George Rochberg Research Articles

The Repercussions of George Rochberg's Rubble Rhetoric

AbstractDuring the Second World War, the American composer George Rochberg served as an infantryman with the US Army in Europe. There, he witnessed first hand the aftermath caused by massive firebombing of the French countryside by both Allied and Axis bombers, an image that would remain with him for the remainder of his life. In his post-war writings, the rubbled city of Saint-Lô soon became a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture, which he believed had suffered a grave injury. This article considers how Rochberg reconstructed his wartime sketches – short miniatures composed during the European campaign – into material for his Sixth Symphony (1986). I argue that Rochberg clearly conceived of musical reconstruction as a means by which to symbolically confront the modernist forces he believed accountable for the decline of Western culture that he increasingly perceived towards the end of his life. The article ends with a cautionary epilogue to this time-worn narrative of rubble, reconstruction, and redemption that challenges Rochberg's false sense of moral superiority and the motivations of ‘rubble narratives’ more generally.

Mixture Strategies

This article presents a framework to approach musical hybridity, which is understood generally as any combination of musical identities. The framework focuses on the concepts of mixture strategies—perceptible processes of interaction and manipulation of styles, genres, and other identity markers. Mixture strategies are recurrent treatments of disparate musical identities in hybrid music, and not only do they define what the materials are, they more fully explore how these entities are put together. There are four distinct mixture strategies—clash, coexistence, distortion, and trajectory—and each have peculiar characteristics and significations contingent on their use structurally and contextually. In the article I define and exemplify each of the four mixture strategies in composers from, or related to, the post-1960s polystylistic concert music such as Alfred Schnittke, George Rochberg, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Peter Maxwell Davies. In these works, hybridity itself is foregrounded, and articulates the musical discourse as much, and oftentimes more so, than other musical parameters. Thus, this repertory proves helpful to demonstrate a general framework that can, and should, be applicable to other hybrid repertories. As I discuss the mixture strategies, I will debate the potential interpretive tropes for each. Then, I apply these ideas in interpreting the entire second movement of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, a work that explores all four mixture strategies. The second movement is then contextualized within the entire concerto.

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

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...

Interview with Composer George Tsontakis

This interview for the journal ICONI, taken by Dr. Edward Green, Professor at the Manhattan School of Music, is with one of the leading composers of the United States, George Tsontakis. A professor at Bard Conservatory of Music, he is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious Grawmeyer Award for his Second Violin Concerto. Professor Tsontakis’ work — nearly all of it commissioned — is wide-ranging in terms of genre, imaginative in its orchestrations, and always strongly emotional. Included in this interview are discussions of some of the biographical background to a number of his major pieces, including The Past, The Passion. Among the subjects discussed is the meaning of “concerto.” Several of his concertos and concerto-like compositions are specifically discussed in this interview, including Man of Sorrows (piano), and Sonnets (English Horn). The interview also touches upon his relations with two important American composers of earlier generation: George Rochberg, and Roger Sessions — who had been Tsontakis’ teacher of composition at Julliard.

The Pastoral After Environmentalism: Nature and Culture in Stephen Albert’s Symphony: RiverRun

