George Rochberg

George Rochberg (1918–2005) was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, he attended first the Mannes College of Music, where his teachers included George Szell and Hans Weisse, then 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. Rochberg served as chairman of the music department at the University of Pennsylvania until 1968 and continued to teach there until 1983. In 1978, he was named the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities. Rochberg 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. Some can also be found in the Music Division of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the Lincoln Center in New York City, the University of Pennsylvania, Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, and the City University of New York. A longtime exponent of serialism, Rochberg abandoned this compositional technique upon the death of his teenage son of a brain tumor in 1964. He said he had found serialism expressively empty and that it had proved an inadequate means for him to express his grief and rage.[citation needed] By the 1970s, Rochberg 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 Rochberg composed early in his career, his Symphony No. 2 (1955–56) stands out as an accomplished serial composition by an American composer. He is perhaps best known for his String Quartets Nos. 3–6 (1972–78). Rochberg conceived Nos. 4–6 as a set and named them the "Concord Quartets" after the Concord String Quartet, which premiered and recorded the works.