my friend's father, George Rochberg, died
Peter T. Daniels
=====================================================
June 1, 2005
George Rochberg, Composer, Dies at 86
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
George Rochberg, an American composer who broke ranks with the rigorous
modernism of the mid-century avant-garde to write music of rare urgency
and candor, died on Sunday at a hospital in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 86 and
made his home in Newtown Square, Pa.
The cause was complications of recent surgery, said his wife, Gene.
Over the course of a career that spanned three decades, Mr. Rochberg
wrote
six symphonies, seven string quartets, other chamber works and song
cycles
and one opera, "The Confidence Man."
He began his career as one of the foremost American exponents of
atonality
and attracted critical attention with works like his Symphony No. 2. By
the mid-1960's, Mr. Rochberg had begun to re-evaluate his aesthetic, and
by the 1980's, he had become modernism's most articulate apostate.
"Modernism ended up allowing us only a postage-stamp-sized space to
stand
on," he said in 1983. "We cut the rest away." A personal loss helped
crystallize his views, when, after the long illness and premature death
of
Mr. Rochberg's son in 1964, the composer found he could no longer
continue
writing serial music. "It was finished, empty, meaningless," he
recalled.
He began a quest for a musical language that would better suit his
creative and expressive needs.
In the process, he grew fiercely critical of what he saw as modernism's
misplaced notion that music could break cleanly from its own history.
"There is no greater provincialism than that special form of
sophistication and arrogance which denies the past," he wrote in a 1969
essay titled "The Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Survival."
During the next few years, Mr. Rochberg made many experiments, including
some "collage" pieces, featuring quotations from different composers
from
the past and present; "Contra Mortem et Tempus" (1965), for example,
contains fragments from works by Pierre Boulez, Berio, Varse and Ives.
He
also wrote original music in different styles and from various
perspectives.
With the Quartet No. 3 for Strings (1972), Mr. Rochberg announced his
departure. This pivotal work contained a genuine late-Romantic,
Mahlerian
adagio - the harmonies diatonic, the mood languorous and the melody
presented in a fashion that was straightforward, passionate and
unapologetically tonal. Mr. Rochberg's move shocked many of his
colleagues, inspiring much heated commentary in conservatories and music
journals.
"The appeal of the work - and on one hearing it seems certain to have
lasting value - lies not in any literary stance but its unfailing formal
rigor and old-fashioned musicality," Donal Henahan wrote in The New York
Times after the world premiere of the Quartet No. 3. "Mr. Rochberg's
quartet is - how did we used to put it? - beautiful. It is one of the
rare
new works that go past collage and quotation into another, fairer land."
In later compositions, like the fourth, fifth and sixth string quartets,
the Symphony No. 4 and the Violin Concerto, which he wrote for Isaac
Stern, Mr. Rochberg's stylistic variants were more homogeneous. These
works are Romantic in many ways, but there is no sense of self-conscious
synthesis, facile quotation or reactionary throwback. Critics heard
elements of Bartok, Mahler, Haydn, Schoenberg, Beethoven and Mozart, but
the final product had an intensity that was Mr. Rochberg's own.
Mr. Rochberg was born in Paterson, N.J., on July 5, 1918. He studied at
the Mannes College of Music, where his teachers included George Szell,
and
at the Curtis Institute, where he later taught from 1948 to 1954. His
chief academic affiliation, however, was to the University of
Pennsylvania, where he served as chairman of the music department until
1968 and continued to teach until 1983.
A book of Mr. Rochberg's writings, "The Aesthetics of Survival: A
Composer's View of 20th-Century Music" was published in 1984 and
reissued
last year in an expanded edition. He was elected to the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1985.
In recent years, his wife said, Mr. Rochberg worked actively on two
unpublished books: a theoretical treatise on chromaticism and a memoir
entitled "Five Lines and Four Spaces." He had hoped to attend a
performance of his Piano Quintet in E flat scheduled for this Sunday
evening in Weill Recital Hall.
Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Francesca, of Moreno
Valley, Calif.; and two grandchildren.
Despite his strong views on the excesses of modernism, Mr. Rochberg
never
became a proselytizer for strict tonality. "Everyone must find his own
voice," he said. "I reserve the right to compose 12-tone music in the
future - or any other music I choose. I've tried very hard to rid myself
of that stultifying conception of historical line, and if I want to
contrast dissonant chromaticism cheek by jowl with a more accessibly
tonal
style, I will do so. All human gestures are available to all human
beings
at any time."
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Mark & Steven Bornfeld
Saw this this morning.
Sympathies to your friend's family, and to you.
Any particular compositions you'd recommend I check out?
Steve
--
Mark & Steven Bornfeld DDS
http://www.dentaltwins.com
Brooklyn, NY
718-258-5001
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> Saw this this morning.
> Sympathies to your friend's family, and to you.
