George Rochberg

The New Image of Music

THE BREAK with tradition which, beginning in the early decades of this century, 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 unconditionally, 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 centurySchoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bart6k; although, in the case of a composer of Varkses stature, we see no sign of the vacillation that afflicted his generation. The first generation to accept unreservedly the break with tradition grew to maturity following the Second World War. Nevertheless, in the ranks of todays advanced composers there is now discernible a growing tension and widening gap between those who proclaim their abandonment of and disengagement from history and those who, reacting against the consequences of this denial, reassert the value and necessity of a sense of historical continuity, a feeling for the continuum of human life and culture. Despite all this-the ambivalence toward the break with tradition, the rejection of or adherence to historical continuity-in the process of casting about for and searching out viable means of composition, certain processes of thought and attitudes of mind, resting on commonly held assumptions, which tend to ameliorate and reconcile differences, have crystallized to create what we may call the new image of music. At first glance this image appears strange, many-faceted, and complex, its features seemingly distorted and disarranged in cubist fashion and, like a cubist image, looking in several directions at once-or in none at all. And like the cubist image, it is an aggregate with a compelling unity about it, gathering into its field the plurality and diversity of methods and means which have been and are still being devised, transformed, discarded, and replaced in the ceaseless search for viable solutions to the problem of musical composition. Viewed in this way, the image loses its aspect of immobile complexity and instead acquires that fascination which derives from contemplating the richness of a constantly metamorphosing process which, despite surface changes, retains its basic morphology.

Guston and me: Digression and return

By comparing Philip Gustons career as a painter with mine as a composer I establish a parallelism which suggests a Zeitgeist was at work. That Zeitgeist is best characterized as a digression from traditional figurative/tonal methods of working to embracing abstract modes of modernism followed by a return to tradition viewed against the abstraction experience. I posit that this produced the tension between concreteness and abstraction which now prevails in our artistic culture and suggest further that the younger generation(s) now at work must take seriously the problem of resolving this tension which in all previous cultures may have existed successively but in ours exists simultaneously. This simultaneous tension between concreteness and abstraction poses the dilemma facing the next epoch.

News of the Culture or News of the Universe

There is widespread and justified concern over the steady decline of culture in America—and in the West generally. In this article I examine the societal forces I believe to be largely responsible for this disquieting tendency. Among them I identify the loss of psychic and intellectual immunity to Bad Art; the century-long slide into vulgarity, tawdriness, and sleaziness, which have helped turn America into the Land of Entertainment; the loss of standards and criteria of taste and judgment in both the production of art and its critical evaluation; the loss—especially in America—of innocence brought on by the corrosion of human values; and, finally, the rise of sentimentality and the consequent triumph of kitsch, which has come to be accepted as an illusory substitute for genuine seriousness and sentiment. In this context I juxtapose what I call “news of the culture” with “news of the universe.”