The year 1972 was a landmark in the history of the environmental movement: the Environmental Protection Agency, founded two years earlier by Richard Nixon, banned the toxic pesticide DDT and authored the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, later amended to the Clean Water Act of 1977. While criticism of DDT was nothing new--Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, a detailed expose of the chemical, was published a full decade earlier (Carson 1962)--the EPA's ban heightened Americans' awareness of environmental issues and lent momentum to the interrogation of cherished post-war ideals, especially those of technological and economic progress. In the arts, a suspicion of progress narratives, which had been gathering steam in the 1960s, fueled the search for alternatives to modernism and its principles of artistic autonomy, abstraction, and the evolution of technique. Besides such well-known contenders for the countercultural throne as minimalism, the vibrant musical landscape of the early 1970s included edgy political works like Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together and Attica (both 1972) and pieces alluding to ecological matters, such as Alan Hovhaness's And God Created Great Whales (1970) and George Crumb's Vox Balaenae (1971). (1) I begin with a reference to 1972 because that year witnessed one of the more spectacular disavowals of serialism, considered by its practitioners to be the most progressive compositional approach. George Rochberg, a former serialist, broke with the modernist demand for advancement by mimicking the styles of Beethoven and Mahler in his Third String Quartet. (2) At first glance, Rochberg's momentary resurrection of the expressive language of romanticism seems to have little to do with the nascent musical environmentalism of Crumb and Hovhaness, let alone the ban on DDT. Yet the postmodern philosophy of history that Rochberg promulgated--a philosophy which discards the notion of linear evolution in favor of an alleged timelessness of musical styles--was a vital factor in the emergence of a genre of music that I will call the neo-romantic pastoral. (3) Combining the romantic and environmentalist impulses of the early 1970s, neo-romantic pastorals, penned by such composers as Stephen Albert, Libby Larsen, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, unabashedly adopt (and adapt) the conventional pastoral topoi of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since many of those topoi are coincident with basic features of tonal music, neo-romantic pastorals typically exhibit some form of neo-tonality. (4) Just as the revival of tonality has inspired controversy among composers and music critics committed to modernist ideals, the reemergence of a relatively traditional form of the pastoral raises questions about the significance of this genre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Viewed in tandem with official and grass-roots efforts to stem the tide of environmental damage, the pastoral's traditional themes of innocence and retreat into nature might appear merely quaint, or even dangerously out of touch with a world in need of concrete solutions to problems of global proportions. Nevertheless, the branch of literary criticism known as ecocriticism has been at pains to show that the literary pastoral, particularly when it foregrounds the provisional status of the retreat to nature, constitutes an indispensable artistic forum for reflection on how human existence is (or has been, or might be) conceived in relation to the natural world, an issue whose discussion is vital to any environmentalist project. (5) Might the neo-romantic pastoral be capable of playing a similar role? This paper contends that Stephen Albert's Symphony: RiverRun (1984) highlights the complex interplay between nature and culture whenever the former is taken as an object of artistic representation. I argue that the particular ways in which Albert harnesses both pastoral devices and the stylistic and generic limitations of the symphony constitute an acknowledgment that the appearance of nature in a musical work is fully the effect of discursive means, of techniques of signification which are culturally determined rather than directly evocative of nature. …

