CHAPTER 18 | CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE 1960s 447THE NEW ROMANTICISM
For composer George Rochberg, the
turn away from serialism toward a
greater lyricism was motivated by
a personal crisis, the death of his
twenty-year-old son, Paul Roch-
berg, in 1964. Beginning with Music
for the Magic Theater (1965), Rochberg
went on to create music that quoted
widely from music of the past, from
J. S. Bach to Anton Webern and jazz
standards, around which the com-
poser wove original music that
incorporated those styles while refl ecting Rochberg’s own personality. Although
many serialist composers denounced his newer music for abandoning avant-garde
intellectual rigor, other musicians were inspired by his fl uid use of quotation.
Indeed, the liberal use of quotations became a hallmark of 1960s composition, from
German-American conductor and composer Lukas Foss’s Baroque Variations (1967)
to the virtuoso Sinfonia (1968) composed for the New York Philharmonic by Luciano
Berio, an Italian composer then teaching at the Juilliard School. In its often playful
reuses of the past, this quotation-based music was an early harbinger of a new aes-
thetic attitude that would come to be known as postmodernism.
West Virginia–born composer George Crumb created some of the 1960s’
most distinctive New Romantic music. With a melodic and harmonic language
rooted in Debussy and Bartók, Crumb’s music displays a dazzling range of tim-
bral possibilities, from the delicate to the overpowering. He created this pal-
ette by using unusual playing techniques—for example, taking to new lengths
Cowell’s pioneering idea of playing directly on the strings of a piano—and by
including instruments unusual in classical music, such as harmonica, musical
saw, and tuned water glasses. Another feature of Crumb’s music is its element of
theater or ritual: various works ask that performers wear masks, move about the
stage, and chant or whisper words, numbers, or vocables as if they were magic
incantations. These and other effects are evident in several works from the late
1960s, such as Echoes of Time and the River (1967), Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death
(1968), and Night of the Four Moons (1969). They reach their peak in two works from
1970: Black Angels, for electrically amplifi ed string quartet, and Ancient Voices of
Children, a cycle of fi ve songs on texts by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.
The scoring of Ancient Voices of Children is unusual and colorful: mezzo-
soprano and boy soprano, oboe, harp, piano, and a large assortment of percus-
sion instruments, as well as mandolin, musical saw, harmonica, and toy piano.
The text of the fourth song (LG 18.2) is a fragment of a poem by Lorca:George Rochberg on His Embrace of New
RomanticismW
ith the loss of my son I was overwhelmed by the realization
that death... could only be overcome by life itself; and to
me this meant through art, by practicing my art as a living thing
(in my marrow bone), free of the posturing cant and foolishness
abroad these days which want to seal art off from life.In their own words
George CrumbLG 18.2Crumb’s setting includes a quotation of “Bist du bei mir,” a song found in a
notebook copied out by Anna Magdalena Bach, the wife of German composer
J. S. Bach (1685–1750). That song begins with these words:Todas las tardes in Granada, todas
las tardes se muere un niño.Each afternoon in Granada, a child
dies each afternoon.172028_18_440-467_r3_sd.indd 447 23/01/13 11:02 AM