The Aesthetics of Survival

A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music

By George Rochberg

Subjects: Music, Cultural Studies
Ebook : 9780472025114, 288 pages, March 2010
Paperback : 9780472030262, 288 pages, 6 x 9, January 2005
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6712
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A revised paperback edition of composer George Rochberg's landmark essays

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Contents Preface to the Revised Edition          xiiiIntroduction, by William Bolcom          xvii On the New Image of MusicIndeterminacy in the New Music (1959)          3The New Image of Music (1963)          16 On Schoenberg and Serialism  My Dear Igor (An Imaginary Dialogue) (1957)           29Reflections on Schoenberg (1972)           36 On Musical Time and SpaceDuration in Music (1960)          61The Concepts of Musical Time and Space (1963)          68 On Music, Humanism, and CultureNo Center (1969)          129Humanism versus Science (1970)          135Fiddlers and Fribbles or Is Art a Separate Reality? (1986)          145News of the Culture or News of the Universe? (1988)          165Talking to Luigi Russolo Eighty-Five Years Later (1998)          180 On the Fantastic and the LogicalAural Fact or Fiction: Or, Composing at the Seashore (1965)          187The Fantastic and the Logical: Reflections on Science, Politics, and Art (1973)          199The Marvelous in Art (1982)          214 On the Renewal of MusicThe Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Survival (1969)          225Guston and Me: Digression and Return (1992)          242Polarity in Music: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Their Consequences (1995)          246 L'Envoi (1998)          253Selected Bibliography          255Index          257

Description

A revised paperback edition of composer George Rochberg's landmark essays

"Rochberg presents the rare spectacle of a composer who has made his peace with tradition while maintaining a strikingly individual profile. . . . [H]e succeeds in transforming the sublime concepts of traditional music into contemporary language."
---Washington Post

"An indispensable book for anyone who wishes to understand the sad and curious fate of music in the twentieth century."
---Atlantic Monthly

"The writings of George Rochberg stand as a pinnacle from which our past and future can be viewed."
---Kansas City Star

As a composer, George Rochberg has played a leading role in bringing about a transformation of contemporary music through a reassessment of its relation to tonality, melody, and harmony. In The Aesthetics of Survival, the author addresses the legacy of modernism in music and its related effect on the cultural milieu, particularly its overemphasis on the abstract, rationalist thinking embraced by contemporary science, technology, and philosophy. Rochberg argues for the renewal of holistic values in order to ensure the survival of music as a humanly expressive art.

A renowned composer, thinker, and teacher, George Rochberg has been honored with innumerable awards, including, most recently, an Alfred I. du Pont Award for Outstanding Conductors and Composers, and an André and Clara Mertens Contemporary Composer Award. He lives in Pennsylvania.

A renowned composer, thinker, and teacher, George Rochberg has been honored with innumerable awards, including, most recently, an Alfred I. du Pont Award for Outstanding Conductors and Composers, and an André and Clara Mertens Contemporary Composer Award. He lives in Pennsylvania.

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