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George Rochberg's critique of Schoenberg


sgcim

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"We do not, cannot, begin all over again. In each generation because the past is indelibly printed on our central nervous systems. Each of us is part of a vast physical, mental, spritual web of previous lives, existences, modes of thoughts, behaviors and perceptions of actions and feelings reaching much further back than what we call history"

- GEORGE ROCHBERG (Don Sebesky quoting Rochberg)

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And???

I too say "And???" Also, who ever said that Schoenberg said that we "should begin all over again"? Not Schoenberg, for one, AFAIK.

As for "In each generation .. . the past is indelibly printed on our central nervous systems. Each of us is part of a vast physical, mental, spiritual web of previous lives, existences, modes of thoughts, behaviors and perceptions of actions and feelings reaching much further back than what we call history," well, for sure.

The problem is that if we're talking about music, we're talking about a lot of different ways of making music over the course of time, while Rochberg, when writing music in the pastiche-of-styles mode that he more or less came to favor because he found Schoenberg's ways of music emotionality invalid, tended (to use a term that usually I don't like but that fits) "privilege" ways of making music that date back to, at the earliest, only the mid-18th Century.

Also, the turning point for Rochberg, previously involved in writing music in what he felt was a Schoenberg-influenced manner, came by his own account after the death of his young son and his resulting inability to write music in his prior manner that in his view adequately expressed the intense emotions he felt about his young son's death and that he wanted to convey in music. Well, if that was how Rochberg felt, that's how he felt. But what a strange thing to say or imply of a composer, i.e. Schoenberg, whose music frequently was emotionally eruptive to an extreme. What, for example, of Schoenberg's String Trio, which scarifyingly conveys the composer's near-death experience from a stroke? And "Ewartung" isn't exactly a walk in the park. One could say that there is little or no Schoenberg music of any period that is, say, amiable, but then he wasn't an amiable guy.

I should add that while I tend to dislike the often geschrie-heavy music that Rochberg wrote in the first flush of his conversion/reversion experience, I've recently discovered his expertly crafted piano music, which so far isn't that way at all.

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and to clarify, sgcim, that quote is nothing. what Arnold Schoenberg is Sebesky/Rochberg talking about, tonal chromatic, 'atonal', twelve-tone? (His variations, deviations from same?) There's nothing in the least bit 'wrong' with ANY of Schoenberg's modes of expression btw; how yokels listen and how some epigones might have composed is another story...

... And I'll take any Webern, Berg, Skalkottas, Robert Gerhard, Egon Wellesz (George Gershwin) over the whole of Rochberg &/or Sebesky.

Edited by MomsMobley
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Schoenberg always pissed me off.

Every time I'd play a gig, he'd swear up and down that he'd bring a bunch of friends, then he'd usually never show up. If he'd show up at all, he'd be intoxicated and babbling about Danish furniture.

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I would like to know the citation for that quote and see the context. I did a quick search and couldn't find anything -- doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it does make me curious. I did happen upon this long Rochberg piece about Schoenberg. Don't have time to read but tried to quickly scan it to see if I could locate the quote and I didn't see it. In any case, context: http://www.schoenberg.at/library/index.php/publications/show/7608

Edited by Mark Stryker
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I think it's funny (as in LOL) how people who always look askance at things that go "too far out" with the comments similar to "you can't start over" or some such are usually trying to do just that - to start back over without dealing with what it is they don't like happening.

Well, guess what? You really can't start over. So the joke's on them.

Only that's not so funny.

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Looking at the Rochberg piece, the paragraphs that begin section 4, "Forgettable Music," seem to me insultingly wrong-headed, even close to stupid. In particular:

"This decreasing profile of identity [of thematic and harmonic content in music] could be graphed in a rough sort of way, moving from a music with precise identities (Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Braahams, Wagner, Bruckner, Verdi, Strauss, Mahler, early Schoenberg) to a music with a marked decline in its profile of identity (the atonal and 12-tone works of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, late Scriabin, Ives) to a music entirely lacking in any aurally meaningful, identifiable characteristics (post-Webern serial works of Boulez and Stockhausen among others; works of Cage, Feldman, Brown, based on aleatory principles; recent works of Elliott Carter, who in an interview expressed concern that his music cannot be remembered). In short, from a music that can be remembered to a music which can be remembered with varying degrees of difficulty, and finally to a music which utterly (or almost) defies memory." Rochberg then goes on to say that the same thing "can be traced as well in painting and literature."

