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a composed farewell
Jul. 2nd, 2005 01:30 pmExcept for a few small obituaries, I've seen nothing on the closely-spaced deaths, about a month ago, of two American composers, David Diamond and George Rochberg, so I'd like to take a moment to commemorate them. Neither was among my favorite composers, but both were interesting and significant of their time.
Diamond was one of the youngest of the great generation of composers (born between 1895 and 1915) who defined the "Americanist" style of the 1930s and 40s. And unless one counts Elliott Carter, who quickly departed from that style, he was the last survivor. Conductor Gerard Schwarz calls Diamond's Second Symphony (1942) the greatest American symphony. I'd go nowhere near that far - it has a lot of note-spinning, and lacks the strikingly memorable features of some of its competitors - but it's a big, solid work whose slow movements are worthy peers of similar music by Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber, the best-known names of that generation.
In his later years, Diamond wrote more chromatically, but unlike Copland he never turned to serialism. He's not the only one who's cited that as an explanation for his increasing obscurity over the years. Which brings us to our second deceased composer.
George Rochberg was only three years younger than Diamond, but he emerged as a composer only after WW2 and had different influences, so he's considered of a different generation. By this time serialism had become the requisite training in the academy, so Rochberg became one of an uncounted number of serialist composers. What made him different was his apostasy. After his son's death in 1964, Rochberg "felt that he could not communicate his grief in the kind of music he had written until then," according to the LA Times obituary.
Which is ironic, because I've spent many, mostly fruitless, hours pawing through recordings of the flood of serialist music of the 1950s and 60s, trying to find anything worthwhile, and just about the only work I've found that uses serialism to adequately convey emotional meaning (as Alban Berg had managed to do earlier) is Rochberg's Second Symphony of 1956.
At any rate, Rochberg in the 60s turned to tonality. "I was accused of betraying, in the following order, the church and the state," he later said. "I was a traitor, a renegade. I never once responded."
I'm sorry to say this doesn't sound like an exaggeration. People nowadays like to pretend that there was no serialist hegemony, but there really were many influential people who liked to declaim that serialism was necessary and that tonality was worn out. In the 1970s and 80s there was a populist revolution (led in the first place by the minimalists), and now it's hard to remember what guff used to be peddled.
I'm also sorry to say that Rochberg was not as good a tonalist composer as he'd been a serialist. Maybe the serialism had entered his soul. Of his later works, the most noted is his Eighth String Quartet (1978), which includes a set of varations on Pachelbel's Canon - not as funny an item as one might think.
I have only a couple CDs of Diamond's and Rochberg's music, but I've been playing these and thinking of them.
Diamond was one of the youngest of the great generation of composers (born between 1895 and 1915) who defined the "Americanist" style of the 1930s and 40s. And unless one counts Elliott Carter, who quickly departed from that style, he was the last survivor. Conductor Gerard Schwarz calls Diamond's Second Symphony (1942) the greatest American symphony. I'd go nowhere near that far - it has a lot of note-spinning, and lacks the strikingly memorable features of some of its competitors - but it's a big, solid work whose slow movements are worthy peers of similar music by Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber, the best-known names of that generation.
In his later years, Diamond wrote more chromatically, but unlike Copland he never turned to serialism. He's not the only one who's cited that as an explanation for his increasing obscurity over the years. Which brings us to our second deceased composer.
George Rochberg was only three years younger than Diamond, but he emerged as a composer only after WW2 and had different influences, so he's considered of a different generation. By this time serialism had become the requisite training in the academy, so Rochberg became one of an uncounted number of serialist composers. What made him different was his apostasy. After his son's death in 1964, Rochberg "felt that he could not communicate his grief in the kind of music he had written until then," according to the LA Times obituary.
Which is ironic, because I've spent many, mostly fruitless, hours pawing through recordings of the flood of serialist music of the 1950s and 60s, trying to find anything worthwhile, and just about the only work I've found that uses serialism to adequately convey emotional meaning (as Alban Berg had managed to do earlier) is Rochberg's Second Symphony of 1956.
At any rate, Rochberg in the 60s turned to tonality. "I was accused of betraying, in the following order, the church and the state," he later said. "I was a traitor, a renegade. I never once responded."
I'm sorry to say this doesn't sound like an exaggeration. People nowadays like to pretend that there was no serialist hegemony, but there really were many influential people who liked to declaim that serialism was necessary and that tonality was worn out. In the 1970s and 80s there was a populist revolution (led in the first place by the minimalists), and now it's hard to remember what guff used to be peddled.
I'm also sorry to say that Rochberg was not as good a tonalist composer as he'd been a serialist. Maybe the serialism had entered his soul. Of his later works, the most noted is his Eighth String Quartet (1978), which includes a set of varations on Pachelbel's Canon - not as funny an item as one might think.
I have only a couple CDs of Diamond's and Rochberg's music, but I've been playing these and thinking of them.
