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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
George Rochberg (July 5, 1918 - May 29, 2005) was an American composer of contemporary classical music.
Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended the Mannes College of Music, where his teachers included George Szell and Hans Weisse, and the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Rosario Scalero and Gian Carlo Menotti. He served in the United States Army in the infantry during World War II.
He was the chairman of the music department at the University of Pennsylvania until 1968, and continued to teach there until 1983.
He married Gene Rosenfeld in 1941, and had two children, Paul and Francesca. In 1964, his son died of a brain tumor.
He died in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 2005, aged 86. Most of his works are held in the archive of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. .
After a long period of composition using the technique of serialism, Rochberg finally abandoned it upon the death of his teenage son in 1964, saying that serialism was empty of expressive emotion and was inadequate to express his grief and rage.By the seventies he had become controversial for the use of tonal passages in his music. His use of tonality first became widely known through the String Quartet No. 3 (1972), which includes an entire set of variations that are in the style of late Beethoven. Another movement of the quartet contains passages reminiscent of the music of Gustav Mahler. This use of tonality caused critics to classify him as a neoromantic composer.
Of the works composed early in his career, the Symphony No. 2 (1955–56) stands out as an accomplished serial composition by an American composer. Rochberg is perhaps best known for his String Quartets Nos. 3-6 (1972-78).
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