{"id":92,"date":"2018-09-27T15:38:55","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T21:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/wordpress\/?p=92"},"modified":"2025-08-08T13:49:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T19:49:10","slug":"attica-coming-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/27\/attica-coming-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Attica: Coming Together"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What follows is the recollection and reflection of a remarkable musical work, and my work experience around it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Prison<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The prison strike of late summer 2018<\/a> was in part a commemoration of the killing of prison organizer and author George Jackson<\/a> on August 21, 1971 as well as the uprising his death sparked (in part) at Attica nineteen days later on September 9. Having just turned 16 at the time, although I was involved in antiwar activity in Boulder, Jackson and Attica were two coastlines away and easy enough for me to ignore. Two years later I was reacquainted with those struggles\u2014through music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Minimizing Minimalists<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As a kid I’d become familiar with composers who pushed the envelope. Our music teacher played us recordings of John Cage in grade school. Two electric\/electronic masses were known to me, one by The Electric Prunes (Mass in F Minor<\/em>, 1968) and the other a collaboration by Spooky Tooth and musique concr\u00e8te<\/a> maestro Pierre Henry (Ceremony<\/em>, 1969). Warner Brothers samplers like The Big Red Ball<\/em> (1970) and Zapp\u00e8d<\/em> (1970) promoted offbeat acts like the GTOs, Captain Beefheart, Ed Sanders, and Lord Buckley, all of whom took liberties with music and the spoken word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My friend Carol’s father, Paul Parmelee, was pals with composer George Crumb as was David Burge, a Crumb collaborator who taught with Paul at CU and conducted our philharmonic. So it’s not surprising that Crumb’s intimately challenging\u00a0Ancient Voices of Children<\/em> (1970) was performed in our high school auditorium\u2014my first exposure to the poetry of Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca (not having paid attention to Joan Baez’s Baptism<\/em> of \u201968). Likewise, our church youth choir did not shy away from Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of the Carols<\/em> (1942), recordings of which sometimes are paired with the composer’s Rejoice in the Lamb<\/em> (1943), the setting of a poem penned by Christopher Smart when he was prisoner in a mental institution: \u201cFor\u00a0I am under the same accusation with my Saviour; for they said, he is besides himself.\u201d Smart later died in a debtor’s prison. (See<\/a> my post about such a gaol.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After high school when I worked with the United Farm Workers as a full-time boycott organizer beginning in the summer of \u201973 a comrade introduced me to the so-called minimalists of avant-garde classical music. The oeuvre of two of these, Steve Reich and Frederic Rzewski, contained charged language. Reich composed his famous Come Out<\/em><\/a> as part of a 1966 legal benefit for the Harlem 6 who were being retried for the \u201964 “fruit stand” riot, covered<\/a> by James Baldwin in the pages of The Nation<\/em>. Five years later Rzewski composed two pieces in reaction to the Attica uprising.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Police
Police beating during the Harlem riot of 1964. (Photo originally via Wikipedia)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Reich’s Come Out<\/em> is a masterpiece of manipulated verbal v\u00e9rit\u00e9: it’s simply and solely a recording of defendant Daniel Hamm explaining how he had to convince cops he’d been beaten in jail\u2014by rupturing his own bruise. Rzewski’s Coming Together<\/em> is a traditional musical setting\u00a0of a written<\/em> text, a narration,\u00a0albeit\u00a0by an electro-acoustic septet. And while both Come Out<\/em> and Coming Together<\/em> had brutal roots, Daniel Hamm survived his ordeal whereas Rzewski’s narrator did not.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are two powerful, musical statements, belied by the minimalism<\/em> genre to which they are assigned, and we minimize the minimalists, in whatever medium, at our poverty if not our peril. Take, for instance, the color field canvases of Mark Rothko. A friend from college<\/a>, a fiber artist, remarked on how those uncomplicated paintings are made richer by the fabric of their foundation, as if the traditional gesso primer had not been applied, freeing the fibers’ textures.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, the repetitions of Come Out<\/em> and Coming Together<\/em> facilitate our auditory and intellectual attention-to-detail\u2014to lyrics, but also to the musical fibers freed from the substrate of either lyrical (representational) melody or atonal (abstract) cacophony. The weft, if you will, of the notation staff bearing a more-or-less even weave, with variation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Melville and Attica: A greater coming together<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

On May 16, 1970 Attica prisoner Sam Melville wrote his close friend John Cohen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melville was born\u00a0Samuel Joseph Grossman in 1934 in New York City. (The story of his name change is told at SamMellville.org<\/a>, from which some of the following is taken.) Like many other political radicals in the \u201960s and \u201970s Melville turned from protest to property destruction as an act of defiance against: the war in Vietnam, rampant capitalism, environmental pillage, governmental clampdown. Melville’s eight acknowledged bombings took place in 1969\u2014before the formation of groups like Weather Underground and George Jackson Brigade.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He was arrested on November 12 of that year, and attempted an escape the next March.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melville made trouble everywhere he was held. He organized prison strikes in The Tombs and Sing Sing before being sent to Attica where he published a zine called Iced Pig<\/em> and organized with black, brown, and white protests against brutality, mail censorship, and 25 cents-a-day wages. And, of course, he was a leader of the prisoners’ takeover of Attica, during which he was killed\u2014but not before fashioning hundreds of Molotov cocktails and other defensive weapons and devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the Attica occupation, Ramparts<\/em> magazine published<\/a> several of Melville’s letters, including the one referenced above. Frederic Rzewski recalled later:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I read it I was impressed both by the poetic quality of the text and by its cryptic irony. I read it over and over again. It seemed that I was trying both to capture a sense of the physical presence of the writer, and at the same time to unlock a hidden meaning from the simple but ambiguous language. The act of reading and rereading finally led me to the idea of a musical treatment.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Rzewski needed more motivation, a photo of Melville in the Ramparts<\/em>\u00a0article was accompanied by a poem by Adrienne Rich\u2014not Attica-inspired but describing the cruelty of “the city of pain.” (The same edition of the magazine, December 1971, includes: a commentary by Staughton Lynd, who would chronicle another prison rebellion at Lucasville two decades later<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>; a lengthy and sympathetic profile of four New York sex workers; an equally lengthy and sympathetic profile of the Cockettes; an ad for The Food Stamp Gourmet: Patrician Eating on a Proletarian Budget<\/em>; a look at nascent women’s studies programs; a piece on Rainbow Farm’s evolution to a women’s commune; a review of records by the Grateful Dead and Country Joe; and a sports column.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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