Rochberg the Progressive, Revisited: An Analysis of the Third String Quartet

ROCHBERG THE PROGRESSIVE, REVISITED: AN ANALYSIS OF THE THIRD STRING QUARTET ROBERT GROSS It would be presumptuous to attempt, or claim to attempt, a depth analysis of the abberations [sic] of the contemporary mind —but it seems to me there is a kind of rational madness let loose in the world which delights in manipulation for its own sake, usually, if not always, buttressed by self-justifying, objective principles, a kind of rational madness which understands no theoretical limits to its pursuit of these goals and which, worst of all, recognizes none of, or is blind to all of the possible consequences of its procedure when acted out in real life and among real people. The energy which feeds and drives the engines Rochberg the Progressive, Revisited 193 of this variety of consciousness is certainly not itself rational, but the faith—couched in rational, ideological terms to which it attaches itself—becomes the sole justification for its exercise. In turn, this rational, ideological faith gives rise to its own specially devised morality and assumes, therefore, the condition of a quasireligious status among its followers and practitioners.1 Because [present-day composers] are fascinated by mathematics, logic, and science and have taken on the rational madness of their scientific confreres, we read much these days about information theory and its relation to the psychology and composition of music; about statistical probabilities, stochastics, and the Markoff Chain and their compositional possibilities; about group and set theory as applied to serial music; about aleatoricism and indeterminacy and entropy. Every possible scientific metaphor and analogy is invoked. Every possible scientific discipline is ransacked. . . .2 UCH QUOTATIONS BY THE LATE COMPOSER George Rochberg make it easy for us to caricature him as a resolute anti-modernist crank. Certainly bearing this out, more to the point, is what the composer actually composed in spite of his sometimes biting anti-modernist rhetoric. Jay Reise argues in the 1980–81 article “Rochberg the Progressive” that the characterization of George Rochberg as one who had renounced serialism and “returned” to tonality is one that is “too simplistic.”3 At that writing, only eight years had passed since the premiere of Rochberg’s Third String Quartet, which Reise describes as having “caused a great stir in the music world.”4 Even then, the “repudiation of serialism” explanation of the piece had so concretized in public perception that Reise apparently felt the need to set the record straight and bring attention to the piece’s more progressive technical tendencies. Perhaps a revisiting of the progressive techniques found in the piece is in order today, since the now-late composer has become nearly synonymous with pastiche and neo-Romanticism.5 However, neither term seems adequate to the task of describing the manner in which Rochberg achieves the integration of harmonic and motivic ideas at foreground, middleground and background levels, and also across the aesthetic divides of the piece. It is important, then, to consider Rochberg’s music from a number of different technical perspectives. Rochberg’s Third Quartet is an idiosyncratic amalgam of compositional techniques both tonal and S 194 Perspectives of New Music post-tonal, and the analytical perspectives brought to bear in consideration of the work must take this into account. This paper looks at the piece from two particular perspectives: projection-constructive analysis, which is my own invention, and modular-transformational analysis, which is the invention of Matthew Santa.6 Projection-constructive analysis seeks a form of quasiprolongational long-term associations in which vertical pitch-fields of salient sets are projected across the background of a work, accumulating one element at a time in order to construct a culminating vertical pitch field. In such a construct, clear noteheads indicate members of the background , analogous to a Schenker graph. The filled-in noteheads are important structural notes (members of the deepest middleground), but are not members of the background. Important to this concept is that each background element is reiterated in fixed register, as fixation of register of repeated pitches compels them toward a greater likelihood of auditory association. There is some precedent for background analyses of pieces thought to be exemplars of postmodernism, and presumed to be resistant to...

Musikalisches Zitat als kulturelle Assoziation. Die ästhetische Bedeutung des musikalischen Zitats in der koreanischen Musik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts

Musical quotation, as a technique of using the pre-existing materials in the music composition, has an important significance in both quantitative and qualitative aspects since the late 20th century, as can be seen from works of Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Luciano Berio, Mauricio Kagel, Alfred Schnittke, George Rochberg, George Crumb. In terms of aesthetics, the musical quotation is closely related with postmodernism as the technique deviates from the aesthetics of originality and reveals musical diversity. In this respect, it can be said that ›musical quotation‹ is an important keyword which describes the late 20th century. In this paper, by extending this perspective into the East Asia with a particular focus on South Korea, the musical quotation was investigated. Since the Western music was first introduced into South Korea in the late 19th century, various types of it have been combined in the country to produce works with a wide variety of musical forms and styles. Among these, works of Na, Un Young (1922–1993), Kang, Unsu (*1960), and Chung, Tae Bong (*1952) who employed the technique of musical quotation in their compositions were examined in detail here. Through this study, quotations in Korean music were found to play a semantic role in revealing the cultural context, similar to the West. However, several differences were found as well. First of all, there are only a few works with the quotation technique employed by Korean composers, probably due to the prevailing influence of the modernist aesthetics yet in Korea. Moreover, it is noteworthy that in Korean works, quoted targets were often selected from musical elements which were very familiar to Korean cultural ones. In this respect, the quotation technique which has been shown to embody not only culture and human, but also history and society, plays a significant role in reflecting the identity as a Korean composer.

