20:00, Sat 8th October 2016 at Jesus Chapel
Michaelmas Week 0

Coming Together is a startlingly beautiful and deeply political work for spoken voice and instrumental ensemble. The text for the piece originates from a letter by the political protester Sam Melville, written while he was in prison in the Attica Correctional Institute; two years after this letter was written, he was killed in the Attica Prison Riots, one of the most important events of the prison rights movement in the United States. In this light, Melville's observations -- " the indifferent brutality, incessant noise"— continue to be particularly relevant in today's climate of political extremism, racism, and a dysfunctional incarceration system. Here, Rzewski has transformed them to encompass both the raw and the political, as well as the abstract and existential.