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"Rochberg, George"
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The aesthetics of survival
As a composer, George Rochberg has played a leading role in bringing about a transformation of contemporary music through a reassessment of its relation to tonality, melody, and harmony. In The Aesthetics of Survival, the author addresses the legacy of modernism in music and its related effect on the cultural milieu, particularly its overemphasis on the abstract, rationalist thinking embraced by contemporary science, technology, and philosophy. Rochberg argues for the renewal of holistic values in order to ensure the survival of music as a humanly expressive art. A renowned composer, thinker, and teacher, George Rochberg has been honored with innumerable awards, including, most recently, an Alfred I. du Pont Award for Outstanding Conductors and Composers, and an André and Clara Mertens Contemporary Composer Award. He lives in Pennsylvania.
eBook
Istvan Anhalt
Istvan Anhalt, born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1919, studied with Zoltán Kodály before being conscripted into a forced labour camp during World War II. In the late 1940s he studied under Nadia Boulanger and Soulima Stravinsky before emigrating to Canada in 1949, where he has been an important figure in the Canadian music scene for the last fifty years.
eBook
Reflections on a Colleague and Friend
These are reflections and ruminations, thoughts and feelings about my friend Istvan Anhalt and our long friendship of over forty years.¹ We first met at the International Conference of Composers held at Stratford, Ontario, in the summer of 1960. It’s hard to pinpoint precisely what drew us together. Surely our initial responses to each other’s music, but beyond that, those human places from which music itself arises. One of William Blake’s proverbs comes to mind: “the bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” Genuine friendship is not possible without the kinship of shared attitudes, tastes, interests. But too
Book Chapter
Eagle Minds
Eagle Minds—a selection from the correspondence between the Canadian composer and scholar Istvan Anhalt and his American counterpart George Rochberg—is a splendid chronicle and a penetrating analysis of the swerving socio-cultural movements of a volatile half-century as observed by two highly gifted individuals.
Beginning in 1961 and spanning forty-four years, their conversation embraces not only music but other forms of contemporary art, as well as politics, philosophy, religion, and mysticism. The letters chronicle the deepening of their friendship over the years, and the openness, honesty, and genuine warmth between them provide the reader with an intimate look at their personalities. A fascinating intellectual tension emerges between the two men as they record their individual responses to musical modernism, to changing political and social realities, and to their Jewish heritage and sense of place, one as a son of Ukrainian immigrants to the United States, the other as a refugee from war-torn Hungary.
Allowing us a privileged glimpse into the private lives and thoughts of these fascinating men, Eagle Minds is a valuable tool for scholars interested in North American composers in the late twentieth century and essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural and social history of that era.
eBook
The New Image of Music (1963)
The break with tradition which resulted from profound changes affecting the sound, structure, and form of music continues to exert its powerful but negative influence on composers, few of whom have been able to accept it without qualm or reservation. This accounts in large measure for the difficulties they have experienced in attempting to solve their problems. Ambivalence, uncertainty, and nostalgia are reflected in the attitudes and works of the masters of the first half of our century—Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartok; although, in the case of Varèse, we see no sign of the vacillation that afflicted his generation. The
Book Chapter
The Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Survival (1969)
It takes some sense of history, however vague or dim, just to utter the term avant-garde in relation to the aesthetic and stylistic problems of art. Implicit in the term for me is the handy, if fanciful, image of Zeno’s “irreversible arrow of time,” and it is generally assumed that theavant-gardeeither sits on the point of that arrow, penetrating to the next unfolding moment of time, or perhaps even occupies the whole of the arrowhead itself, its sharp cutting edges ending in the point which will tear into the fabric of the future. Before we begin though we
Book Chapter
The Marvelous in Art (1982)
In his novel,Fifth Business,Robertson Davies asks:
Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?³
Josef Pieper, the contemporary German philosopher, quotes Thomas Aquinas in his essay, “The Philosophical Act”: “The reason ... why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvellous.”⁴ Pieper
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Guston and Me
On one of my rare (these days) visits to New York I saw an exhibit of drawings by Philip Guston at the Museum of Modern Art. What led me there was not so much interest as just plain curiosity. Guston’s name and work had always existed ever so vaguely on the periphery of my inner awareness of American painters. Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky as well as Franz Kline and Mark Rothko had absorbed the greater part of my early fascination during the 1950S with the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. On the way into the show I picked
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