George Rochberg (NY Times)
Hyfler/Rosner
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,
Varèse 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."