George Rochberg (July 5, 1918 – May 29, 2005) was an Americancomposer ofcontemporary classical music. Long aserial composer, Rochberg abandoned the technique after his teenage son died in 1964, saying it had proved inadequate to express his grief and was empty of expressive power.[1] By the 1970s, Rochberg's use oftonal passages in his music had provoked controversy among critics and fellow composers. A professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania until 1983, Rochberg chaired its music department until 1968. He became the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in 1978.
Rochberg chaired the music department at theUniversity of Pennsylvania until 1968 and continued to teach there until 1983. In 1978, he was named the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities.[3]
He married Gene Rosenfeld in 1941, and had two children, Paul and Francesca. In 1964, his son died of a brain tumor.
A longtime exponent ofserialism, Rochberg abandoned this compositional technique upon the death of his teenage son in 1964. He said he had found serialism expressively empty and that it had proved an inadequate means for him to express his grief and rage.[1] By the 1970s, Rochberg had become controversial for thetonal passages in his music. His use of tonality first became widely known through the String Quartet No. 3 (1972), which includes a set of variations in the style of late Beethoven. Another movement of the quartet contains passages reminiscent of Gustav Mahler. This caused critics to classify him as aneoromantic composer. He comparedatonality toabstract art and tonality toconcrete art and compared his artistic evolution with the painterPhilip Guston's, calling "the tension between concreteness and abstraction" a fundamental issue for both of them.[4] His music has also been described asneoconservative postmodernism[5]
Of the works Rochberg composed early in his career, his Symphony No. 2 (1955–56) stands out as one of the most accomplished serial compositions by an American composer. He is perhaps best known for his String Quartets Nos. 3–6 (1972–78). Rochberg conceived Nos. 4–6 as a set and named them the "Concord Quartets" after theConcord String Quartet, which premiered and recorded the works. No. 6 includes a set of variations onPachelbel'sCanon in D.
James Freeman, musician and teacher atSwarthmore College, said of Rochberg andserialism: "If George Rochberg can do something like that, there's nothing that I can't do and get away with it. I don't have to write 12-tone music; I can if I want to. I can write stuff that sounds like Brahms. I can do anything I want. I'm free. And that was an extraordinary feeling in the late 1960s for young composers, I think, many of whom felt really constrained to write serial music."[6]
Rochberg's collected essays were published by theUniversity of Michigan Press in 1984 asThe Aesthetics of Survival. A revised and expanded edition,[7] published shortly before his death, was awarded an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 2006.[8] Selections from his correspondence with the Canadian composerIstván Anhalt were published in 2007 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.[9] His memoir,Five Lines, Four Spaces, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2009.[10]
Oboe Concerto (1983), written for and premiered by Joe Robinson
Violin Concerto (1974; rev. 2001), written for and premiered byIsaac Stern with thePittsburgh Symphony Orchestra,Donald Johanos conducting. The concerto was commissioned by the Steinfirst family in memory of Donald Steinfirst, the music critic for over 35 years of thePittsburgh Post-Gazette which participated in the commission. Long a friend of Mr. Steinfirst, Isaac Stern consulted with the family. He premiered and recorded the concerto in Pittsburgh, and included it in his repertoire for several years.
Eden: Out of Time and Out of Space, for guitar and ensemble (1998)
Rochberg, George (1992). "Guston and Me: Digression and Return."Contemporary Music Review 6 (2), 5–8.
Rochberg, George (2005).The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music (revised and expanded ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.ISBN978-0-472-03026-2.
Wlodarski, Amy Lynn. 2019.George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity. Eastman Studies in Music Series, senior ed.Ralph P. Locke. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.ISBN978-1-58046-947-0.
Gagne, Cole, and Tracy Caras (1982).Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.ISBN0-8108-1474-9
Rochberg, George (2012).A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language. Jeremy Gill, ed. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press.ISBN978-1580464130
