Frederic Anthony Rzewski was born on 13 April 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts, to Polish-American parents and raised Catholic. He began the piano at five and studied at Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt. A Fulbright grant took him to Italy in 1960, which proved decisive: he studied composition with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence and started performing new piano music, often with an improvised element. He married Nicole Abbeloos in 1963 and they had five children. From 1977 he lived mainly in Belgium, and he died on 26 June 2021.

In 1966 he co-founded Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, a group that treated composition as a collective process built on improvisation and live electronics. He returned to New York in 1971, and in 1977 became professor of composition at the Royal Conservatory of Liège under Henri Pousseur, teaching also at Yale, CalArts, UC San Diego, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and Trinity College of Music. His music carries an explicit political conscience: The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, thirty-six variations on Sergio Ortega’s song, has been called a modern classic, and Coming Together sets letters written by Sam Melville, an inmate at Attica before the prison uprising. North American Ballads, Les Moutons de Panurge, the Antigone-Legend, the graphically notated The Price of Oil and Le Silence des Espaces Infinis, and the late Nanosonatas belong to the same body of work. He played the solo part in the premiere of his piano concerto at the 2013 BBC Proms.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Rzewski
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1346849