Coming Together

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 ofMarch. I had just been admitted to hospital for ten days (for treatment for a chronic respiratorycondition), and when this happens, as it does from time to time, Coming Together is perfect for gettingme 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 theatresclosed 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 coursesand 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’spiece 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 ofstructure 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, accumulatingwaves 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.

TimRutherford-Johnson