Rochberg's compositional indictment of modernism in the Third Symphony would find its literary translation two years later in “Humanism versus Science” (1970). The essay lamented the replacement of “singing and dancing in the traditional musical sense” with “conscious counting” and the desire of modernist composers to achieve a “frozen” aesthetic—“sound events designed in time” but lacking human pulse and personal cosmologies. His diagnosis of the situation again targeted a cultural fascination with “mathematics, logic, and science [that] have taken on the rational madness of their scientific confreres,” with music now reduced to a “new form of applied science, a kind of acoustical technology.” At the conclusion of the essay, Rochberg described musical composition as being held hostage, expressing a fear that “any sense of the human limits of music has been lost.” He concluded with a passage from The Physicists (1961) by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt: “I am poor King Solomon. Once I was immeasurably rich and wise and god-fearing… . But my wisdom destroyed my fear of God, and when I no longer feared God, my wisdom destroyed my riches. Now all cities are dead over which I ruled; the empire which was entrusted to me is empty … I am poor King Solomon.” It is the lamentation of a modern-day scientist who realizes too late the human consequences of his creations.

King Solomon is also a Jewish figure, and his deliberate presence in Rochberg's text points to another lesser explored subject-position in the composer's biography: his identification as a secular Jew. In a letter to Anhalt, he described his relationship to Judaism as a “war [he had felt] in [him]self since [he] was fifteen to seventeen [years old],” and it begged of him many complex existential questions. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rochberg confessed to a “growing need to confirm and reaffirm my Jewishness—not in the ordinary sociological sense [of] joining a congregation … but in the spiritual sense.