Tag: George Rochberg

Rochberg’s lines and spaces

jamesprimosch5 Comments

Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music by George Rochberg is disappointing for those of us who were hoping for a more comprehensive memoir. There are only glimpses of a personal narrative here. I would have liked to hear more about Rochberg’s family of origin, his own family, his work at Theodore Presser Co. and at the University of Pennsylvania.  But George chose to make the book principally about his music. (I say “George chose”, but my understanding is that the published book is only a fraction of a much longer manuscript - hence the somewhat patchwork form of the book. You’ll have to visit the Sacher Foundation to read the whole thing.) The book is mostly about the origins of selected pieces of George’s, combined with praise for the best performers of those pieces, and warmed-over polemic aganist modernism in general and serialism in particular. Actually, the warming-over is more like boiling over. Rochberg in his last years remained intensely angry about what he saw as the evils of serial music. This is mostly old news, though the book includes a new attack on Joseph Straus for his article demonstrating how serial composers didn’t actually dominate the musical culture the way people think they did, Rochberg saying this is an attempt to “de-Stalinize” the era.

George’s voice does come through in the book, and not always in a flattering way. Throughout, the tone is pretentious - all rehearsals are exhaustive, all his pieces seem to be of the utmost expressive intensity at all times - as though he needs to reassure himself of his work’s importance. Although he is nice about some performers of his music, sometimes to the point of overpraising them, there is also a striking and sad lack of generosity toward his colleagues. George has nothing to say about those who worked with him at Theodore Presser Co., and nothing about his composer colleagues at Penn, except some shabby comments about George Crumb’s music. (The one mention of a Penn colleague of any kind is of how medievalist Norman Smith confirmed that the Latin for the title of Contra Mortem et Tempus was correct.) Relatively few composer colleagues are mentioned in the book and George almost never acknowledges owing any of them any musical debt. He is, in general, only influenced by dead composers. He takes pains to make clear that he was writing 12-tone music before he met Dallapiccola. He does show some collegiality when he expresses his gratitude to Ulysses Kay for helping proof the parts to his early Night Music, or to William Schuman for his positive reaction to Rochberg’s Sonata-Fantasia.  And he does acknowledge a few contemporary works. There are passing references to the Barber Piano Sonata - as a piece in the background of the Sonata-Fantasia - and to one of Ligeti’s woodwind quintets - mentioned in a discussion of Rochberg’s own quintet. But he seems to work in a kind of isolation. You wouldn’t know from this book that any other composer of that period was rejecting aspects of modernism as was Rochberg.

The consequence of this isolation can be some curious assertions. Like the self-deception I posted about earlier, this example has to do with Crumb. Rochberg speaks of having “invented” the piano harmonics he employed in his chamber piece Contra Mortem et Tempus. These are not the sympathetic harmonics that we know from Schoenberg’s and Berg’s piano writing, involving silently depressed keys. Rather, the ones George used require touching the piano string at the appropriate node, just like playing harmonics on a violin or guitar. I don’t have the scores at hand, but I am fairly certain George Crumb used such harmonics in his Five Pieces for Piano and Night Music I, of 1962 and 1963 respectively - before Rochberg’s 1964 Contra. Now, Crumb did not join the Penn faculty until 1965, but it still seems odd that Rochberg was not aware of his younger colleague’s use of this technique - and odd that years later he still didn’t know Crumb’s use of harmonics predated his own.

And yet, for those of us who love the Serenata d’estate, the Second Symphony, the Third Quartet, Contra Mortem et Tempus, the Sonata-Fantasia, and more; for those of us who are grateful for the insights gained by studying with George; for those of us who admire the courage and passion with which George pursued his musical visions, the book is fascinating, if sometimes sad reading.

Répons response

jamesprimosch7 Comments

Michael Kimmelman’s piece on Boulez in the NY Times today is mostly about Boulez the persona, then about Boulez the conductor, while Boulez the composer is a distant third. But what got my attention in the article was related to the composer angle. According to Kimmelman, Boulez’s Répons has been “rarely performed, just a few dozen times”.

On what planet is a piece that has been played “a few dozen times” accurately characterized as rarely performed?

In the real world, most composers - including those who are doing work at least as interesting as Répons, maybe more so - consider themselves very lucky if a piece receives a second or third performance. A tiny handful of American composers might have some pieces that are performed “a few dozen times”, but those pieces would never be thought of as “rarely performed”.

The premise behind Kimmelman’s remark about Répons is that the piece should be more widely played - after all, it is by Pierre Boulez; after all, it is “the first major work he wrote using the electronic-music institute in Paris, Ircam.”  This premise overestimates Boulez’s importance as a composer. If I had to pick a favorite member of the post-war European avant-garde, it would be Berio or Ligeti, not Boulez. If I had to pick an atonal piano sonata from the post-war era, it would be George Rochberg’s Sonata-Fantasia, not the Boulez 2nd. Try to imagine Boulez’s standing in the field if he wasn’t a leading conductor. Wouldn’t he be on about par with Dutilleux?

