His major compositions, which often incorporate social and political themes, include the minimalist Coming Together and the variation set The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,[1] which has been called "a modern classic".

[5] He began playing piano at age 5 and attended Phillips Academy, Harvard, and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Milton Babbitt.

Musica Elettronica Viva conceived music as a collective, collaborative process, with improvisation and live electronic instruments prominently featured.

(36 variations on the Sergio Ortega song "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido"); Coming Together, a setting of letters from Sam Melville, an inmate at Attica State Prison, at the time of the riots there (1972); North American Ballads (I.

Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues) (1978–79); Night Crossing with Fisherman; Fougues; Fantasia and Sonata; The Price of Oil, and Le Silence des Espaces Infinis, both of which use graphical notation; Les Moutons de Panurge; and the Antigone-Legend.

[11] Nicolas Slonimsky said of Rzewski in 1993: "He is furthermore a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.

In ben Israel's interpretation, Melville's prison years have made him both visionary and mad, and the torment of his incarceration is rendered more vivid by the nagging intensity of the music.