The Apostasy Of George Rochberg

Abstract

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.

Résumé

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.

Notes

• [1] Rochberg, liner note for the 1973 recording of the Third String Quartet (Nonesuch H-71283); reprinted in Joan DeVee Dixon, George Rochberg: A Bio-Bibliographic Guide to His Life and Works (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1992), 139.
• [2] Rochberg, ibid., 141.
• [3] See, for example, Steven D. Block, “George Rochberg: Progressive or Master Forger?” Perspectives of New Music 21, nos. 1–2 (Fall–Winter 1982 / Spring–Summer 1983): 407–9; Lance W. Brunner, “George Rochberg: “The Concord Quartets,” Notes 38, no. 2 (December 1981): 423–6; Andrew Porter, “Musical Events: Questions,” New Yorker, 12 February 1979, 109–15; and Hugh Wood, “Thoughts on a Modern Quartet,” Tempo 111 (December 1974): 23–6.
• [4] For a discussion of Rochberg’s and Anhalt’s different responses to modernism, see Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg (1961–2005), ed. Alan M. Gillmor (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), xiii–xxxvii. Portions of this essay first appeared in my introduction to this volume.
• [5] George Rochberg to Istvan Anhalt, letter of 9 September 1961, in Gillmor, Eagle Minds, 5–6. The works in question were Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer (1961), Carter’s Double Concerto for Harpsichord, Piano and Two Chamber Orchestras (1961), and Kirchner’s Concerto for Violin, Violoncello, Ten Winds, and Percussion (1960). Duende literally means “imp,” “goblin,” or “demon”; for Lorca, duende is the “mysterious power” of great art: “‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there is no greater truth. These dark sounds are the mystery, the roots pushing into the soil which we all know, which we all ignore, but from which comes what is real in art . . . Angel and muse come from outside; the angel gives light and the muse gives shape . . . The duende, though, must be awakened in the deepest dwellings of blood.” From the text of a lecture the poet gave in Havana and Buenos Aires in 1933, “Theory and Function of the Duende,” in Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Poems, trans. Merryn Williams (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992), 219–30.
• [6] Rochberg to Anhalt, letter of 1 July 1963, in Gillmor, Eagle Minds, 22.
• [7] Rochberg, “Pierre Boulez: Structures,” Notes 14, no. 2 (March 1957): 197. It is interesting to note that Boulez would write, some thirty years after the composition of Structures, that great art was “a mixture of the rational and the irrational; the two are like a knot that is impossible to untie.” “The Composer and Creativity,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 11, no. 2 (November 1988): 122.
• [8] Rochberg, “Reflections on the Renewal of Music,” Current Musicology 13 (1972): 76; reprinted in Rochberg, The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, ed. with intro. by William Bolcom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 233. As a kind of corollary to Rochberg’s aphorism, we might add the following statement by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin: “Memory affects the music-listening experience so profoundly that it would not be hyperbole to say that without memory there would be no music.” Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006), 162–3.
• [9] See Rochberg, “Indeterminacy in the New Music,” Score 26 (January 1960): 9–19; reprinted in Rochberg, Aesthetics of Survival, 3–15.
• [10] See Rochberg, “Duration in Music,” in The Modern Composer and His World, ed. John Beckwith and Udo Kasemets (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961), 56–64; reprinted in Rochberg, Aesthetics of Survival, 71–7.
• [11] Ibid.
• [12] Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Art, Mind, and Religion: Proceedings of the 1965 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy, ed. W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), 88–9.
• [13] Rochberg, “The Concepts of Musical Time and Space,” in Aesthetics ofSurvival, 132.
• [14] Rochberg, “Duration in Music,” 67.
• [15] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology I, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 24.
• [16] Ibid., 25.
• [17] Rochberg, “Reflections on Schoenberg,” Perspectives of New Music 11, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1973): 77; reprinted in Rochberg, Aesthetics of Survival, 63.
• [18] See, for example, Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1965).
• [19] Rochberg to Anhalt, letter of 30 April 2000, Istvan Anhalt Fonds (MUS 164), Music Division, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. The extensive correspondence between Rochberg and Anhalt—nearly four hundred letters written between 1961 and 2005—are divided mainly between Library and Archives Canada and the George Rochberg Collection of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. A selection of 252 of these letters appears in Gillmor, Eagle Minds.

  It should be noted that Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist approach to the problem of serialism has its critics. Morag Grant, for example, questions his assumption that musical and spoken languages function analogously on primary and secondary levels of articulation. In her view, such a binary system of communication fails to take into account the distinctions between open (serial) and closed (thematic) musical systems as well as aesthetic and semantic modes of information. Moreover, by insisting upon “the articulatory power of hierarchies,” Grant suggests, Lévi-Strauss risks placing himself in the unenviable position of rejecting not only serial music (with all its unlovely connotations in the popular mind) but also a great deal of music that belongs to a parallel stream of early modernism: Debussy’s more athematic, tonally ambiguous, and formally amorphous piano Préludes, for example. M. J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 212–3.