First, what is this "identity" he speaks of? That piece of music X, once heard, can be recognized as piece of music X? That music that has identity has a readily recognized and identifiable (and/or "translatable") set of emotional meanings? A bit later on, Rochberg adds: "I used to think it was pure nostalgia [that led to his views of what had happened in music and the other arts], a longing for a past Golden Age which always brought me back to the supremely wrought clarities and identities of the old music. Now I realize that it was not nostalgia at all but a deep, abiding personal need for clear ideas, for vitality and power expressed without impediments, for grace and beauty of line, for convincing harmonic motion, for transcendent feeling...."

Well, it can't be the first kind of identity. What piece of of music, once heard, could be more identifiable as what it is than, say, Berg's "Wozzeck" or even Boulez's "Le Marteau"? So it seems like the second sort of "identity" is what Rochberg has in mind, with an emphasis not only on sets of translatable emotional meanings but also, as the second passage suggests, meanings that are attractive to a man like Rochberg -- ones that are marked by "clear ideas ... vitality and power expressed without impediments ... grace and beauty of line ... convincing harmonic motion [and] transcendent feeling. OK, so Gesualdo and Biber among others, way back in time though they are, probably would be a no go for lack of "clear ideas." As for Beethoven -- vitality and power, yes, but if Rochberg thinks that those traits were "expressed" in Beethoven's music without impediments, I wonder what the heck he was listening to. Struggling with and overcoming all sorts of impediments (both dramatic and purely musical) is what much of Beethoven's music is about.

Returning to the first passage, I suppose Rochberg's "a music entirely lacking in any aurally meaningful, identifiable characteristics post-Webern serial works of Boulez and Stockhausen among others; works of Cage, Feldman, Brown, based on aleatory principles; recent works of Elliott Carter") could be modified to music that has characteristics that are not "aurally meaningful, identifiable" to Rochberg. But does he also think that everyone who finds that music to be meaningful is lying? I'm reminded of a concert-goer who once told pianist Eduard Steuermann that Schoenberg's works could not be played from memory because they lacked what Rochberg calls identity and, thus, memorability, When Steuermann told him that he had just played Schoenberg's Piano Concerto from memory, the concert-goer said just that: "You're lying."

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If we're getting anecdotal here, there's always the story about Leonard Bernstein walking into a big meeting of twelve-tone composers, and going immediately over to the piano, and playing "Happy Birthday" in the various forms 12-tone composers use to develop their themes; retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion...

He then asked if any of them could identify it.

Not one of them could...

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And???

I too say "And???" Also, who ever said that Schoenberg said that we "should begin all over again"? Not Schoenberg, for one, AFAIK.

As for "In each generation .. . the past is indelibly printed on our central nervous systems. Each of us is part of a vast physical, mental, spiritual web of previous lives, existences, modes of thoughts, behaviors and perceptions of actions and feelings reaching much further back than what we call history," well, for sure.

The problem is that if we're talking about music, we're talking about a lot of different ways of making music over the course of time, while Rochberg, when writing music in the pastiche-of-styles mode that he more or less came to favor because he found Schoenberg's ways of music emotionality invalid, tended (to use a term that usually I don't like but that fits) "privilege" ways of making music that date back to, at the earliest, only the mid-18th Century.

Also, the turning point for Rochberg, previously involved in writing music in what he felt was a Schoenberg-influenced manner, came by his own account after the death of his young son and his resulting inability to write music in his prior manner that in his view adequately expressed the intense emotions he felt about his young son's death and that he wanted to convey in music. Well, if that was how Rochberg felt, that's how he felt. But what a strange thing to say or imply of a composer, i.e. Schoenberg, whose music frequently was emotionally eruptive to an extreme. What, for example, of Schoenberg's String Trio, which scarifyingly conveys the composer's near-death experience from a stroke? And "Ewartung" isn't exactly a walk in the park. One could say that there is little or no Schoenberg music of any period that is, say, amiable, but then he wasn't an amiable guy.

I should add that while I tend to dislike the often geschrie-heavy music that Rochberg wrote in the first flush of his conversion/reversion experience, I've recently discovered his expertly crafted piano music, which so far isn't that way at all.

