The Music of George Rochberg

Ringer, Alexander L.

doi:10.1093/mq/lii.4.409

Musical Quarterly

1966

DOI: 10.1093/mq/lii.4.409

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The Music of George Rochberg

Alexander L. Ringer¹

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“…59 Although Ringer's claim-from our much later vantage point-now appears a bit infl ated and premature, only Rochberg's harshest critics would deny that the composer did eventually shed the burden of the past, and few would deny that he deserves a special place in the annals of American music as one who did indeed show a way forward. Th is much seems self-evident.…”

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The Apostasy Of George Rochberg

Gillmor¹

2010

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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.Une exploration du rejet bien connu, chez George Rochberg, du modernisme musical — plus particulièrement du sérialisme — au début des années 1960. Cet article examine la conception que Rochberg se faisait de l’espace et du temps musical, de la durée en musique et de ses rapports avec la mémoire, l’identité, l’intuition, ainsi que la perception dans le développement de l’expérience humaine. Il explique la notion d’« écart métaphysique entre la conscience humaine et le cosmos » que Rochberg fait en partie remonter à la proposition de Wittgenstein selon laquelle le jugement éthique et esthétique résiderait en dehors des propriétés du langage. Selon Rochberg, le sérialisme ne parvient pas à fournir un modèle organique tridimensionnel de la durée qui correspondrait à celui qui provient de la perception humaine du temps : passé (mémoire) et futur (prévision) fusionnent en un présent continu, et l’équilibre décisif entre information et redondance se révèle défaillant

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The Apostasy Of George Rochberg

Gillmor¹

2010

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“…3 3 On the notion of connotation see, for example, Ringer (1966), Flynn (1975), Hicks (1981–2), Dixon (1992) and Metzer (2003). On motivic correspondence see, for instance, Budde (1972b), Altmann (1977), Reise (1980–81), Adams (1983) and Danuser (1988) and (1990). …”

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“…11 11 Ringer (1966), p. 416, and Morgan (1991), p. 412, have argued that quotations can be seen as prefabricated material capable of being reconfigured in ways analogous to those through which composers previously made use of the twelve‐note row. Morgan states: ‘Quotation technique and serialism may seem far removed from each other, yet they share at least one essential attribute: in both, the composer begins the compositional process with “pre‐formed” material already at hand and manipulates it through various combinatorial and permutational methods.…”

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The Process of Modulation in Musical Collage

Losada

2008

Music Analysis

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By 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.

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George Rochberg's Road toArs Combinatoria, 1943–63

Wlodarski¹

2018

J Soc American Mus

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George Rochberg often attributed his postmodern shift to the death of his son in 1964. Accordingly, the literature has described his practice of ars combinatoria (“art of combination”) as an “abrupt about-face”—a sudden rejection of modernist aesthetics. But the composer's unpublished essays, diaries, correspondence, and musical sketchbooks suggest that the road to ars combinatoria had well-laid roots in two of his least considered biographical periods: his service during World War II and his serial period. During these two decades, Rochberg actively sought positive models for humanistic composition, historical figures who rose to the level of musical heroes in that they served humanity through their art. But as the war had taught him, heroes are necessarily defined by their struggle against nemeses in ethical conflicts. Correspondingly, he constructed the other side of the artistic world as a realm of vain egoists who sought self-promotion and seemed unconcerned with humanistic modes of expression. As his ideas matured, Rochberg assigned different figures to these archetypes, but the guiding ethical criteria remained fairly consistent throughout. I therefore argue that ars combinatoria was less a sudden aesthetic reversal than it was the result of a longer cumulative process of self-assessment and compositional maturation.

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The Music of George Rochberg

Cited by 5 publications

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The Apostasy Of George Rochberg

The Apostasy Of George Rochberg

The Process of Modulation in Musical Collage

George Rochberg's Road toArs Combinatoria, 1943–63

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