Sunday, November 6, 2011

13, 14, 15: Toni Negri, Albert Camus, Chilean songs and virtuoso pianism

Session 13 will be on monday. The text will be an interview with Toni Negri by Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert, published in the recent collection Community Art: the Politics of Trespassing. The interview text for the reading group can be downloaded here.

Tuesday's session is canceled.

Session 14 will be on wednesday. Text: The Rebel by Albert Camus (recently invoked by Hans Achterhuis to explain the Occupy movement).

Session 15 will be on thursday. This is the first session of what I hope will be a series, in which we "read" works of art and the way they deal with some of the recurrent themes of our reading. In this session, we'll look at the Chilean song El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido and Frederic Rzewski's grand set of piano variations on the song, The People United Will Never Be Defeated. We'll look at these works for how they think the unity of the people in its diversity: a motive that first came up in our discussion of Merijn Oudenampsen's text on populist imagery.

Here is a link to the text and an .mp3 of the song itself. Composer Christian Wolff's program notes on the music can be found here.

The Rzewski piece itself is extensive, consisting of a theme and 36 variations, taking about 50 minutes. I've uploaded some mp3s of the piece: these are the links for part one - part two - part three. The interpretation is Ursula Oppen's, who is the piece's dedicatee. On Youtube, there is a thrilling bravoura interpretation by the Liszt-specialist Marc André Hamelin, which projects the score at the same time; it is in 8 parts however, and the editing is imperfect, so two variations end up incomplete.

Update: I've just uploaded a .pdf of the score.

Enjoy - and hope to see you there!