[Uh… I’m not sure where these footnotes went. I’ll try to find them…]
In the early 1960s—around the time that his son became sick—Rochberg’s style began to evolve. In letters written during the second half of the decade, he refers to his use of material either borrowed directly from other composers or modeled on styles or works of other composers. His works Nacb Bach (1966), Music for the Magic Theatre (1966), and the Caprice Variations (1970) all rely on preexisting music: J.S. Bach’s E-major keyboard partita, Mozart’s Adagio from K. 287, and Niccolo Paganini’s twenty-fourth caprice, respectively. In an essay in Critical Inquiry, Rochberg cites a passage by Milan Kundera that describes the failure of modern culture to remind us of the past, and he relates this “forgetting” to music:
Where “forgetting” is not present, it is because the composer, for example, a Bartók or a Berg, has composed not according to the traditions of the music of the past but by remembering those traditions. What kind of music has built “forgetting” into its very fabric?: music without any perceptibly clear motivic or melodic shapes; music without perceptible harmonic syntax or metric/rhythmic syntax; music of designed and generalized textures and colors; music without a clear emotional scenario or no emotional scenario at all.9
He criticizes the modernists’ abandonment of history: their “forgetting:” “If we value Wagner and Brahms for their harmony, why, then, have we given up harmony? If we value Mozart and Chopin for the elegance of their melodies, why, then, have we given up the melodic line? If in the combination of many voices a radiant polyphony emerges, why have we given up counterpoint?”7 He continues by saying music must still be able to “move and touch us,” implying that music of the modernists is lacking in emotional content.
In “Reflections on the Renewal of Music,” he draws a parallel between the evolution of music and the evolution of man: “No matter how far up that ladder [of evolution] he may climb, no matter how far away from his beginnings he may find himself, . . . he will bear within him all that he ever was.”14 Rochberg seeks not to recreate the past, but to acknowledge its role in shaping the present. He views pieces of music as summing up the musics that preceded them, and this is the case with works like third string quartet, the Caprice-Variations, and the Partita-Variations. By mixing tonal and atonal languages within a single work, Rochberg avoids duplicating the past by creating a musical retrospective. His link to the past is unique among contemporary composers: in addition to resurrecting traditions of the past and introducing new techniques into these traditions, Rochberg successfully mimics the music of other time periods.
Rochberg began incorporating tonality into his compositions in the mid-1960s, and his rationale for mixing the tonal and atonal follows:
To regain through conscious and intense effort a meaningfully personal connection with the traditions of the past and integrate that variegated past with an equally variegated present into a large, as inclusive as possible, spectrum of seeming opposites is, I believe, to re-establish the inner tension a composer needs today in order to make the richest possible musical statements of which he is capable.16
Rochberg’s stylistic turn was not without its critics. In a response to Rochberg’s essay in Critical Inquiry, Jonathan Kramer accuses Rochberg of chauvinism, for the composers that he chooses to imitate are predominately European, and not necessarily representative of his past.18 Steven Block also criticizes Rochberg’s mimicry, claiming that the more successful Rochberg is at copying a style, the more the work becomes spiritually devoid.20 That is, if Rochberg composes a work in the style of Beethoven, the closer he comes to Beethoven’s style, the less of his own spirit he will be able to include: the work is more Beethoven than Rochberg. Additionally, he can never infuse a work, no matter how expertly copied, with Beethoven’s spirit. For Block, Rochberg’s imitations of tonal music appear to be empty formalisms. Kramer argues that the coexistence of tonal (historical) and atonal (contemporary) movements in one large piece as a way to break from modernism is, in fact, modern in that no previous composer had integrated past and present in such a way as Rochberg. Kramer says, “Ironically, during the brief period when he actually did achieve modernism--by using style confrontation as a structural principle--Rochberg’’s self-defensive prose trumpeted his reclaiming of the past.”21