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The Repercussions of George Rochberg's Rubble Rhetoric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2022
Abstract
During the Second World War, the American composer George Rochberg served as an infantryman with the US Army in Europe. There, he witnessed first hand the aftermath caused by massive firebombing of the French countryside by both Allied and Axis bombers, an image that would remain with him for the remainder of his life. In his post-war writings, the rubbled city of Saint-Lô soon became a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture, which he believed had suffered a grave injury. This article considers how Rochberg reconstructed his wartime sketches – short miniatures composed during the European campaign – into material for his Sixth Symphony (1986). I argue that Rochberg clearly conceived of musical reconstruction as a means by which to symbolically confront the modernist forces he believed accountable for the decline of Western culture that he increasingly perceived towards the end of his life. The article ends with a cautionary epilogue to this time-worn narrative of rubble, reconstruction, and redemption that challenges Rochberg's false sense of moral superiority and the motivations of ‘rubble narratives’ more generally.
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References
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15 For a detailed discussion of these sketchbooks, see Wlodarski, George Rochberg, 26–35. The sketchbooks primarily contained short compositional exercises, although a few of them assumed more programmatic titles that could be read as commentaries on his personal experiences or mood: ‘Pensive Air’, ‘Lullaby for Paul’, ‘Cacophony’.
16 For an analysis of the sonatina, see Wlodarski, George Rochberg, 32–4.
17 Rochberg, journal entry, 2 October 1985, Tagebuch 34, Lebensdokumente, SGR-PSS.
18 Initially, Rochberg had planned to deposit his papers at the New York Public Library, which accounts for the collection of his correspondence and sketches there. In the 1990s, he would receive a large offer from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, which ultimately acquired the significant remainder of the collection.
19 Rochberg, letter to Anhalt, 20 August 1988, in Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg, ed. Alan Gillmor (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), 215–16.
20 Rochberg, letter to Anhalt, 1 May 1986, in Eagle Minds, 188.
21 See Wlodarski, George Rochberg, 19–23.
22 Dixon, Joan DeVee, George Rochberg: A Bio-Bibliographic Guide to his Life and Works (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992), 166Google Scholar. In Rochberg's republished programme note, he comments that he no longer has a copy of the original march, but this statement is revised in Five Lines, Four Spaces. The march in question is the ‘March of the Halberds’.
23 Rochberg, journal entry, 26 January 1968, Tagebuch 11, Lebensdokumente, SGR-PSS.
24 Rochberg, letter to Anhalt, 21 May 1998, in Eagle Minds, 341.
25 While this small fragment might seem too musically generic to link it specifically to Rochberg’s ‘Song of the Doughboy’ – it is, of course, also a common rhythmic trope associated with military music dating back to the French Revolution – Rochberg specifies in his memoirs that his own marches were the source for this particular symphony. The sketches add further evidence to this interpretation, in that Rochberg explores the idea of resolving the ‘brutale’ theme to the key of F major, the original key of the ‘Song of the Doughboy’.
26 For an analysis of the 5-Z38 pentachord in Stravinsky's ‘Lamentations’, see Craig Ayrey, ‘Stravinsky in Analysis: The Anglophone Traditions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 213–20.
27 George Rochberg, Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 209.
28 The pairing unsettled Rochberg at first, as he admits in his memoirs: ‘I suddenly found myself extremely concerned. For reasons I have never fathomed, Maazel chose to couple [the Sixth] with Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps. I wondered briefly how my new symphony would hold up cheek by jowl with Le sacre.’ See Rochberg, Five Lines, 210.
29 Rochberg, journal entry, 12 November 1987, Tagebuch, Lebensdokumente, SGR-PSS. In his memoirs, Rochberg notes that marches had long held a place in his imagination, and he had long associated them with idealistic memories of American patriotism from the interwar period: ‘My earliest … memory is of flag flying, bands playing, and soldiers marching [down] Main Avenue in downtown Passaic, New Jersey. The crowd went wild … It remains one of the most vivid scenes in a long life – alive, unforgettable.’ See Rochberg, Five Lines, 209.
30 Rochberg, Five Lines, 31–2.
31 George Rochberg, The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 33 and Rochberg, Five Lines, 105.
32 Rochberg, letter to Anhalt, 21 January 1980, in Eagle Minds, 80.
33 Rochberg, letter to Alexander Ringer, 19 January 1976, Korrespondenz, SGR-PSS.
34 Rochberg, ‘The Artist and Society’ (1944), George Rochberg Papers – Additions, NYPL, JPB 13-04, Box 17, Folder 12.
35 Rochberg, ‘A Composer's World’ (1944), George Rochberg Papers – Additions, NYPL, JPB 13-04, Box 17, Folder 12.
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37 Wlodarski, George Rochberg, 91.
38 David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2003), 126–7.
39 Rochberg, Five Lines, 175.
40 Rochberg, Five Lines, 175. Italics added for emphasis.
41 Rochberg, programme note for the Third String Quartet, as reprinted in Dixon, A Bio-Bibliographic Guide, 143–4.
42 Rochberg, journal entry, May 16, 1988, Tagebuch, Lebensdokumente, SGR-PSS. Italics added for emphasis.
43 Rochberg, programme note for the Third String Quartet, as reprinted in Dixon, A Bio-Bibliographic Guide, 141 and ‘Reflections on the Renewal of Music’, in Aesthetics of Survival (1984), 242.
44 Albrecht Dümling observes that Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg adopted similar metaphors in his early writings, including the language of struggle and renewal that appeared in his anti-modernist writings. See Albrecht Dümling, ‘The Target of Racial Purity: The “Degenerate Music” Exhibition in Düsseldorf, 1938’, in Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich, ed. Richard Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 49, 56.
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46 Evans, ‘Stravinsky's Music in Hitler's Germany’, 570–1. Evans argues that the inconsistencies of Nazi policy meant that Stravinsky's works generally enjoyed a notable measure of success in Nazi Germany, despite the composer's inclusion in the exhibition.
47 Pamela Potter, ‘Defining “Degenerate Music” in Nazi Germany’, OREL Foundation, http://orelfoundation.org/journal/journalArticle/defining_8220degenerate_music8221_in_nazi_germany.
48 Leen Katrib, ‘On Archiving Rubble’, Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism 15/2 (2018), 33–4.
49 For a fuller account, see Wlodarski, George Rochberg, 155–61.
50 Rochberg, letter to Anhalt, 21 May 1998, in Eagle Minds, 341.