Anyone know where I can purchase a score to Rzewski's "de Profundis?" I come up blank at sheet music plus. Thanks a lot.

Tomasino
aka
TomTomasino

I have some Rzewski from Zen-On. They're a Japanese publisher, you could try to find them online. Alternately, Rzewski's still alive. You could probably find him online.

HTH

It's free. Several years ago, Rzewski started releasing his works for free at the Werner Icking archive. They're mirrored at IMSLP:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Rzewski,_Frederic

Great!Thanks K, and thanks DanS too for the suggestion. What a good guy Rzewski is for doing that.

TomTomasino
aka
tomasino

Wow! That's great. I know what I'm doing tonight.

Cool! I've always been interested in the scores of Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues.

And I didn't know it was for 2 pianos...

This is only too AWESOME!

I can't do the same right now, but I do wish other composers, if they've solved their living expenses problem would do the same...

The version most people know is solo. IMSLP doesn't have his copyrighted works (because they're copyrighted!) That includes the Squares, North American Ballades, and, of course, the variations.

I notice that his more popular pieces aren't available, surely his publisher's doing.

It's too bad Rzewski doesn't have a donate link. I'd certainly throw some money his way if I seriously worked on any of the pieces from IMSLP.

Well I've printed de Profundis out, and it is a toughie. It's also a hand printed score, quite a clean and useable hand printed score, but still, it's a hand printed score.

I'm going to just look at it for awhile, and talk to my teacher as well before I really bite into it. I learned and performed "Down by the Riverside" a year ago, and Rzewski became one of my favorite composers. It was the most difficult thing I'd done to that point, but de Profundis looks like it would stretch me even further. I love the idea of a "speaking pianist," as I was a singer before taking myself seriously as a pianist, and I think it would be fun to play around with that end of it. It really calls for an elocution style of delivery, and I think I could come up with that without too much difficulty. The piano part, though, will be a challenge.

TomTomasino
aka
tomasino

Rzewski is making the works he has the rights to available, but he doesn't have the rights to his earlier works (he signed those over to Zen-On long ago.)