George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity by Amy Lynn Wlodarski

Abstract

Reviewed by: George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity by Amy Lynn Wlodarski Jonathan Blumhofer George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity. By Amy Lynn Wlodarski. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 154.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019. [xiii, 239 p. ISBN 9781580469470 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781787444461 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. In the standard telling, composer George Rochberg’s music underwent a radical stylistic shift following the death of his son, Paul, in 1964. In response to [End Page 69] the tragedy, the once committed serialist rediscovered the expressive riches of tonality; that reaffirmation of traditional harmony, in turn, helped usher in the neoromantic movement among American composers during the latter third of the twentieth century. If the tale sounds a hair too neat, that’s probably because it is: as Amy Lynn Wlodarski’s absorbing biography of the composer makes clear, Rochberg’s relationship with the post–World War II avant-garde and serialism was nothing if not complex. And, if Paul’s early death from brain cancer provided the catalyst for Rochberg to go in his own direction, the seeds for his musical change-of-heart were planted much earlier. Indeed, Rochberg’s musical development reflected a life that was shaped by traumas both deeply personal and global, beginning with his experiences on the front lines in Europe during the Second World War. Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1918, and his musical education included a striking pedigree of teachers, beginning with Hans Weisse and Georg Szell. (Prior to his appointment as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, Szell taught composition at New York’s Mannes College of Music.) It was from those two that Rochberg developed a formative reverence and appreciation for the standard canon—views that would, in turn, shape his understanding of his role as a composer. His artistic training was interrupted, though, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Drafted into the army in 1942, Rochberg’s rigorous military training (he ended up an officer in the infantry) was balanced by a handful of creative and morale-boosting activities. The latter included composing a set of marching songs for his regiment and listening to broadcasts of orchestral concerts (often with scores sent by his wife, Gene, in hand). Such opportunities ended abruptly when Rochberg joined George S. Patton’s Third Army for the brutal push out from Normandy following D-day in 1944. Here, moments of release and refreshment were fleeting: the joyous reception from newly liberated French citizens, particularly children, loomed large in Rochberg’s subsequent memories of those days. In September 1944, the composer was seriously injured during a firefight near Mons, Belgium, and his lengthy recuperation saw him begin composing again. There is little that reflects his war experiences in the resulting short piano pieces; Wlodarski describes them as “love letters” to the infant Paul. But following a second battlefield wounding in February 1945 and Rochberg’s subsequent discharge from the Army that June, his creative process was increasingly informed by a desire to write music that faced “the realities of the world around me and my relation to that [modern] world” (p. 38). While Rochberg was thoroughly drilled in compositional technique during his postwar studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, his self-motivation shines through the pages of Wlodarski’s book: the diary entries she cites show Rochberg deliberately pushing himself to grow and develop as a composer. Initially, this resulted in the embrace of what he called “hard romanticism”—that is, music marked by “sharp angularities of dissonance” (p. 39). By the early 1950s, though, Rochberg’s convictions had led him to embrace Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. Rochberg took to Schoenberg’s technique and music with alacrity: “I know of no composer of the twentieth century,” he gushed in a 1952 journal entry, “who has the sense of [the living phrase] as Schoenberg had it” (p. 50). While Rochberg’s enthusiasm for Schoenberg wasn’t exceptional for the [End Page 70] time, his excitement sometimes got the better of him. Wlodarski relates the embarrassing episode surrounding Rochberg’s treatise The Hexachord and Its Relation...