"Frederic Anthony Rzewski (born April 13, 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts) is an American composer and virtuoso pianist.

Rzewski (pronounced zheff-skee) began playing piano at age 5. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt. In 1960, he went to Italy, a trip which was formative in his future musical development. In addition to studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, he began a career as a performer of new piano music, often with an improvisatory element. A few years later he was a co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum. Musica Elettronica Viva conceived music as a collective, collaborative process, with improvisation and live electronic instruments prominently featured. In 1971 he returned to New York.

In 1977 Rzewski became Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium, then directed by Henri Pousseur. Occasionally he teaches for short periods at schools and universities throughout the U.S. and Europe, including Yale University, the University of Cincinnati, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, San Diego, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and Trinity College of Music, London.

Many of Rzewski's works are inspired by secular and socio-historical themes, show a deep political conscience and feature improvisational elements. Some of his better-known works include The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (36 variations on the Sergio Ortega song El pueblo unido jamás será vencido), a set of virtuosic piano variations written as a companion piece to Beethoven's Diabelli Variations; Coming Together, which is a setting of letters from Sam Melville, an inmate at Attica State Prison, at the time of the famous riots there (1971); North American Ballads; 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, which features a principled opposition to the policies of the State, and which was premiered on the night that the United States bombed Libya in April 1986. Among his most recent compositions, the most interesting are the Nanosonatas (2006~2010) and the Cadenza con o senza Beethoven (2003), written for Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. Rzewski played the solo part in the world premiere of his piano concerto at the 2013 BBC Proms.

Nicolas Slonimsky (1993) says of him in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians: "He is furthermore a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument." "

"Stephane Ginsburgh has been praised for his daring piano playing and appears regularly in recitals and chamber music worldwide. He has performed at numerous festivals such as Ars Musica, Quincena Musical, ZKM Imatronic, Agora, Bach Academie Brugge, Ultima Oslo, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Gaida (Vilnius), Warsaw Autumn, Musica Strasbourg and Klara Festival. His next season performances will take him to Les Nuits Botanique, Festival Musiq3, Ars Musica, Impuls and Festival Musique Action.

A tireless surveyor of the repertoire but also exploring new combinations including voice, percussion, performance or electronics, he dedicates much of his energy to contemporary music. He regularly plays with the Ictus Ensemble, has collaborated with many composers such as Frederic Rzewski, Jean-Luc Fafchamps, Stefan Prins and Matthew Shlomowitz of whom he premiered works, as well as with choreographers and visual artists. Stephane Ginsburgh loves immersive performances and has played Prokofiev's complete piano sonatas in one evening.

Stephane Ginsburgh recorded Feldman, Duchamp, Satie, Fafchamps for Sub Rosa. He recorded the world premiere of two pieces by David Toub for World Edition. His Prokofiev complete piano sonatas are released on Cypres Records in 2015. In 2018, Grand Piano/NAXOS published his recording of the world premiere of the "Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard", a series of 24 Preludes and Fugues by the composer and writer Anthony Burgess. His most recent release in 2019 is "Piano Hero" which is included in an album dedicated to the music of Stefan Prins on Kairos. His upcoming recordings for Sub Rosa include one CD with Julius Eastman's complete music for four pianos and another one with pieces for speaking pianist by Frederic Rzewski.

He is a laureate of the Tenuto competition 1995 and has received the Pelemans Prize in 1999 from the Belgian composers union for his dedication in performing Belgian contemporary music. In 1998, Stephane Ginsburgh co-founded SONAR (previously le Bureau des Arts), a group of artists dedicated to different types of artistic expression and creation including music, dance and literature, which he directed until 2018. He has also been artistic director of the Centre Henri Pousseur, an electronic music studio in Liège, from 2010 until 2013.

He taught piano and chamber music at the Royal Conservatories in Brussels, Mons and Liège. He is a professor at the Dalcroze Institute in Brussels. After completing his studies at the Conservatory with a master in music, he worked with Paul Badura-Skoda, Claude Helffer, Jerome Lowenthal and Vitaly Margulis.​ Stephane Ginsburgh also holds a BA in philosophy of science from the Free University of Brussels (U.L.B.) and a DMA (PhD in the Arts) from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel en Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel."