George Rochberg
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George Rochberg, (July 5, 1918, Paterson, New Jersey – May 29, 2005, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) was an American composer. He abandoned serialism after 1963 when his son died, saying that serialism was empty of expressive emotion and was inadequate to express his grief and rage. By the seventies he was causing controversy with often obviously tonal music. He compared atonality to abstract art and tonality to concrete art and compared his artistic evolution with Philip Guston's, saying "the tension between concreteness and abstraction" is a fundamental issue for both of them (Rochberg, 1992).
Rochberg is perhaps best known for his "String Quartet No. 6", which includes a movement of variations on the Pachelbel Canon in D.
A few of his works were musical collages of quotations from other composers. "Contra Mortem et Tempus", for example, contains passages from Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Edgard Varese and Charles Ives.
Rochberg attended the Mannes College of Music, where one of his teachers was George Szell. He was the chairman of the music department at the University of Pennsylvania until 1968, and continued to teach there until 1983.
His later works tend to be neo-romantic (and even neo-Mahlerian) in style.
Major works
- Symphony No. 1
- Symphony No. 2
- Symphony No. 5
- Violin Concerto
- Black Sounds
- Apocalyptica for large wind ensemble
- Transcendental Variations for Strings
- String Quartet No. 6
External links
- [Theodore Presser Company Composer Information: George Rochberg]
- [George Rochberg's Revolution] by Michael Linton, Copyright (c) 1998 First Things 84 (June/July 1998): 18-20.
Listening
- [Art of the States: George Rochberg] three works by the composer
Source
- Rochberg, George (1992). Guston and Me: Digression and Return. Contemporary Music Review 6 (2), 5–8.
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