I did my master’s thesis on George Rochberg and have continued to be fascinated by his music. As part of a longer project on music and trauma, I revisited his life and music in that context. Here is part 1 of some work I did to that end. It is very much work in progress but I’m not sure I have the time/resources/energy to complete it. If you’re down to collaborate on something like this, let me know!
George Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1918. He began his composition studies at the Mannes School of Music, where he studied with (among others) Adolph Weiss, a student of Arnold Schoenberg’s who had emigrated to the United States.[1] His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which he served his country as an infantry lieutenant. Following the war, he continued his studies at the Curtis Institute where he studied with Rosario Scalero (Samuel Barber’s teacher) and Gian Carlo Menotti. In 1948, Rochberg joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he had just completed his master’s degree. In 1950, he traveled to Italy where he met the composer Luigi Dallapiccola, whose approach to composition would greatly affect Rochberg’s own. He continued to teach at Penn in various capacities until his retirement in 1983. His works were widely performed and recorded, and he was the recipient of numerous awards. He was married to Gene, and they had two children: a daughter, Francesca, and a son, Paul.
Rochberg’s early works were written in the lush post-romantic style of his teachers, Menotti and Scalero. In 1952, he broke with this tradition when he composed his Twelve Bagatelles for solo piano. These pieces represented “an open declaration of composing with twelve-tone rows.”[2] He earnestly sought the approval of Luigi Dallapiccola, an Italian composer whom he had befriended in Italy a few years ago. Dallapiccola is among the more lyrical serial composers, and the fact that Rochberg was interested in his criticism suggests that lyricism was important to Rochberg even in his serial music. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Rochberg was hailed as one of the most promising serial composers of his generation. In addition to composing with the technique, Rochberg theorized and wrote extensively on it. His book The Hexachord and its Relation to the Twelve-Tone Row appeared in 1955.
Serial music is so named because the principal musical material comprises an ordered series of pitches. Serial music and serial composers met with a great deal of criticism and today, nearly one hundred years after the technique’s invention, they are still easy targets for critics. Tonal music relies on a hierarchical system of pitch organization in which one pitch, called the tonic, is privileged over all others. When we talk about a piano sonata in C# minor, or a symphony in E major, we are referring to the tonic pitch. The other pitches serve to create varying degrees of tension with respect to the tonic: generally speaking, the “further” from the tonic a given pitch is, the greater the need for resolution to the tonic is. The tonic—a sort of musical “home base”—discharges all of the accumulated tension. As music evolved, composers began to find more adventurous ways to avoid the tonic, which created a great deal of instability in their works. These techniques reached their apex in works by late nineteenth-century composers such as Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler; the sheer length of works by these composers is a testament to their gradual accumulation of tension and avoidance of the tonic. The tension-resolution paradigm associated with tonality shaped other facets of music as well, such as melody and form.
In the 1920s, the composer Arnold Schoenberg developed a new method of organizing pitches.[3] The music in the early part of the century was so intensely chromatic (that is, included notes outside of the prevailing key in order to prolong tonal tension) that he felt tonality had exhausted its utility. Schoenberg’s musical language came of age in the same cultural milieu that Freud was working in: both lived in Vienna around the same time, and they had several friends and colleagues in common. Often hailed as the vanguard of musical expressionism, Schoenberg’s early experiments with free atonality represented an effort to express repressed neuroses. His monodrama Erwartung (1909) used text by Marie Pappenheim, who was related to Bertha Pappenhiem, the first patient to engage with Freud’s “talking cure.”[4]
In contrast to the seven-note major and minor scales (and the five outlying chromatic notes) that commonly appear in tonal music, Schoenberg used all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, and gave each one equal weight: many musicians liken Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system to a “democracy” of pitches. The twelve pitches are organized into a twelve-note series such that each pitch is included only once. Ideally, all twelve notes should be stated before any one is repeated: to extend the “democracy” metaphor, each note gets one and only one vote, and no one pitch is more important than another. The row forms the basis of the composition: it is not a melody, not a motive, not a generator of form; rather, it is a background method of organization. To create variety—the tension and relaxation associated with tonal music—the row can be transformed by transposing it, inverting it, or stating it in reverse order (retrograde). Transposing a row preserves the intervals between notes, but starts the pattern on a different pitch. Inverting reverses the direction of the intervals but preserves their size; inverted row forms can begin on any of the twelve pitches. Retrograding a row preserves the size and direction of intervals, but reads the row form (either the original or an inverted form) backwards. All of these operations preserve the pitch content of the row; ultimately, the operations just change the ordering of the pitches.
In the 1950s, composers in Europe and America began applying principles of serial ordering to musical aspects beyond pitch. Composers such as Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others subjected dynamics, articulation, instrumentation, and other musical parameters to these serial procedures. As a result of these procedures, the music ultimately became so complex that only a computer could successfully “perform” the piece. Many composers of and advocates for this style of music recognized that it was not meant for mass consumption: this was music by experts, for experts. Much of this music lived (and died) in the academy, the university providing a safe harbor (and compensation!) for these highly sophisticated musical experiments. In a famous essay, Princeton University composer Milton Babbitt argued that the average person cannot be expected to understand (much less enjoy) contemporary music, nor can the average performer be expected to play accurately music of such tremendous difficulty. The essay, originally titled “The Composer as Specialist,” was given the more provocative title “Who Cares if you Listen?” by an editor. Babbitt likened his outlook to advances in the sciences: they must take place (and they must be funded!) even if the general public remains largely unaware and does not benefit immediately.
At first glance, this approach to composition might seem cold and mechanical; however, composers still exert total control over their own material. The composer chooses a twelve-tone row based on interesting properties that it may exhibit; writes melodies and harmonies that are suggested by the row; assigns rhythms; and orchestrates the piece. Given the number of available row forms (48 total), a listener might wonder how he or she could be expected to hear the row as it twists and turns through melodies, harmonies, and different transformations. There is no doubt, however, that this music is often difficult to listen to: the familiar melodies, harmonies, and forms of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms are all but absent in this music, which seems to unfold at random. At a fundamental level, repetition—the basic source of pleasure in most music—is something that serial music goes out of its way to avoid.
[1] Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was an Austrian composer who is credited with developing the twelve-tone system.
[2] George Rochberg, Five Lines, Four Spaces. Urbana [IL]: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
[3] Schoenberg was not the first one to do this—many other composers developed similar approaches more or less contemporaneously—but his experiments are certainly the most well-known.
[4] Alexander Carpenter, “Schoenberg’s Vienna, Freud’s Vienna: Re-examining the Connections Between the Monodrama Erwartung and the Early History of Psychoanalysis. The Musical Quarterly 93/1 (Spring 2010), 144-181.