Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music (review)

In describing his own music to violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved in 2000, George Rochberg wrote of an "all-at-once world" in which "all that matters once again is craftsmanship of the ancient kind, taste of the kind Mozart and Haydn possessed; judgment of the kind Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Bartók applied to every major decision they made" (p. 144). Indeed, this is a volume of "all-at-once" memoirs, wherein Rochberg examines his life through lenses musicological, apologetic, critical, and undoubtedly personal. The scope and ambition of Rochberg's undertaking is never cumbersome, although his quasi-chronological approach disrupts the imposition of "early, middle, late" chronologies so often foisted upon composers in retrospect. Rochberg was aware of the multifaceted nature of his book, noting that in some regards it is a "history of twentieth century music and its discontents" (p. 228). In many ways, it provides an excellent companion to the recent publication of his correspondence with Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt (Alan M Gilmor, ed., Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg [Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2007]).

The memoirs carry the overriding sense that Rochberg wished to write about his music to avoid musicological conjecture. This is both fascinating and irritating for the musicologist who may be tempted to ask, "Well, what is left?" Rochberg presents his self-study as a gift, as if to say, "See, I've saved you the trouble." No doubt, however, he felt obliged not only to stake out his own territory in the collective memory of history, but to testify to his own rhymes and reasons.

He even creates his own vocabulary to analyze his music. For example, "gargoyle music" is the term Rochberg applies to his 1995 Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra and which he describes as music that "pushes . . . into the demonic regions of the dark forces" (p. 241). In more of a textbook mode, he develops concepts and explains them as they apply to music as a whole. Rochberg's kinesthetic relationship to music is pervasive in his references to the "temperature" of music and the distinction he draws between "hard" (Concord Quartets, p. 108) and "soft" (first movement of Symphony No. 4, p. 203) romanticism. These terms are listed under Rochberg's name in the index, but I would hope to see them appear as their own entries as this lexicon becomes more important to the study of his music. In addition to presenting more general analytical concepts, Rochberg provides explanatory notes and analyses of his own works, such as the in-depth and revelatory discussion of his 1965 works Contra Mortem et Tempus and Music for the Magic Theater in chapter 8, "Unlocking the Past."

At an early point in the book, Rochberg warns us about the recurring theme that is "a matter of sufficient magnitude to warrant returning to any number of times" (p. 31). He revisits constantly (one might even say, incessantly) the tension between modernist/twelve-tone composition and more tonal, so-called "traditional" procedures. The presence of this narrative thread is appropriate because so much of Rochberg's biography has rested on his eschewal of twelve-tone music after the death of his son Paul in November 1964. His tone is at times apologetic, and occasionally reactionary, but always emboldened by a sense of pride in being able to justify his own compositional raison d'être. Chapter 6, blatantly titled "Breaking with Modernism," addresses the Third String Quartet and how the media event of Rochberg's "break" upstaged what the composer himself deemed a natural step in his creative evolutionary process, but what he admits was a "breakthrough into a world where it was possible to write tonal music again" (p. 161). We learn that the "tectonic shift" (p. 61) occurred in 1952 many years prior to losing Paul. Rochberg explains that it was an...