I think the context of when the quote was taken is important. His string quartets cyle, which I find quite remarkable, follow this struggle of breaking with the past, then reconciling with it -- the earlier ones having that geschrei, the latter ones quite different, almost lyrical.

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Stefan Wood wrote: "I think the context of when the quote was taken is important."

For sure, in terms of Rochberg's opinions about what he does and doesn't like, but that's no excuse for a presumably sophisticated man saying so many dumb and close to outright false things in the act of defining what he likes and doesn't like in art.

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Stefan Wood wrote: "I think the context of when the quote was taken is important."

For sure, in terms of Rochberg's opinions about what he does and doesn't like, but that's no excuse for a presumably sophisticated man saying so many dumb and close to outright false things in the act of defining what he likes and doesn't like in art.

In what year he said that? After the death of his son? Did he, years later when his music had changed, keep that same opinion, or was there a retraction?

We say a lot of dumb things. We also change our minds.

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Stefan Wood wrote: "I think the context of when the quote was taken is important."

For sure, in terms of Rochberg's opinions about what he does and doesn't like, but that's no excuse for a presumably sophisticated man saying so many dumb and close to outright false things in the act of defining what he likes and doesn't like in art.

In what year he said that? After the death of his son? Did he, years later when his music had changed, keep that same opinion, or was there a retraction?

We say a lot of dumb things. We also change our minds.

That Rochberg article is from 1973, when he was age 55, surely old enough to know better when it comes to saying so many things in an article that IMO were dumb and close to outright false -- that aside from his perfectly justifiable opinions about what he does and doesn't like in art.

​About the death of Rochberg's son and what followed, here is some information from a Rochberg admirer, who deals with R's entire career:

"But in 1961 the Rochbergs’ seventeen-year-old son, Paul, fell ill with a brain tumor. He died three years later, throwing his father into despair. Confronted with his son’s death, Rochberg struggled to give that tragedy some meaning through his music, but the serialism upon which his career had been built he now found empty and meaningless. It was a language that could not bear the weight of his sorrow."

The piece that Rochberg eventually wrote to mark/commemorate his son's death was: Contra Mortem et Tempus ("Against Death and Time"), for violin, flute, clarinet, and piano (1965)

As for "Rochberg struggled to give that tragedy some meaning through his music, but the serialism upon which his career had been built he now found empty and meaningless. It was a language that could not bear the weight of his sorrow" -- I would say, instead, "he now found empty and meaningless" and "could not bear the weight of his sorrow." Again, that this is how Rochberg himself felt cannot be denied. That he felt free to conclude from this personal emotional fact that such music was "empty and meaningless" per se and for everyone and to suggest, further, that such music could not "bear the weight of"/express anyone's sorrow, strikes me as ... you fill in the blank. The Berg Violin Concerto, anyone?
Whether Rochberg eventually changed his mind, I don't know. As I said above, I've found some of his piano music (on a series of Naxos CDs) to be quite effective.
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In this piece, "Guston and Me,” in which Rochberg sees his latter-day style of tonal pastiche as parallel to the return to representation (after decades as a celebrated abstractionist) on the part of the IMO great painter Philip Guston, it seems to me that Rochberg really lets the cat of of the bag:

http://books.google.com/books?id=k0xjK0iaMz4C&pg=PA242&lpg=PA242&dq=rochberg+guston&source=bl&ots=vmK5eW9I0R&sig=MiCEmXwi7Qj1ahlmL_enE_X7jd8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KGLZU6-_BtevyASM7YD4Bw&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=rochberg%20guston&f=false
In particular, Rochberg goes on here to equate tonality in music with representation or concreteness in painting and abstraction in art with atonality and the like in music. In this, it seems to me, Rochberg forgets or ignores several things. First -- and one could, and should have to, write a book about this, which I don't have the time or the ability to do -- all representational art has an abstract dimension, has abstract meanings. And tonal music of any value does, too — it doesn’t purely or merely or (to use Rochberg's favorite term) "concretely" represent specific emotional states. Further, did Rochberg actually look at any of those latter-day Guston paintings that he feels run parallel to his own music? Did he not notice the nature of their imagery, which is as far as one could imagine from the widescreen “heroic” and “lyrical” gestures for which Rochberg’s music strives? Herewith some latter-day Guston (and I love Guston’s work of all periods):
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identity = tunes, I guess

those who equate tonality with expression are usually thinking about what Romanticism thought it was doing

the people who moved on from Romanticism began to find its specific developments of tonality to have become exhausted and to seem inauthentic, while they also questioned its view of interiority and 'expression'

as Larry points out the projected notion of 'tonality' as if it were a fixed entity glosses over the specific technical developments of tonality and also the context of those developments within and at the service of a specific view of Romantic expressivity

a discussion of tonality and expression focussed say on Lully would look a little different

in most contexts 'tonality' means more or less Schumann

generally not Wagner

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in most contexts 'tonality' means more or less Schumann

