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Among the (very) contemporary compositions that eighth blackbird will perform at Cambridge's Sanders Theatre on March 26 is Les Moutons de Panurge, written in 1969 by Westfield, Massachusetts native Frederick Rzewski. Eighth blackbird recorded Les Moutons de Panurge for their most recent CD, fred, Music of Frederick Rzewski.

Eighth blackbird cellist Nicholas Photinos writes of the work (links mine):

Les Moutons de Panurge (the Sheep of Panurge) takes its title from a story found in the fourth book of Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Pantagruel is traveling by ship with his rascally companion, Panurge, when their boat meets with a merchant ship carrying sheep. The merchants make fun of Panurge, though Panurge manages to buy one sheep from them after much haggling. Panurge then chucks the sheep into the sea, whereby all of the other sheep follow the sheep overboard, one after another. To this day, the phrase “sheep of Panurge” implies a person who blindly follows the lead of another.

Rzewski’s work, which is scored for any instruments, follows this concept in several ways. The work is constructed of only 65 notes, though Rzewski instructs the performer to follow an additive and then subtractive process. The performer plays the notes as follows: 1, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, etc. until the 65 th note is reached, at which point the process is reversed by subtracting notes from the beginning (1-2-3-4…65, 2-3-4…65, etc.), until the 65 th note is reached and held. The pitfall is, of course, that rarely can people can stay together the whole time, and Rzewski indicates that when a performer gets off from the others, they stay off and continue to follow the rules. We have found that in rehearsing this work, as soon as one person gets off, other people gradually begin to get off as well, and so each player is obliged to follow the lead of the person who originally got lost.

Complete notes on Les Moutons de Panurge and the rest of eighth blackbird's March 26 program can be found here.

Daniel Varela interviewed Frederick Rzewski in 2003 for the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever. Here is an excerpt of one of Rzewski's answers:

Personally, I remain optimistic, I believe very strongly that live music, as opposed to recorded music, will continue to survive and recorded music will collapse. I think perhaps the 20th century will be regarded by future generations like the "recording century," which leads to confusion between a work of art and its industrial reproduction. In a way similar to the notion of the ancient Egyptians about life after death (a very strange idea), in the 20th Century there was the strange idea that it was possible to freeze the music into a piece of plastic which you could then buy it in a store. I think that we have had some kind of return to a more traditional view, namely that music is something that one does, not something that comes to you. It's some form of activity so I think that we'll find new forms of folk music, something that appears spontaneously.

The full interview from Perfect Sound Forever is here.

Frederick Rzewski will give a free piano recital at Boston Conservatory on March 28. But you don't have to save that date, the All-Rzewski recital is sold-out. There are, however, still tickets available for eighth blackbird's March 26 performance at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge...