George Rochberg, Composer, Dies at 86

New York Times
June 1, 2005

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."