The postmodern in music

“Postmodern” is an elusive concept that embraces a wide range of critical theories and attitudes. To borrow the assessment that the American poet Walt Whitman offered of himself, the concept is large and contains multitudes, various aspects of which often seem to be at odds with one another. Postmodern art likewise contains multitudes; indeed, it would seem that one of postmodern art's chief characteristics is the comfortable integration of apparently contradictory stimuli that, importantly, are sited less in the “work” itself than in the eye/ear/mind of the beholder. Grounded on the idea that postmodern music is defined not by composers but by listeners, this essay challenges musicological writing that since the early 1990s has sought both to illuminate an ideology of postmodernism and to identify elements of a postmodernist style. In particular, it counters the much-repeated statement that the first, and perhaps quintessential, example of musical postmodernism is the eclectic yet thoroughly linear and discursive 1972 Third String Quartet of the late American composer George Rochberg; the essay suggests that, if a prototype of the postmodern in music must be named, a better candidate would be Rochberg's palimpsest-like 1965 Music for the Magic Theater.

Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg, 1961-2005 (review)

Reviewed by: Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg, 1961-2005 Friedemann Sallis (bio) Alan M. Gillmor , editor. Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg, 1961-2005. Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2007. xliv, 426. $85.00 Published correspondence is usually consulted rather than read, but not so with the selected correspondence (1961-2005) of István Anhalt (1919-) and George Rochberg (1918-2005). The editor, Alan Gillmor, has delivered a marvellous piece of work that deserves to be read slowly, with time to linger over well-wrought phrases and closely argued disagreements. The Wilfrid Laurier University Press should also be commended for making this significant contribution to our understanding of music in North America. The letters are well presented, carefully edited, and preceded by Gillmor's thoughtful and informative introduction. Though it is bursting with useful nuggets of information, this book is more than a compilation of source material. Gillmor's edition gives the letters a shape, a kind of narrative structure that takes us through the unexpected twists and turns that active composers experience as they move through their careers. [End Page 471] Anhalt and Rochberg first met in the summer of 1960 at an International Conference of Composers that took place in Ontario at the Stratford Festival. The former was born in Budapest and immigrated to Canada in 1949, the latter in Paterson, New Jersey. Both are of Jewish background. The book opens onto a bleak landscape. Paul Rochberg (born 1944) passed away in November 1964 following a long illness, leaving his father profoundly wounded. Throughout his letters, Rochberg rails against the 'layers deep horrors' of life 'with all its pain, uncertainty, unreasonableness (only academics still prate about reason & reasonableness).' As a Holocaust survivor, Anhalt had experienced more than his share of horrors and, like Rochberg, he, too, angrily denounces the ills of contemporary society. And yet, he could also step back and write, 'It is a good life,' something Rochberg seemed incapable of doing. One of the most substantive differences between the two that underlies many discussion topics is their respective approaches to history. Though he constantly refers to the data of the past, Rochberg's letters show him to be unable, unwilling, or simply uninterested in addressing the complex contingencies of time and place and how they impinge on value judgments. By contrast, Anhalt consistently reminds Rochberg that to 'search for meaning in the "now" one must travel backwards.' The statement is more than mere lip service to central European habits of thought. Anhalt's respect for history as an intellectual discipline informs both his ethics and his aesthetics. In an article on modernism, Rochberg drew a Manichaean division between 'the intransigently radical avant-gardists who deny everything but their own ideas and those who believe in the continuity of civilization and its enduring values.' Anhalt insisted that he qualify this assertion in terms of time and place, and added, '[B]esides, or instead of, being "beautiful" . . . music can, and should at times, at least aim at presenting truth or some aspects of truth.' The latter statement reveals Anhalt's strong links to German idealism and particularly to Arnold Schoenberg's intellectual legacy, as articulated by Theodor Adorno. Thus, where Anhalt felt the need to 'walk the world with open eyes,' looking for understanding, Rochberg seemed overwhelmed by 'uncertainty in the very midst of vast mysteries which neither our perceptions nor our intelligence are strong and large enough to grasp adequately.' On one occasion, this difference in approach caused Anhalt to raise his voice in admonition against his friend. The object of discussion was one of Anhalt's major symphonic achievements, The Tents of Abraham (A Mirage Midrash) (2003), in which he reflected on 'the awful situation existing between the Israelis and the Palestinians.' In looking for terminus ab quo Anhalt focused on the story of Abraham and his two sons. 'The outcome of all of this is the new piece, quite likely my "rounding-out statement" about wanderers/searchers . . . a "role" and a "type" I have [End Page 472] known only too well.' The score bears the dedication, '[F]or the peace-seeking descendants and friends of Isaac and...

Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music (review)

Reviewed by: Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music Rebecca Marchand Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music. By George Rochberg. Edited by Gene Rochberg and Richard Griscom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. [xii, 305 p. ISBN 9780252034251. $40.] Photographs, bibliographic references, chronology, index. In describing his own music to violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved in 2000, George Rochberg wrote of an "all-at-once world" in which "all that matters once again is craftsmanship of the ancient kind, taste of the kind Mozart and Haydn possessed; judgment of the kind Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Bartók applied to every major decision they made" (p. 144). Indeed, this is a volume of "all-at-once" memoirs, wherein Rochberg examines his life through lenses musicological, apologetic, critical, and undoubtedly personal. The scope and ambition of Rochberg's undertaking is never cumbersome, although his quasi-chronological approach disrupts the imposition of "early, middle, late" chronologies so often foisted upon composers in retrospect. Rochberg was aware of the multifaceted nature of his book, noting that in some regards it is a "history of twentieth century music and its discontents" (p. 228). In many ways, it provides an excellent companion to the recent publication of his correspondence with Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt (Alan M Gilmor, ed., Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg [Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2007]). The memoirs carry the overriding sense that Rochberg wished to write about his music to avoid musicological conjecture. This is both fascinating and irritating for the musicologist who may be tempted to ask, "Well, what is left?" Rochberg presents his self-study as a gift, as if to say, "See, I've saved you the trouble." No doubt, however, he felt obliged not only to stake out his own territory in the collective memory of history, but to testify to his own rhymes and reasons. He even creates his own vocabulary to analyze his music. For example, "gargoyle music" is the term Rochberg applies to his 1995 Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra and which he describes as music that "pushes . . . into the demonic regions of the dark forces" (p. 241). In more of a textbook mode, he develops concepts and explains them as they apply to music as a whole. Rochberg's kinesthetic relationship to music is pervasive in his references to the "temperature" of music and the distinction he draws between "hard" (Concord Quartets, p. 108) and "soft" (first movement of Symphony No. 4, p. 203) romanticism. These terms are listed under Rochberg's name in the index, but I would hope to see them appear as their own entries as this lexicon becomes more important to the study of his music. In addition to presenting more general analytical concepts, Rochberg provides explanatory notes and analyses of his own works, such as the in-depth and revelatory discussion of his 1965 works Contra Mortem et Tempus and Music for the Magic Theater in chapter 8, "Unlocking the Past." At an early point in the book, Rochberg warns us about the recurring theme that is "a matter of sufficient magnitude to warrant returning to any number of times" (p. 31). He revisits constantly (one might even say, incessantly) the tension between modernist/twelve-tone composition and more tonal, so-called "traditional" procedures. The presence of this narrative thread is appropriate because so much of Rochberg's biography has rested on his eschewal of twelve-tone music after the death of his son Paul in November 1964. His tone is at times apologetic, and occasionally reactionary, but always emboldened by a sense of pride in being able to justify his own compositional raison d'être. Chapter 6, blatantly titled "Breaking with Modernism," addresses the Third String Quartet and how the media event of Rochberg's "break" upstaged what the composer himself deemed a natural step in his creative evolutionary process, but what he admits was a "breakthrough into a world where it was possible to write tonal music again" (p. 161). We learn that the "tectonic [End Page 753] shift" (p. 61) occurred in 1952 many years prior to losing Paul. Rochberg explains that it was an...

