Missouri Classical Music News

America has lost one of its great composers, George Rochberg, a controversial and insightful musician who helped lead contemporary classical music back to more “listenable” idioms.

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Some called Rochberg the father of musical postmodernism, though he resisted the label. He was loved and reviled in the academic environment in which he thrived, mainly at the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in Paterson, N.J., in 1919, he fought in World War II and went on to study music in a musical world gripped by Schoenberg's 12-tone dogma, as Rochberg came to view it.

He became an atonal disciple of the great revolutionary and wrote some of the most dramatic, ingenious and richly hued 12-tone music we've heard from an American.

Rochberg didn't turn his back on aggressive modernism because he simply changed his mind, although in the early 1960s he was already questioning modern music's increasing tendency toward ugliness.

Instead he was forced out of his dodecaphonic shell by a horrendous blow of fate. In 1964 his son Paul developed a brain tumor and died at age 15. Rochberg's grief was staggering, and he found that his musical idiom didn't allow him to express the depth of his feeling.

In his darkest hour he began to pound out music on his piano that sounded like late Beethoven, or Brahms, or Mahler. But it was his.

It was beautiful music, too, though it defied the rules of academic political correctness. He was considered an impostor.