13. Rochberg on pluralism and
questions of style
The story of how Rochberg rejected serialism in the aftermath of
his son’s death is just well known enough that I don’t wish to recite in
detail. That Rochberg’s ars combinatoria approach is one of a
number of potential pathways to a synthesis of ragtime and sonata form is
simply a proposal at the level of theory.
Joplin did not need a Rochberg to write the long since lost piano
concerto. Thanks to the influence of
thinkers like Adorno, however, Rochberg’s formal rejection of serialism and
move toward a polystylistic juxtaposition of tonal and atonal musical idioms
fortuitously overlapped with the ragtime revival.
Rochberg was rejecting the American academic standard for serious
composition during the period in which the most influential popular style in
the history of American music was being revived not within the realms of pop
music but by classical musicians. If as Edward Berlin and others have noted,
the ragtime revival coming at the behest of classical musicians may have skewed
our understanding of ragtime toward the solo piano literature of the Joplin
school, a fringe benefit, noted with acid humor by Tom Wolfe in the
introduction, was that in the 1970s there were American compositions that had
actual tunes that could be included in academic concert life at a time when
serialism still held sway.
Rochberg, for his part, was advocating not a “return” to tonality
that tried to forget that atonality ever happened. He was instead making a case that Western
music could embrace both musical dialects:
From The Aesthetics of
Survival
On the Third String Quartet
page 239
... Far from seeing
tonality and atonality as opposite "styles," I viewed them as
significant aspects of an enlarged language of musical expression with ranching
subdivisions of what I like to call "dialects"--a particular way of
stressing or inflecting parts of the whole spectrum of Western musical
language. These dialects can be
represented singly or in combination depending on what one wants to say and the
particular size, shape, and character of the work one wants to say it in. In
the quartet the dialects range widely from diatonic, key-centered tonality to
forms of chromaticism which veer toward nineteenth-century or
early-twentieth-century practices (but still structurally tonal) to a more
atonally oriented chromaticism; from predictable to unpredictable periodicities
of phrase structure; from simple to complex metric pulsation; and from
continuous to noncontinuous gestural relationships between phrases, sections,
and movements.
...
page 240
... I suspect that what my
quartet suggests to others, and what I began to accept for myself at least
fifteen years ago, is that we can no longer live with monolithic ideas about
art and how it is produced. Nor can we take as artistic gospel the categorical
imperatives laid down by cultural messiahs or their self-appointed apologists
and followers of whatever persuasion.
On the contrary, the
twentieth century has pointed--however reluctant we may be to accept it in all
areas of life, social as well as political, cultural as well as
intellectual--toward a difficult-to-define pluralism, a world of new mixtures
and combinations of everything we have inherited from the past and whatever we
individually or collectively value in the inventions of our own present,
replete with juxtapositions of opposites (or seeming opposites) and contraries. ...
page 241
Granting pluralism, how
is a composer to deal with it? From the inside out, i.e., from the internal
psychic imagery which becomes the musical gesture to its artistic
manifestation. Gesture, singly or in combination, successive or simultaneous,
is the determining factor--not style, language, system, or method.
What Rochberg advocated for and
demonstrated in his Third String Quartet
can be described as a musical form of what is lately called code switching. To
translate Rochberg’s term “gesture” into a term that can connect with fans of
popular music, everything emerges from the hook and there is no style,
language, system or method that has to constrain the ways in which a composer
transforms a hook into a finished musical work, or a work that can become the
basis for an improvised performance.
Rochberg discovered that
serialism did not give him the expressive possibilities he felt he needed to
compose music in the wake of his son’s death.
Adorno had damned serialism and aleatory alike as technocratic means
that obliterate the decision-making music-making subject, so Rochberg’s
rejection of serialism was in one sense a vindication of Adorno’s condemnation
of serialism and aleatory as twin dead ends.
Rochberg, however, concluded that tonality was not “used up” and that
there was no need to constrain himself to an Adornian set of prohibitions.
Rochberg went on in his later
works to say that he believed a fusion of the asymmetrical pitch systems of
tonality and the symmetrical pitch systems of atonality can become the basis
for continued exploration in the posthumously published A Dance of Polar Opposites edited by Jeremy Gill (University of
Rochester Press, 2016).
I can’t resist mentioning at
this point that one of the greatest themes in the history of ragtime, Louis
Chauvin’s initial strains in “Heliotrope Bouquet”, simultaneously present us
with a tonal theme laced with quartal harmonies and whole-tone scale
inflections. Rochberg’s vision of a
dance of polar opposites has been latent within the musical language of ragtime
for a century.
Rochberg
was, of course, not the first to wrestle with the nature of the pluralism he
saw. The American musicologist Leonard
B. Meyer observed that the nature of the pluralism that the West was observing
had grown bigger in reality than Western ideals of pluralism could encompass.
It is to Meyer’s comments on pluralism I turn next.
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