The Apostasy Of George Rochberg

An exploration of George Rochberg’s much-publicized rejection of musical modernism—in particular serialism—in the early 1960s. The paper will explore Rochberg’s conception of musical time and space, duration in music and its relationship to the roles of memory, identity, intuition, and perception in the shaping of human experience. It will explain his notion of the “metaphysical gap between human consciousness and cosmos,” which he derived in part from Wittgenstein’s proposition that ethical and aesthetic judgments lie outside the property of language. In Rochberg’s view, serialism fails to provide an organic three-dimensional model of duration as experienced through the human perception of time: past (memory) and future (anticipation) become conflated into a continuous present, and the crucial balance between information and redundancy has malfunctioned.

Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg (1961-2005) (Book Review)

[no abstract]

(Ne)ugodje vplivanja: Georg Rochbergove Kapriciozne variacije za violino brez spremljave (1973)

V sestavku soočam Herolda Blooma »Strašljivost vplivanja« z vrsto novejših in še zlasti uspešnih glasbenih adaptacij Blooma, pri čemer ponujam teorijo glasbenega (ne)ugodja na podlagi postlacanovske psihoanalize.

Sonata-Formal Functions and Transformational Processes in the First Movement of Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 6

To the extent that it represents the actual temporal event-series of a composition, transformational theory can reveal some interesting correlations between the formal functions of sections and the transformations that characterize them. For example, the changes in characteristic transformations in the first movement of George Rochberg’s sixth string quartet articulate specific functions familiar in sonata form. The differing types of transformations (transposition versus inversion) in the first two sections set up a contrast analogous to that of the first and second themes. The third section functions as a development section, blending both types of transformations found in the exposition. Reprises of these types, and their contrast, define the function of the last two sections as a recapitulation, in which the second-theme group is metaphorically transposed. Rochberg has been criticized for mimicking conventional musical structures, but this analysis demonstrates how he successfully reinvents a tonal form with non-tonal transformations.

The Process of Modulation in Musical Collage

ABSTRACTBy exploiting the multivalent implications attendant on principles of quotation, disjunction and juxtaposition, musical collage works of the 1960s, like their analogues in the visual arts and literature, call into question traditional notions of unity. However, these compositions also incorporate new modes of continuity which lend a distinctive expressive force to music of this kind. The present article outlines organisational precepts which composers including Luciano Berio, George Rochberg and Bernd Alois Zimmermann have used to achieve a degree of syntactic mediation: overlap, chromatic insertion and rhythmic plasticity. The common occurrence of these principles in works exhibiting widely divergent stylistic predispositions indicates that they may constitute important technical aspects of this particular repertoire.

Reflections on Rochberg and "Postmodernism"

