Double Bass Frederic Rzewski

[Anonymous75966]

Anyone ever play "Coming Together" on double bass?

 

[anonymous12251111]

Yes! I had the luxury of performing this piece last year in my universities contemporary ensemble, it's really fun, quite tiring. I did the entire thing arco. Great piece!

 

[Chris Fitzgerald]

I had the pleasure of attending a composition masterclass in Belgium with Rzewski in a previous life. It was a great pleasure, and I learned a lot. I've long been intrigued by his "Silence of Infinite Spaces" and "The People United", which is great fun.

 

[damonsmith]

I saw concert of his last year, he is an amazing musician and composer. His piano chops are incredible. I didn't know he had a bass piece.

 

[Anonymous75966]

Yes! I had the luxury of performing this piece last year in my universities contemporary ensemble, it's really fun, quite tiring. I did the entire thing arco. Great piece!

"Quite tiring?" That's pretty damn impressive - nice work.

Damon, it's an ensemble improv piece. The only fully notated parts are text and a bassline - which consists of a pentatonic line that does a minimalist / displacement transformation. It's all 16th notes, it's 20 minutes long, and it never repeats. (Technically - repeats at the pattern level, but I think never at the barline level - if that makes any sense.)

I've only played it on electric, and even then I could only hack it by tuning DGDG to have an open G at the bottom of the riff. Tiring is right. And really fun - and a very serious piece, it's being played a lot in recent years, I guess because of the political content - possibly been performed more since 2001 than in the previous 30 years since it was written.

 

[anonymous12251111]

Our ensemble for it was awesome. I played the entire thing with a pickup. The pianist, myself and marimba player did the entire thing. There were two vocalists trading off of each other and sax's and violins coming in at set times from different places in the room. It was ultra trippy. Oh and our band leader, Greg Oh (from Toca Loca), played the bass line with some sort of nose-piano where you snort into a tube that gives you "air" while you key it with your left hand.

hahaha it's really funny, i should look for a pic of it.