Richard Taruskin (and some others) have pointed out that while George Rochberg has often been called a postmodernist he didn't use that term to describe himself. Whether it's Rochberg's writings themselves (A Dance of Polar Opposites or The Aesthetics of Survival) or in a book written about Rochberg, such as Amy Lynn Wlodarski's George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity, you'll discover that however modernist he was for a while in formal terms he had, if you will, a Romantic heart. The Third String Quartet was the moment where he publicly repudiated serialism, or at least that is what has commonly been written.
Kim Hojin, however, has made a case that if we want to understand Rochberg's shift from serialism to his post-serialist musical language more attention should be paid to his Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin, on a famous Paganini caprice. Hojin's treatise can be accessed here online. I plan to make an admittedly brief comparison of two works that play with epochs of music for musical effect, Rochberg's Caprice Variations and Ferdinand Rebay's Historisch Suite for flute and guitar.
Merely playing with styles from different times and places can't be taken as "postmodern" without some kind of additional defense because while Rochberg's Caprice Variations could be billed as postmodern nobody would dream of saying that Rebay was a postmodern, having died in the early 1950s and having been as conservative as conservative could be, yet his Suite is clearly a chronological tour of musical eras in Austro-German music.
However, let's start with Rochberg, if only by way of reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66oj02Qtg1U&t=927s
Rather than be too detailed I want to highlight that Rochberg went through a number of styles before closing the massive cycle of variations with a formal presentation of the Paganini Caprice proper.
It comes as entry 51 in the giant cycle, a set of reverse-variations where all the variations on the theme precede a final presentation of the varied theme. Benjamin Britten used this technique to magnificent effect in his Nocturnal After John Dowland, and a variant of reverse variations known as cumulative setting was used by both Britten and even more by Charles Ives but that's some topic for another time.
What Rochberg's extensive variations on a 19th century theme in a variety of styles from eras before, during and after Paganini's life time does not indicate in itself is that Rochberg was a postmodernist? Now someone could argue that the placement of old and modernist variations across the entire cycle that cycle, as it were, symbolically around the caprice before presenting the caprice at the end is what "could" make the work postmodern ... to postmoderns ... but let's recall that Rochberg scholars seem to be in general agreement that Rochberg never identified as a postmodernist.
So, now, let me skip along to Ferdinand Rebay's Historische Suite for flute and guitar.
Ferdinand Rebay's Historisch Suite for flute and guitar
The suite presents the following:
Prelude in the style of J. S. Bach
Menuet in the style of Haydn
variations in the style of Mozart
Scherzo in the style of Beethoven
Rondo in the style of Schubert
You can hear a rendition of the piece here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWRx38_vAGQ&t=1s
Now we could propose that what made Rebay's suite conservative, not least being written in the early 20th century when Stravinsky and Schoenberg were being themselves, was how obviously beholden to the proverbial long nineteenth century the music is. Rebay starts with a Bachian homage and moves chronologically through the German canonized masters up through to Schubert and stops there. Pretty conservative, pretty much what we could expect an Austrian composer to write for guitar with flute. I like a good chunk of Rebay's music, though, and thanks to a lifetime of being glutted with Spanish music let me just tell you as a guitarist that if Germans are considered to have a disproportionate, hegemonic over-representation in the symphony for the guitar Spanish
But since I'm pushing back against the idea that Rochberg's variations could be considered modernist I want to propose that what both the Rebay and the Rochberg cycles suggest is that during the age of mechanical/electric recording (what Sousa warned would be the era of "machine music") the capacity to write music, whether conservative or iconoclastic, could take for granted the juxtaposition of dramatically contrasting styles that could not have coexisted in conventional concert life in the times and places invoked. Now by Schubert's time, yes, Bach and Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven could all be heard alongside Schubert but Rebay's suite leans on our knowledge that that trip through time is one-way and that our capacity to hear and think and feel in musical terms across stylistic shifts is a capacity that has been cultivated in our era, whether we're "traditionalist" or "avant garde".
Rochberg shuffled things more by having Brahms, Beethoven, Paganini and more archly 20th century variations but Caprice Variations was, per the thesis alluded to above, the beginning of Rochberg's process of repudiating integral serialism and doing so through music. Although Rochberg said we are not slaves of the past and can choose the future we want to pursue he was acutely aware that not being slaves to the past doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of what is musically or otherwise in that past.
Now I admit that all that I have written will seem completely facile to music scholars who could no doubt make a case that Rochberg was a postmodernist even if he didn't claim he was one and that juxtaposing Rochberg and Rebay is a facile comparison pointing out a too-obvious point about composers who were both conservative and traditionalists. Sure, I can grant that point but as a traditionalist sort who admits to being conservative what I want to point out about both of these composers is that when you take such an approach the effects and means available are cumulative. If there's a case to be made that Rebay is "modern" it's that he follows the course of time in a straight line whereas Rochberg fractures time and place so that his variations on the Paganini cycle about to time-spaces before and after Paganini before ending with his caprice as the capstone to a grand cycle of variations.
Rochberg was not a postmodern just because writers keep repeating the claim that he was as part of music history discussions, it makes Rochberg an of-his-time composer who was aware of the past and wanted to present it or maybe compress it into a cyclical work that revealed the potential humanistic significance of our capacity to hear centuries of style variants as cumulatively being available to us as listeners, composers, and performers. If Rochberg were a postmodern merely for recognizing that then we might as well say the same could be true of the thoroughly old-school and traditionalists Ferdinand Rebay.
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