William Copper writes:

>In the recent Tempo magazine there was an article about composer George
>Rochberg.  I seem to have read virtually the same article every 6-8 years,
>and it postulates that GR is the trend-setting composer of the latter 20th
>century.
>
>The "logic" (?) of the author of the article goes like this:
>
>A.   Old music had harmony
>B.   GR copied old music
>C.   Therefore composers who use harmony are copying GR
>
>As someone engaged in an homage to Bach and Shostakovich now, I feel very
>sensitive to the mis-interpretation that I am writing in an attempt to
>revive any older style.

These comments have lured me out of lurkerdom for a response.

Having spent enough time on the fascinating and elusive case of George
Rochberg to produce a doctoral document on his piano and chamber music
(Juilliard, 1987), I have to suggest that Mr.  Copper is oversimplifying
and somewhat misrepresenting the nature of Rochberg's work.  Although I
am less familiar with Rochberg's work since 1987 than I am with his music
up to that point, it is clear to me that Rochberg's "multi-gestural"
experiments represent a phase in his ongoing development.  The return
to the past mentioned by Mr.  Copper emerges in post-serial works of
the mid-1960s such as "Music for the Magic Theater" and "Nach Bach"
(commissioned by the late Igor Kipnis), and is a natural, heart-felt
response to a personal and aesthetic crisis, and represents the composer's
quest for renewal in the wake of a self-perceived dead end.  True,
Rochberg's best-known works do sometimes indulge in a reinvention of older
idioms, philosophically guided in part by the arguments put forward by
Jorge-Luis Borges in his fiction about Pierre Menard, "author" of Don
Quixote.  But even in "Magic Theater," "Carnival Music," the "Concord"
Quartets and other works of the 1960s and 1970s, Rochberg never merely
copies; what he did in those days was much too sophisticated and deeply
motivated for that.  One also finds that the dizzying clash of styles and
use of traditional tonality characteristic of that period become less
evident in works written since 1980.  Rochberg seems to have revisited and
reconsidered his early use of atonal (and perhaps even serial) techniques.
My impression is that more recent scores inhabit a darker, rather
ambivalent emotional world, with in correspondingly ambivalent application
of common practice tonality.  (I think of works like the Violin Sonata and
"Circle of Fire" for two pianos as two examples which I have heard at least
in part.)

As to Rochberg's historical position, it may not be unquestionably evident
just how central a figure he is; it's probably to early to make such
pronouncements.  He was certainly not the only one-time modernist dipping
into the past in the late 1960s -- think of Berio's "Sinfonia," or even
more recent works of his like "Rendering." But Rochberg certainly was an
influential American composer and teacher pointing alternative routes to
young composers steeped in the mid-century avant-garde.  William Bolcom
openly acknowledged his debt to the older composer in editing a series of
Rochberg essays for the book, _The Aesthetics of Survival_.  While his
work tends to borrow more from American vernacular styles than from the
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classics (which he has also utilized),
Bolcom's procedures at times greatly resemble those of Rochberg.  (It also
occurs to me from time to time that Bolcom's work is also in some measure
a continuation of what his teacher Darius Milhaud did before him.) Whatever
one may think of Bolcom's increasingly large output, one can hardly
characterize his music as barren.

I would agree with Mr. Copper that simplistic copying of the past is not a
particularly productive creative avenue;  it's just that George Rochberg
is hardly a simplistic figure, and deserves at least as much accurate
interpretation as Mr. Copper wishes for himself.

Daniel Paul Horn