Reflections on Rochberg and "Postmodernism" tetTfcl JamesWierzbicki i Commenting on the "postmodernist turn in music," Richard Taruskin in his voluminous new Oxford History ofWestern Music declares that the "story begins (or we can begin effectively to tell it) with the firstperformance, on 15May 1972, of the String Quartet no. 3 by George Rochberg."1 In 1972 "postmodernism" had yet to enter the vocabulary ofAmerican cultural commentators, but by the early 1980s it had become a buzz word.2 Soon the label was applied toRochberg, and Rochberg vehemently opposed it. In an essay that triggered a blustery debate within the pages of the journal Critical Inquiry, he articulated the "simple enough" reasons forhis objection: Reflections on Rochberg and "Postmodernism" 109 While I acknowledge the purely temporal sense inwhich the term is used, it ishardly that fact alone which is sufficientfor acquiescing to a term in which the word "modernism" remains embedded and which is intended, I suppose, to describe, referto, indicate those col lective effortsalready set inmotion which are attempting to create a new and more balanced culture, one which must base itselfagain on the past and its relation to the present and the recognition of the validity of continuity. In this sense, itwould be better to invent a new term, and ifone does not come to mind quickly or easily, it would be just as well to get along without a label while we get on with themain business at hand.3 The word was problematic for Rochberg mostly because its root posed "a constant reminder of the sickness of spiritwhich themodern movement engendered, of the loss of values itbrought on, of the imbal ances it caused."4 Vis-?-vis modernism and all that it implied, Rochberg had no use for such a reminder. Once a champion ofmodernism, in the 1960s he found himself caught painfully between modernism's demands and dictates from his artistic conscience.5 Although his writings from the early 1970s resonate with conflicted thoughts, Rochberg nonetheless believed thatwith his Third Quartet he had at last escaped the dilemma. After a long and emotionally tortuous period that he called his "time of turning," Rochberg was convinced that by means of the Third Quartet he had started to move beyond modernism.6 By the time "postmod ernism" came into fashion, Rochberg had made bold strides along his chosen path. Chronology notwithstanding, there was simply no point, he felt, in affixing to his currentwork a tag that smacked of a backward glance. Rochberg died on 28 May 2005. Surely the passing of a prominent American composer warrants new evaluations of his output as a whole, but this essay has only a narrow focus. Prompted by Taruskin's recent pronouncement that the story of musical postmodernism begins with Rochberg's 1972 Third Quartet, the goal here is to suggest that amuch more prophetic model formusical postmodernism can be found in a work for chamber orchestra thatRochberg completed relatively early in his "time of turning." Before discussing Rochberg's 1965 Music for the Magic Theater, however, it is necessary to put into perspective both Rochberg's pre-1965 career and the still slippery concept of musical postmodernism. MO PerspectivesofNew Music II It iswith a curious conceit thatRochberg begins his 1973 "Reflections on Schoenberg," a rambling appreciation published in this journal on the eve of the Schoenberg centennial. In a literaryflourish that at the time must have shocked at least some readers of Perspectives ofNew Music, he likens Schoenberg to awerewolf. Rochberg makes no reference to lycanthropic transformation of the sort enacted by Lon Chaney Jr. so famously in the movies. For Rochberg, therewas nothing moonstruck about Schoenberg's dramatic leap from the safe ground of functional harmony into the atonal vocabu laryof Pierrot Lunaire, nothing so pernicious in Schoenberg's method of twelve-tone composition that itwarranted curing with the musical equivalent of a silver bullet. Rochberg did not compare Schoenberg to a creature occasionally fanged and hairy; the comparison, rather, is to Harry Haller, the central character of Hermann Hesse's 1927 novel Steppenwolf Quoting directly from the preface to the 1963 English-language edi tion of the novel, Rochberg notes thatHesse's protagonist, who truly believed that his human...

The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology (review)

