MUSIC . Suite Spot

Habeas Corpus

Serialism nearly killed the new music scene.


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Published: Jun 8, 2010

It is one of the great ironies of the art world that so many masters achieve their greatest fame after death. Not always — Beethoven was the most famous man of his time, and his funeral drew 20,000 mourners to the streets of Vienna — but usually. Shostakovich and Ligeti, to name two, were well-regarded, if controversial, in their time, but there has been an explosion of interest in both composers since their death. More recently, the same may be said of the work of George Rochberg, a longtime fixture of the Penn composition department who died in 2005 at age 86.

Rochberg was an early adopter of serialism, the atonal music style invented by Arnold Schoenberg, and largely credited with nearly killing the new music scene by chasing away audiences. Following a personal crisis, the death of his son, Rochberg sought refuge in music, but according to his own statements, he was unable to find a way to deal with his grief through his own music, and so he slowly began the process of redefining his language. In 1972, his String Quartet No. 3 premièred, featuring the reintroduction of tonality into his work, to the horror of his academic colleagues. Many have since labored under the misunderstanding that Rochberg's change in direction was a stake in the heart of serialism. It wasn't, and he continued to keep it in his arsenal of tools. It merely signaled the sensible concept that a composer did not have to be straightjacketed into one writing style. That simple notion has snowballed into the unprecedented eclecticism that marks our musical world today. (That and the iPod.)

Two recent CDs from Naxos explore the music Rochberg wrote for solo and duo piano. The material is exquisitely wrought and hugely varied in dynamic and dramatic effect. There is the tuneful, easy swaggering beauty of his Elegiac Pieces, the thundering chromaticism of the Sonata Seria, and the grandly exotic, nearly hourlong Circles of Fire for two pianos. A recent live performance by Mimi Stillman and Coline-Marie Orliac of Slow Fires of Autumn, for flute and harp, displayed textures so vivid that the music seemed palpably physical.

Rochberg's flirtations with various styles once made him difficult to categorize. The value of his body of work as a whole now makes that meaningless. More should hear it, even if the man himself is no longer around to relish the appreciation.

(p_burwasser@citypaper.net)