I would have thought that it meant Beethoven/Mozart/Haydn. Schumann is often quite disruptive that way, lots of fragmentation/instability that doesn't come to rest. Charles Rosen's "The Romantic Generation" has a lot to say about that side of Schumann.

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I don't think anyone is proposing a return to classical tonality. Could be wrong but I think it is that romantic manipulation of tonality that is equated with expression. That said, who knows what they mean really. I don't think Rochberg wants to purge Schumann.

I think you've zeroed in on something here. For sure, it's expressivity (or expressivity that's readily translatable into certain desired feeling states like "heroic," "tragic," "lyrical," "noble", etc.) that is the goal for Rochberg; and that is what one gets from his actual post-conversion music by and large -- a good deal of IMO poster-like geschrei. OTOH, though, at least for Rochberg when he writes about these matters, it's also about "clear ideas, vitality and power expressed without impediments, grace and beauty of line ... transcendent feeling...." In other words, intensity and reliability and "concreteness" of more or less verifiable-in-advance emotions versus (although Rochberg wouldn't say "versus" but something like "plus") the stability and orderliness with which the structural material that yields such emotions is deployed. Thus, even though it may be true that no one "is proposing a return to classical tonality," a yearning for its supposedly lost or semi-sabotaged or pissed-away world of stability and orderliness is one of the more powerful emotions at work in all this. Where I get confused, or see a potential paradox (and this may just be me), is whether stability and orderliness are supposed to be values in themselves here or signs that the expressive results will be, in nature and intensity, what one wishes to summon up. Like what modern music could be more orderly than much of late Hindemith, but there's not much "expressivity" there in the experience of most listeners. And I'm sure that once could come up with lots of highly expressive, or would-be highly expressive, modern works that not only lack structural clarity but whose expressiveness (or "expressiveness") is bound up with the sense that one is encountering parts that don't seem to fit into other parts but that those parts are nonetheless being jammed together.

BTW, I've been trying to work my way through Rochberg's Oboe Concerto, figuring that actual (and I hope open-minded, honest) listening might be the best, if not the only, test. Two days in a row now I've fallen asleep somewhere between the 12- and 17-minute mark of a work that runs 18:35. Maybe today I'll try again, but in the morning rather than after lunch and maybe on earphones.

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Just listened to the Oboe Concerto all the way through. Sounded something like the soundtrack to a circa 1948 film about an unhappy adolescent unjustly confined to a mental ward -- "sensitive" wistful oboe cantilenas, lightly accompanied or in the form of cadenzas, alternate with eruptive, often IMO rather clotted orchestral passages (as in thickish figures for what seems to be the full complement of orchestral strings are mirrored by a four or so French horns). It's as though the sensitive wistful oboe were struggling with and being subdued by the agitated (one might even say) resentful orchestra, which (again, one could say) doesn't "understand" the feelings being expressed by the poor oboe. At about the 10-minute mark a somewhat acidic Prokofiev-like march emerges and is elaborated for about two minutes more; the rhythmic profile of that was, for me, a welcome break from the previous cantilena/eruptive orchestra back and forth, but soon we're in cantilena/eruptive orchestra territory once more, until a final deliquescence closes the door.

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QUOTE: "Fast forward to 1990, and the Times does a big article on the death of twelve-tone music (after it had completely emptied the concert halls), citing many of the leading composers of the day saying things to the effect of, 'Oh, it was all just a big mistake, and we won't do it anymore, if you'd just come back to the concert halls...'"

Can you supply a link or some specific text from this article. Frankly, none of it rings true. I don't believe that 12-tone "emptied the concert halls" or that such composers "begged" audiences to come back. Sounds like a spurious way to discredit some serious music.

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