Répons is certainly impressive to see (I saw the piece done in NYC in the 1980s). There are six soloists, ensemble, surround sound, enough electronic gear to launch the space shuttle - but the musical payoff is not commensurate with the apparatus at hand.  (Mario Davidovsky used to joke about pieces that metaphorically use the space shuttle to drive down the Jersey Turnpike.) The moment when the electronics kick in is admittedly dazzling, but after that first entrance, the thrill soon wears off.  I remember two things from the piece in the versions I have heard: a quirky mixed meter allegro section, and mostly a whole lotta’ trills - not enough to carry a piece of that length. (The DG recording runs about 40 minutes, I understand later revisions have yielded a longer piece. Maybe there is more going on in those longer versions.) The recent Boulez piece I rather prefer is Sur Incises, which is scored for a mere nine players, without electronics, yet is more varied in its gestural repertoire. I get a more satisfying sense of narrative (fractured though it may be) from Sur Incises than from Répons.

However, my main concern is not Boulez, but the problem of the 2nd performance. In the orchestral world, there is a certain amount of prestige when an ensemble does a premiere, but the glamour quotient for subsequent performances falls off fast. (The exception is when there is a fad for a particular composer’s work, and then being on the bandwagon has its own kind of chic.) Too many first-rate pieces languish. To pick three such pieces at random: Melinda Wagner’s Trombone Concerto; Stephen Hartke’s Symphony #3, Augusta Read Thomas’s Orbital Beacons - these are all pieces well deserving of a “couple dozen” performances, but I don’t think those performances will be forthcoming; I hope I am mistaken.

Of course, there are exceptions, and of course, I and my colleagues are profoundly grateful for the opportunities that orchestras do give us. In my own recent experience, I am extraordinarily grateful to the Chicago Symphony for arranging a tryout of my Songs for Adam with the Chicago Civic Orchestra last spring. Composers for orchestra don’t get the out-of-town tryout that a composer for the musical theatre does. The second or third performance of an orchestral work affords a chance to test the myriad corrections and adjustments that a first performance suggests.

While orchestras are right to look to new music as a way of invigorating concert life, the seedlings of interest planted by such efforts will have shallow roots unless compositions are given an ongoing life and composers a more than sporadic presence in our concert halls.

Remembering Rochberg

jamesprimosch1 Comment

I recently finished reading George Rochberg’s memoir, Five Lines and Four Spaces. I wrote a brief comment about the book in an earlier post, and although I am trying to make progress on my piece for the Albany Symphony, I hope to be writing again about the book in the next few days. For now, here is an essay I wrote in connection with a performance of George’s music by Orchestra 2001 a few years ago. I am indebted to John Harbison for the Milosz quote.

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Composer, pianist, publisher, writer, administrator, teacher – there were many vehicles for George Rochberg’s formidable impact on musical life. The University of Pennsylvania benefited from George’s efforts in the last two of these categories, for he served as chair of the music department and as professor of composition. I had the privilege of experiencing his presence at Penn myself when, in the fall of 1978, I took two classes with George as part of my graduate studies in composition at the University of Pennsylvania. There was a composition seminar, which was to focus on writing for orchestra; and a course in 19th century chromatic harmony, where George would expound on “circular harmonic sets” (his way of describing certain symmetrical harmonic relationships) and “the harmonic envelope” (his term for the surface details through which a composer projects the harmonies of a piece.) George’s manner in both courses was discursive. He would circle around a topic slowly, offering oracular pronouncements, generalizations, proverbs. Some of his comments were wry. In speaking of the material state of the composer in today’s world, George pointed out to us “if money corrupts, you are incorruptible.” But most of his comments were more serious. “The problem with composers today is that they don’t know how to write accompaniments for melodies” was one statement I remember hearing from George early on. And, in the manner of an Old Testament prophet, he told us that the “11th commandment” for us as composers was “Thou Shalt Make Shapes.” With comments like these, George was inviting us toward the ideal he held out as his own: to create music that fulfilled its spiritual responsibilities with the utmost clarity, richness, and vividness, with harmonies clearly projected, with melodic shapes of distinctive profile.

There were no technical means, no style that could be rejected – anything was fair game if it could serve the expressive task at hand. Well, not quite anything. George made perfectly clear his rejection of the mid-century avant-garde, which he saw as artistically bankrupt, its myriad compositional strategies having little to offer us as aspiring composers. He even had little good to say about the modernist masters from the first part of the 20th century, particularly the Second Viennese School whose languages he had shown himself to be a master of in his works of the 1950s. It is a curious fact that despite George’s acid comments on Schoenberg, he never abandoned atonal and expressionist gestures, which continue to appear in his music long after he started employing tonal idioms. What George set aside was the systematic side of serialism, preferring that the rigor of the music reside in its tenacious adherence to an intuitive path, rather than in patterns of structure that George came to see as extrinsic to the matter at hand – the problem of “making shapes” with a maximum of expressive power.