The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Meaning, Intention, Ideology. Edited by Arved Ashby. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004. [viii, 404 p. ISBN 1-58046-143-3. $75.] Music examples, illustrations, index. This collection of fifteen essays aims to develop postmodern approaches to modernist (p. 2) as a means by which to reengage a repertory that throughout its history has been anathema to much of the musical public and at times, even the specialist. Central to this task is the conscientious rejection by the collection's authors of those tenants of modernist discourse that served to oppress, willfully or otherwise, individualized modes of listening. so doing, the volume creates a space within the highly polarized debates of the last century into which today's listener might experience pleasure and even discover musical meaning. dealing with the difficult works of the last century The Pleasure of Modernist Music necessarily restricts itself to the discussion of works generally considered elitist and unapproachable (p. 1). The composers whose works, musical and prose, are most heavily represented across these essays include Boulez, Schoenberg, Webern, Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Babbitt. George Rochberg also receives a fair amount of ink given his public anti-modernist writings that, for the purposes of this book, serve to articulate some of the aesthetic conflicts inherent in a century dominated by the interrelated musical imperatives of structure, process, and autonomy. Over the course of the book's five parts, Reception and Politics, Metaphors for Modernism, Writing and Listening, case Study, and Belated Modernism, an emphasis on listening takes on a cumulative weight, and indeed becomes the collection's most important contribution. The authors each offer different ways of liberating the listener from a post-war project that demanded of them an attention to pitch structure, a project that denied the listener his or her need to create musical meaning relative to his or her own environment. This is a necessary endeavor, if not already too late, given the growing availability of this music to an ever-widening global audience. It stands to reason that people are going to listen to modernist music in ways that its composers could not have imagined, let alone intended. Under such a light, Arved Ashby engages the very issue of intention in his first essay, Intention and Meaning in Modern Music. addition to tracing the pertinent historiography of the intentional fallacy, as well as other death of the author constructs, Ashby's discussion offers a fascinating look at the involvement of the composer in the dissemination and reception of his own ideologies, as opposed to musical works, particularly through the print media. He points out that, at least during the formative years of musical modernism, people were more likely to read about a new musical work than to hear it, given the wider availability of newspapers and journals than radio broadcasts or recordings. The result was that many early modernist compositions became trapped in their composer's ideologies (p. 42), and consequently, the authority of intention seems to have lingered longer in the musical realm than in that of art or literature, although there were important voices of anti-intentionalism during the early formation of the modernist canon. One such voice was that of Theodor Adorno, who understood modernist music as an effective means of political and aesthetic resistance, thereby serving the needs of society over those of the composer. His ideas greatly inform Martin Scherzinger's essay, In Memory of a Receding Dialectic: The Political Relevance of Autonomy and Formalism in Modern Musical Aesthetics. Scherzinger nimbly elucidates the aesthetic philosophies of Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht, which posited aesthetic autonomy as necessarily antagonistic, and which sought to distance itself from the everyday, and therefore position itself as an agent of social change. …

'Multiplication by minus one': Musical Values in East–West Engagement

The cold war is typically regarded as enforcing cultural boundaries; however, it also drew artists and administrators into parallel circumstances and beliefs through processes of negation. One Hungarian music critic characterized the situation as 'multiplication by minus one', for just as the mathematical operation retains the quantity perfectly when changing the sign, so the Western values that were so vehemently opposed in Hungary were in some ways maintained through this very opposition.This premise is considered here through an examination of postwar views of the music of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartók. The conscious rejection of Western values played a key role as Hungarian Communists formulated their own musical values; and engagement with Western standards of value helped to motivate both the ban on some of Bartók's music from 1948 to 1955 and its revival in 1955–56. Likewise, when in the 1970s the American composer George Rochberg wanted to turn away from avant-garde musical styles he associated with Western cold war thought, Bartók's music served as a central model for his postmodern aesthetics because it offered precisely those expressive tonal resources that had been rejected by elite serialist composers.

Robin Elliott and Gordon E. Smith, eds. 2001. István Anhalt: Pathways and Memory. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, xx, 425 pp. ISBN 0- 7735-2102-X (paperback)

Robin Elliott and Gordon E. Smith, eds. 2001. István Anhalt: Pathways and Memory. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, xx, 425 pp. ISBN 0- 7735-2102-X (paperback). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 24, numéro 1, 2003, p. 1-138) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The Recovery of Modern Music: George Rochberg in Conversation

Composer George Rochberg (b. 1918) is the pivot point around which American music took a decisive turn away from Arnold Schoenberg's systematized dissonance, generally known as 12–tone or serial music, and back toward tonality. If it is now safe to return to the concert halls, it is largely because of him. Before turning against 12–tone music in the mid–1960s, Rochberg had been one of its most adept and prestigious practitioners. Thus his ‘conversion’ provoked an outraged reaction from the musical establishment and the avant-garde. However, Rochberg's courage helped to free the next generation of composers from the serial straightjacket to write music that was once again comprehensible to audiences. On a two–CD set, New World Records has re-released recordings of Rochberg's Quartets Nos.3–6, brilliantly performed by the Concord String Quartet (New World Records 80551–2). These works, especially the Third Quartet, were very much at the heart of the controversy caused by Rochberg's attempt to ‘regain contact with the tradition and means of the past’. At his home in Pennsylvania, I spoke with Maestro Rochberg about what is at stake in modern music and about his own extraordinary spiritual and musical journey.