String Quartet No.6 Mov.3 - Variations (On Pachelbel Canon) - George Rochberg

Performer: Concord String Quartet
Composer: George Rochberg

5:25 - What a beautiful and soul-shrieking chord!

Is It Music If Nobody Hears It?
By Kyle Gann for American Public Media, Eve Beglarian and Kitty Brazelton

George Rochberg used to be one of America's best composers in a not-very-popular style: 12-tone music. Developed by Arnold Schönberg in the 1920s, 12-tone music was an attempt at a new musical language in which all 12 pitches of the scale were used in a complexly rotating order. Though the technique promised theoretical unity and consistency, the style was usually dense and dissonant and difficult for nonmusicians to follow. Rochberg was one of our major composers in that style, but his music had a lightness and lyricism to it that was attractive. Pieces like his Serenata d'estate, or Summer Serenade, of 1955 used the 12-tone idiom with a rare and delightful lightness of being.

However, in 1964 Rochberg's 20-year-old son Paul died of a brain tumor. Devastated, Rochberg did some soul-searching, and found that the highly technical 12-tone style wasn't sufficient for the emotions he now needed to express. As he put it,

"With the loss of my son I was overwhelmed by the realization that death... could only be overcome by life itself; and to me this meant through art, by practicing my art as a living thing (in my marrow bone), free of the posturing cant and foolishness abroad these days which want to seal art off from life."

Already well known and with a prominent position at the University of Pennsylvania, Rochberg underwent a highly visible and controversial change of mind. To the horror of his colleagues, he abandoned the official atonal style of musical academia and started writing tonal music, romantic music, music with hummable melodies. First he worked quotations from other composers into his music. But by the mid-1970s, he found himself writing in older, obsolete styles, the styles of Handel, Beethoven, Mahler. For instance, the beginning of his String Quartet No. 5, written in 1977, sounds very like a Beethoven scherzo, though written 150 years after the death of the composer it evokes.

Innocent-sounding as it is, within the profession this music was a slap in the face. Rochberg's fellow composers raked him over the coals. Prominent music critics like Andrew Porter of the New Yorker dismissed him as "irrelevant." For all his music's continuing undeniable craftsmanship, Rochberg had abandoned the one most essential core belief of 20th-century music: the idea of progress. Rochberg had turned away from the future, and was looking, through his music, back toward the past.

The term "avant-garde" is military in its origins, denoting those who go out on the front line, to be followed by reinforcements. This paradigm had always worked in the past; Beethoven was considered avant-garde, but music lovers eventually figured out what he was doing, and caught up. Brahms was once considered so academic and melodyless and dissonant that in Boston's Symphony Hall, one wag put up a sign over the door that said "Exit in case of Brahms." It became a truism that new music was never appreciated by the public at first, but that as they got used to it they would learn to hear its beauties. "The authentic poet," Wordsworth had written, "must create the taste with which he is to be enjoyed." That expectation had paid off for over a hundred years, and composers can be forgiven for not recognizing for a couple of decades that the system no longer worked.

In the case of mid-20th century music, the cavalry never arrived. The avant-garde went on ahead, but audiences never followed. Once again, and hardly for the first time, American Maverick composers had to go out looking for their audience. It was all the harder since 12-tone music and similar types had given new music a very bad name with the average music lover. To win back audiences, the new music had to be not only well-written but seductive. It had to provide listeners with points of access. These took two forms, one associated with the New Romanticism, the other with minimalism: either you had to refer to some musical convention that listeners would already be familiar with - that's the New Romanticism - or you had to define your musical terms so simply that listeners could figure out what was going on on first listening - that was minimalism. "Accessibility" became the controversial buzzword of the 1980s."

Category:

Music

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• String
• Quartet
• No.6
• No6
• Number
• six
• No.
• No
• Mov.3
• Mov3
• Movement
• three
• Mov.
• Mov
• Variations
• (On
• Pachelbel
• Canon)
• On
• Cannon
• Pachelbel's
• George
• Rochberg
• Concord
• classical
• romantic
• chamber
• tonal
• music
• violin
• cello
• viola

[troyarmstrong434]

The Canon in "duplicitous".

[troyarmstrong434]

The Cannon in "Deathly".

[troyarmstrong434]

Best intro of all time.