JAVS Spring 2019

Ironically, it was Rochberg’s music of this period that began generating talk of “pluralism,” and “pastiche.” In 1965, he employed borrowed quotations from other composers’ works in his chamber ensemble work Music for the Magic Theater . Some of these quotations are from expected modernist sources (Stockhausen, Varese, Webern) and others come from very unexpected, tonal, sources (Beethoven, Mahler, Mozart, and Miles Davis). It was the String Quartet No. 3, premiered in 1972 by the Concord String Quartet, that became the seminal work in what came to be known as Rochberg’s new style. The work juxtaposes atonal language with lush, tonal diatonicism in its extended middle section of variations, evoking the style and sound of a late Beethoven quartet. The stark contrast in content and style within the same work has led some to refer to this as the beginnings of “musical postmodernism,” a term Rochberg himself never embraced. 6 The unabashedly tonal sections of String Quartet No. 3 sent shockwaves through the new music world of the early 1970s. Rochberg had previously established himself as a highly successful and thoroughly modernist composer. By embracing such traditional tonality, he was, in the view of his critics, effectively turning his back on the entire ethos of postwar compositional practice. More accurately, though, he was attempting to develop a new musical language combining the tonal and atonal worlds into a fresh amalgam: There was a strong sense that the two great languages of musical expression, tonality and atonality, had reached a point of high maturation beyond which neither could be pushed with any fruitfulness. Then came the sudden realization that each, if juxtaposed to the other in genuinely imaginative ways, might yield new forms, new meanings, and new values understood as complementarities. . . . Thus was born the idea that polar opposites are not mutually exclusive, but are as complementary to each other as night and day, hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus was born the possibility that the art of music was no longer a case of either/or, but of both/and. . . . 7 By the time David Dalton approached Rochberg with the commission for the viola sonata, the dramatic shift in Rochberg’s compositional style was well known in the music world. In January 1979, seven months before

the premiere of the Viola Sonata at the Utah Congress, Rochberg’s “Concord Quartets,” —his Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth string quartets—were premiered as a set. These three works all continue in the vein of the Third Quartet, with the slow movement of the Sixth Quartet being, unironically, “a quaint set of variations on Pachelbel’s popular canon in D major.” 8 Given the context of where Rochberg’s compositional career during the previous decade, it is perhaps less surprising that Rochberg might return to sketches from so early in his career for inspiration. In describing how he returned to his 1942 sketches when composing the Viola Sonata, Rochberg wrote in his memoir: In casting about for the right approach to the music I wanted to produce for the Primrose piece, I decided to dig out the old violin sonata sketches and test their possibilities. Uppermost in my mind was a series of questions that had to do primarily with the viability of the old ideas and their emotional substance. Would they lend themselves to transference to the darker timbres of the viola? Would the overall qualities of my initial ideas sound natural [sic] to the viola—not just larger than the violin, but also more plangent in tone? It was the dirge-like, sadly singing character of the second movement that ultimately decided the issue. 9 Rochberg goes on to add that he “did virtually nothing to alter the basic design of the 1942 sketch.” 10 These became, with minor modifications, the first two movements of the viola sonata. The short third movement was later added at the suggestion of Rochberg’s wife, Gene, who felt that the sonata was not finished as just a two-movement statement. 11 Regarding the unusual nature of the third movement, Rochberg said: I had resisted the feeling that something of a definitive, concluding nature needed to follow the Adagio lamentoso. The kind of last movement I knew I could not add—that in fact I detested—was a fast, concluding movement in order to fulfill a purely perfunctory function. . . . I settled on writing an epilogue, one that had the sense of “remembrance of things past.” 12 Rochberg’s approach to composing the Viola Sonata

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2019