• [20] Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “The Challenge of Contemporary Music,” in Developing Variations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 270–1, 275.
• [21] See Charles Ives, Essays before a Sonata, the Majority, and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (New York: Norton, 1962), esp. 75–7.
• [22] Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni, intro. David Robey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 220–1. There is, of course, an extensive literature, both pro and con, on the viability of serialism. On the negative side of the ledger, William Thomson requires an entire monograph to defend his bluntly stated thesis: “Whatever posterity may determine to have been the merit of his [Schoenberg’s] innovations as a composer, the rationale he devised for his music was derived from untenable hypotheses.” Schoenberg’s Error (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 37. No less a champion of Schoenberg than Glenn Gould declared in a 1963 lecture at the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati that the “fundamental effect” of Schoenberg’s soundworld “has been to separate audience and composer. One doesn’t like to admit this, but it is true nonetheless.” Glenn Gould, Arnold Schoenberg: A Perspective, foreword Arthur Darack (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Press, 1964), 17; reprinted in The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. with intro. by Tim Page (New York: Knopf, 1984), 119.
• [23] Rochberg, “Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of the Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism),” Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984): 317–40; Jonathan D. Kramer, “Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg?” Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984): 341–54; Rochberg, “Critical Response: Kramer vs. Kramer,” Critical Inquiry 11 (March 1985): 509–17.
• [24] Rochberg to Anhalt, letter of 20 May 1984, in Gillmor, Eagle Minds, 141.
• [25] Rochberg, “Can the Arts Survive Modernism?” 332.
• [26] For an extended discussion of Rochberg and postmodernism, see James Wierzbicki, “Reflections on Rochberg and ‘Postmodernism,’” Perspectives of New Music 45, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 108–32.
• [27] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), viii.
• [28] See Gertrude Stein, Picasso (1938; repr. Boston: Beacon, 1959), 11.
• [29] See, for example, Humboldt’s Gift (1975). Bellow borrowed the expression from the British painter, novelist, and critic Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), for whom it was a symbol of a confused, decadent, and apathetic postwar Western European society—a vulgar mass of dead minds, of somnambulist automata, a “moronic inferno of insipidity and decay.” Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career Up-to-Date (London: Hutchinson, 1950), 169. It thus offered Bellow an appropriate and vivid metaphor for what he perceived to be the corruption, dehumanization, and shallowness of contemporary American society. As Martin Amis reminds us, however, “The moronic inferno is not a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course, primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy . . . It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality.” The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), x–xi.
• [30] Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 215.
• [31] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Cecil K. Ogden and Frank P. Ramsey, intro. Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), 189.
• [32] Rochberg, “Can the Arts Survive Modernism?” 336–7.
• [33] Ibid., 320.
• [34] Ibid., 331.
• [35] Kramer, “Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg?” 342.
• [36] It would appear to be no mere coincidence that the modernist project, which highly prized experimentation and originality in its search for a singular underlying reality—essential components of capitalist notions of creative liberty, individualism, and entrepreneurship—reached the apex of institutional acceptance during the height of the Cold War. If there is indeed a link, there is a certain irony in the fact that the Soviet Union was not alone in aestheticizing politics, albeit with far less subtlety. See, for example, Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
• [37] Kramer, “Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg?” 353.
• [38] Rochberg, “Critical Response,” 509.
• [39] Ibid., 517.
• [40] Rochberg to Anhalt, letter of 15 January 1985, in Gillmor, Eagle Minds, 157.
• [41] Rochberg to Anhalt, letter of 23 April 1985, in Gillmor, Eagle Minds, 163.
• [42] The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, s.v. “Kramer, Jonathan D” (by James Chute).
• [43] Susan McClary, “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition,” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring 1989): 63.
• [44] Milton Babbitt, “The Unlikely Survival of Serious Music,” in Milton Babbitt: Words About Music, ed. Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 163.
• [45] Pieter C. van den Toorn, Music, Politics, and the Academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 61.
• [46] Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 543.
• [47] Richard Taruskin, “After Everything: Postmodernism: Rochberg, Crumb, Lerdahl, Schnittke,” The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5:435.
• [48] Rochberg, liner note for the 1973 recording of the Third String Quartet (Nonesuch H-71283); reprinted in Dixon, George Rochberg, 141.
• [49] Rochberg, quoted in Richard Dufallo, Trackings: Composers Speak with Richard Dufallo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 72.
• [50] The Kapell Trio, Rochberg: The Three Piano Trios, Gasparo Records (Gasparo GSCD-289) (1998).
• [51] Rochberg to the author, letter of 2 November 1998.
• [52] Anhalt to Rochberg, letter of 29 October 1998, Istvan Anhalt Fonds (MUS 164), Music Division, Library and Archives Canada.
• [53] See Alan Gillmor, “Echoes of Time and the River,” in Taking a Stand: Essays in Honour of John Beckwith, ed. Timothy J. McGee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 24.
• [54] Hermann Bahr, Expressionism, trans. R. T. Gribble (London: Henderson, 1925), 84.
• [55] Quoted in Robert S. Wistrich, Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 11.
• [56] Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 47.
• [57] Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973), 142.
• [58] Joseph N. Straus, “A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism in American Music,” Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 3 (August 2008): 377.
• [59] Alexander Ringer, “The Music of George Rochberg,” Musical Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 1966): 426.
• [60] Quoted in Guy Freedman, “Metamorphosis of a 20th Century Composer,” Music Journal 34, no. 3 (March 1976): 38.
• [61] Quoted in Harrison, 1910, 75.