Mark Likes Music

Last January, I gave a paper on Rochberg's Second String Quartet at the winter meeting of the American Musicological Society's Greater New York Chapter. In March 2012, I'll be down in Charlotte to give a paper on the composer's Music for the Magic Theater at the Society for American Music's annual conference . Here's the abstract:

Last weekend, I gave a paper at the local American Musicological Society chapter's winter meeting . Here's the paper, which is on Rochberg's Second String Quartet.

The announcement that Jennifer Higdon won the Pulitzer Prize for her Violin Concerto gave  David Patrick Stearns a chance to look back  on notable Philadelphia composers of the past and identify some, including Higdon, that are coming into their own. George Rochberg was one of the older generation that Stearns discussed. Like Higdon, Rochberg taught at the Curtis Institute--he was also a student there, continuing a music career suspended when he went overseas to fight in World War II.   But it was in 1958, after Rochberg left Curtis to work for the music publisher Presser, that a chance meeting on Chestnut Street with an old mentor set in motion a series of events that would bring him to national prominence.  The composer remembers hearing someone call his name: "Roschbergh, Roschbergh." It was George Szell. The Hungarian conductor taught Rochberg in New York at the Mannes School, shortly before he was drafted in 1942. Szell was an aloof teacher, and Rochberg w...