Bonus episode: Coming Together

Exit/isolate

Tonight at Kings Place, London, Riot Ensemble will be playing Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together (alongside Steve Martland’s equally propulsive Dance Works and Lisa Streich’s delicately introspective Falter). Tickets and details are here, should you wish.

Five years ago, we created a very different version of Rzewski’s masterpiece, CassetteBoy style, using the speeches and press conferences of Boris Johnson in relation to Brexit and the Covid pandemic. One of the many jokes was that the word ‘truthfully’, so prominent in Sam Melville’s letter that provides the work’s text, could not be found in any of Johnson’s speeches. As the group’s sole non-playing member, I was tasked with recording a few takes of myself – in various states of urgency/rage – that could be dropped in where needed. Those bits of footage were all shot in and around my new house, into which my family and I had only recently moved. We were navigating the double dislocation of intermittent lockdowns and a new setting; I think a little of that comes across, even in my tiny clips.

The video caused a bit of a stir at the time, although we had Rzewski’s approval to do it this way. Looking back on it now, it’s a time capsule, an attempt to make sense of a very weird time. Whereas Rzewski’s piece (in its more typical renditions) triumphantly transcends the moment – the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 – that inspired its creation.

I wrote a text to accompany the video too, although the page on which it was hosted seems to have been lost to the ether. It too is a bit of a time capsule, but I think still worth sharing – not least because it prototypes some of the lines of thought that would eventually become the Schubert Dub project. Here, as a little bonus, it is.

I think …

Most years, I find, are coloured by a single piece of music: something I have written about several times, or that I have seen live on multiple occasions, or that turned my ears towards something completely new. This year, that piece has been Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together of 1971. I haven’t yet had occasion to write about it this year. I haven’t seen it live, obviously. And it is a piece I have known and loved for two decades. Yet nothing has captured 2020 quite like Rzewski’s visceral setting of a letter by the incarcerated Civil Rights radical and anti-Vietnam bomber Sam Melville – organiser of the Attica Uprising, the bloodiest prison protest in US history. I first played it this year at the start of March. I had just been admitted to hospital for ten days (for treatment for a chronic respiratory condition), and when this happens, as it does from time to time, Coming Together is perfect for getting me through a day of infection-controlled isolation, exercise, drugs and brutal physiotherapy.

… it’s six months now and I can tell you, truthfully, few periods in my life have passed so quickly …

I came out of hospital on the day London’s theatres closed and I didn’t go outside again for nearly twelve weeks. I exercised at home, running hundreds of laps around my kitchen, following online yoga courses and designing my own HITT routines. I listened to Coming Together almost every morning as I worked out. Soon, Melville’s letter about imprisonment and discipline and hope started to sound eerily prescient. It’s ten months now, and everyone has experienced that same strange collapse of time – time without moments, just continuity, time flowing like treacle and a torrent.

… I am in excellent physical and emotional health. There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead but I feel secure and ready …

As lockdown’s spring progressed into an even darker summer, Coming Together continued to resonate: the indifferent brutality that killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the incessant noise of Twitter and discontent, the experimental chemistry of food (all those Insta-ready sourdoughs), and the ravings of lost hysterical men (too many to mention). Rzewski’s piece seemed to be everywhere: a document of prison life so precise it could predict the future. I took to reciting its words like a mantra, or an affirmation, and it seeped into my bones: a source of structure and depth when everything was foreground.

… I can act with clarity and meaning …

Of course the form of Rzewski’s work – with its constructivist musical cells, its restricted options, its unsettling near-stasis on the edge of boredom – directly reflects the experience of prison (and Covid isolation). But there is another side, too. Because in the approachability of its four-to-the-floor rhythm, its pentatonic scales and its cresting, accumulating waves of instrumentation, Coming Together is also a piece about collectivity and empowerment. The prompts are in Melville’s words but they are backed up by Rzewski’s music – no less when, as in this recording by Riot Ensemble, every part has been made in isolation against a shared click track. It is a work whose unceasing, centrifugal energy four walls (or a Zoom split-screen or a Tier 4 boundary; choose your own chamber) can barely confine. Through ten months in which everything took on an unbearable significance, Coming Together continued to speak, empower and console. What a way to conclude this incredible, awful year and look forward to a new one.

… I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 28 December 2020