Instead of modernism, George held before us the canon of tonal music from Bach to Mahler. The notion that this canon had something to tell young composers was, in 1978, still startling. The idea was so conservative that it was radically progressive. Having come from an undergraduate experience that emphasized whatever was the latest thing, it took time to get my mind around the idea that the plan for George’s composition seminar included studying Pictures at an Exhibition and two Mahler symphonies. Mind you, this was for composition seminar, not orchestration class. When the shock wore off, I did experience the course as nourishing. The issues George pointed out to us in a tonal context – for example, “writing accompaniments for melodies” - became for me the need to project harmonies transparently, with character and melodic interest, even if the chords involved were post-tonal.

In George’s harmony class I worked on a piano piece in a 19th century romantic style based on idioms from Chopin and Liszt. What I remember most about George’s comments is how he urged me to extend a cadenza late in the piece: “spin it out, let it speak, let it take the time it needs.” He was inviting me toward a greater generosity of compositional voice. There is a generosity of this sort in George’s inclusive approach to musical style. His music since the 1970s was not just tonal, but polystylistic. Like Mahler, he wanted to embrace universes of expression in his music. While there are pieces from this period that are quite tonal throughout, embracing a 19th century idiom, most often he mixed idioms in a wide-ranging stylistic array. He by no means gave up writing non-tonal music. The so-called Concord Quartets, the 4th, 5th and 6th quartets, written, like the 3rd Quartet, in response to a request from the Concord String Quartet, were created as a group, in imitation of the sets of pieces that comprise a single opus, like the quartet sets by Haydn and Mozart.  I was lucky enough to attend the premiere of this set at Penn’s University Museum. Hearing all three pieces in a row was an exhausting and astonishing experience, the fertility of the man’s imagination being the chief source of the astonishment. Here was an extraordinarily wide range of expressive types, in marked contrast to the modernist tendency toward cultivating a narrow range of such types, even a single such type – think of the powerful but limited expressive range of Varese, or of the expressionist painters who created many canvases that were variants on a signature gesture or form. Instead, George engaged a different part of the modernist tradition, one represented better by Ives and Mahler than Webern and Varese. Consider the range covered in the Sixth Quartet. The work begins with an atonal fantasia, presenting vivid gestures, both dramatic and evocative, strung together in an improvisational manner. The scherzo that follows uses a Viennese classical gestural language, but with a harmonic idiom that partakes of much later practice. Then we come to the central set of variations. This was perhaps the most striking movement in the piece at the premiere, for the basis of the movement is the famous, or infamous, Pachelbel canon. Yes, the hit of classical radio in the 70s, thereafter heard in myriad arrangements, and as accompaniment to more than a few bridal processions. The reaction in the hall when the basis of the movement became apparent was one of amusement and disbelief – George was going to do something with this beautiful little piece that had been made so banal through repetition? He certainly was. At George’s hands, the little piece -  really, the bass line and harmonic progression of the piece - are transfigured. The movement follows a rough expressive arc, beginning with the simplest of statements of the underlying structure, and moving through a variety of tonal idioms, finally reaching a Mahler-esque version, and eventually retracing its steps to a simple outline. The movement’s journey covers much more territory than one would think possible given the vehicle at hand. After the variations, Rochberg offers a brief serenade that again is in a post-tonal idiom, and a finale that recalls the finales of the Viennese classical period, but from a nostalgic point of view, with moments of repose interrupting the onrushing motion.

In his polystylistic works like the 6th Quartet, George offered an uncommonly inclusive vision of what a piece of music could contain. The example this music set before us as students was a challenge to openness, to generosity, to breadth – but always at the service of an intensely focused spiritual impulse.

Sometimes George’s classroom remarks were expressed in a more poetic manner: “All we are doing as composers is drawing in the air, coloring the air”.  The poignant evanescence of music is one of the secret sources of its gentle and devastating power over us. George’s own “drawings in the air” continue to carry a spiritual charge for us, not least because of particular cultural moment in which they appeared. A poem of Czelaw Milosz speaks to this point. Milosz wrote “A Task” in 1970, just before the Rochberg 3rd quartet appeared:

In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life
Only if I brought myself to make a public confession
Revealing a sham, my own and of my epoch:
We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons
But pure and generous words were forbidden
Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dare to pronounce one
Considered himself as a lost man.

George Rochberg had the courage to speak to us in his music with pure and generous words, and yet, he is no lost man. In the presence of the gift of his music, for as long as the drawing in the air lingers, we too are no longer lost.

How we fool ourselves

jamesprimosch3 Comments

“The determining impulse for the Third Quartet was a fall 1971 concert that took place at the University of Pennsylvania… [that included] George Crumb’s Black Angels… This concert and performance of Crumb’s work, which I’d not heard before, helped produce the seed for my Third Quartet. I remember with absolute clarity that the moment Black Angels ended and I was leaving the hall I said to myself, “Now I know what not to do.”

-from, Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music by George Rochberg

And so George went home and wrote his important and beautiful Third String Quartet: a piece that juxtaposes tonal and modernist musics; that layers tonal music with non-tonal figuration; that features a rapturous major key adagio; and that opens with a fortissimo statement in rhythmic unison of a repeated tritone-laden motto that returns later in the piece - all traits that Rochberg’s Third Quartet shares with Crumb’s Black Angels.