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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
Indeterminacy in the New Music (1959)
Human consciousness and thought in the twentieth century have discovered the essential irrationality of the premises on which they are based. That the old world of illusory certainties has disintegrated in the face of new conditions which govern contemporary existence is acknowledged by all who are seriously concerned with man’s destiny, including the physicist, the theologian, and the philosopher. The falling away of values founded on the illusion of rationalistic certainty has left man exposed both to the waywardness of his own nature and to that of the universe around him. Man can predict nothing today except on the basis
Book Chapter
Fiddlers and Fribbles or Is Art a Separate Reality? (1986)
Of his Puritan ancestors, Hawthorne had this to say: “No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine ... would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. ‘What is he?’ murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. ‘A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life—what mode of glorifying God or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler.¹
No sharper dichotomy could be drawn between the exterior world of the
Book Chapter
My Dear Igor (An Imaginary Dialogue) (1957)
Schoenberg:Ach, my dear Igor, so now you are one of us ...
Stravinsky:If you mean, Herr Schoenberg, that I have embraced the serial technique, that is so; but you are undoubtedly aware that I apply it in a completely personal way, therefore there can be no logical basis for claiming that I have also accepted the expressionistic aesthetic of the Vienna School. Subjectivism has always been foreign to my view. My concern with the objective values of music is well known and remains totally unchanged. If I now find that for purely compositional purposes I can no longer
Book Chapter
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