> Any particular compositions you'd recommend I check out?
I never heard one I didn't like ... no idea what's currently available.
He had several LPs on Nonesuch, but ...
His Paganini variations (60 of them, for solo violin) are impressive.
Mark & Steven Bornfeld
Thanks, Peter.
Gary Goldberg
to experience his pain.
--
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Matthew Fields
Gary Goldberg <XGa...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> If serialists could only learn from his experience without having
>to experience his pain.
...Who? what?
--
Matthew H. Fields http://www.umich.edu/~fields
Music: Splendor in Sound
To be great, do better and better. Don't wait for talent: no such thing.
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Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <XGaryG-ya02408000...@news.west.earthlink.net>,
> Gary Goldberg <XGa...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> > If serialists could only learn from his experience without having
> >to experience his pain.
>
> ...Who? what?
Did you read the obituary? It is generally recognized that it was the
death of his son (Chessie's older brother) that prompted him to turn
away from the emotionless serialism he had been practicing, toward
neoromanticism, where he was an unfashionable pioneer.
Matthew Fields
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <42A0A1...@worldnet.att.net>,
> Peter T. Daniels <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >Matthew Fields wrote:
> >>
> >> In article <XGaryG-ya02408000...@news.west.earthlink.net>,
> >> Gary Goldberg <XGa...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >> > If serialists could only learn from his experience without having
> >> >to experience his pain.
> >>
> >> ...Who? what?
> >
> >Did you read the obituary? It is generally recognized that it was the
> >death of his son (Chessie's older brother) that prompted him to turn
> >away from the emotionless serialism he had been practicing, toward
> >neoromanticism, where he was an unfashionable pioneer.
> Which is all a bunch of hokum, so?
So you've never read anything he's written, either. His collected essays
were just reprinted (I haven't seen them anywhere yet). They might be
good for you.
Matthew Fields
No, actually, I have read some of his writings, they're very good
marketing for his music but they're full of hokum. Also met him
in person, and a few more things. So? The whole "serialist vs
romanticist" thing was a lot of smoke and mirrors for marketing,
mainly within academe.
Peter T. Daniels
So it's your claim that his earlier music is not serialist;
that his later music is not neoromantic;
and that the switch in style that didn't happen did not follow upon his
son's death?
supergumby kid
Matthew Fields
It's my claim that serialist music IS neoromantic music, just with a darker
harmonic pallette. As a lifelong practitioner of all of the above, I think
I'm ENTITLED to say that.
RyanT
Peter T. Daniels
> It's my claim that serialist music IS neoromantic music, just with a darker
> harmonic pallette. As a lifelong practitioner of all of the above, I think
> I'm ENTITLED to say that.
So it's your claim that there is no significant difference between what
Rochberg viewed as the two very different phases of his music.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> never heard of him.
How many twentieth-century American composers have you heard of?
Steven Bornfeld
No one will deny you the right to say that, Matthew. But can you
explain how serialist music is neoromantic, in words so plain and simple
that even a dentist can understand?
Steve
>
>
>
--
Cut the nonsense to reply
RyanT
professors, was that serialism was a system that had a "faster"
harmonic change. Even Schoenberg originally argued that his music
wasn't atonal but "pantonal", with very fast key changes.
Since neo-romanticism has no particular qualms about moving from key
center to key center without really much attention to the tonal method
either, I guess it could be argued that it's pretty similar.
I wrote some minimalistic pieces in the past that sounded fairly
neo-romantic I guess, but he told me to gradually introduce new notes
until all of them were present. Sort of an "unfolding" of the 12-tones
from something relatively simple to more complex. Seemed to work as a
way to gradually introduce dissonances, and might be relevent to what
we're talking about.
Ryan
Matthew Fields
Basically in the same way that Bach's fugues are "baroque":
intellectual structure in the service of drama and expressionism
(remember that fugue is conceptually at least a mark of renaissance
"pure structuralism").
Steven Bornfeld
Not simple enough for a dentist! ;-)
Besides, do you really think that changing the tonal center is the
essence of romanticism?
Steven Bornfeld
OK, maybe we should call serialism "neobaroque".
RyanT
where it would use repeated chord progressions as sort of a basis for
the piece. Since these progressions don't seem to really follow any
tonal structure, I hear it as being more like pitch sets that just
repeat itself a lot.
Daniel Kolle
<bornfe...@dentaltwins.com> thought hard and wrote:
>Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
>
> Saw this this morning.
> Sympathies to your friend's family, and to you.
> Any particular compositions you'd recommend I check out?
The Transcendental Variations are lovely.
>Steve
--
-Daniel "Mr. Brevity" Kolle; 17 A.A. #2035
Koji Kondo, Yo-Yo Ma, Gustav Mahler, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Geirr Tveitt are my Gods.
Head of EAC Denial Department and Madly Insane Scientist.