown.”
Sophie’s relationships with her parents
are beautifully drawn, most impressively in
a pair of consecutive scenes recalling her
childhood. In the first, her father makes her
laugh with his impressions of people, in-
cluding his patients. “Why did people really
come to him, she asked; what was the mat-
ter with them, what did he do for them,”
Taubes writes. “She listened very carefully
so she could avoid this happening to her.”
Then her father relates a series of anec-
dotes characterizing various people he’s
treated.
In the following scene, Sophie interrupts
her mother reading and the two have a
tense conversation, its full emotional con-
tours only partly understood by Sophie. “Do
you know why you don’t love me?” her
mother asks.“To say something to stop her mother
from continuing, Sophie said, ‘Because
you’re always away.’ Now she was angry at
herself. She heard that from others. She had
no right to say it to her mother. She was glad
when her mother was away.”
In one of the heavier-handed moments,
Sophie tersely says to a therapist: “I must
repeat my mother’s life.” From the start, So-
phie’s lifelong love of travel is presented as
part free-spiritedness and part coping
mechanism, a way to deal with the “oppres-
sive, superfluous” nature of time.
Time and history, as experienced both
personally and collectively, are just two of
the big ideas this novel leaves a reader pon-
dering. Aptly, given all the psychoanalysis,
“Divorcing” is also rife with thoughts about
dreams: recounted dreams, dreamlike im-
agery, the uncertain blurring of dream and
reality. Packing for one trip while remem-
bering another, Sophie feels that it’s “dis-
concerting how the urgencies of dream and
waking life correspond. At home in neither.
The one who got up no more myself than the
one dreaming.”JOHN WILLIAMS BOOKS OF THE TIMESA Skeptical Heroine, Still Unconvinced by Freud
Susan Taubes’s newly reissued
novel introduces a remarkably
modern protagonist.
Divorcing
By Susan Taubes
265 pages. New York Review
Books. $16.95.VIA ETHAN TAUBES AND TANAQUIL TAUBESFollow John Williams on Twitter:
@johnwilliamsnyt.