ABSTRACT
Music scholars have recently begun to use postmodernism as a basis for critical accounts of contemporary concert music and in their discussions, George Rochberg's Third String Quartet inevitably enters as an example. Many of these writers have turned to a binary conceptual model adapted from scholarship in art criticism that divides postmodern works into radical and reactionary categories. Typically, Rochberg's quartet is described as a “neoconservative” type of postmodernism whose use of a tonal art music genre and stylistic allusions to past historical styles indicates a nostalgic yearning for an imagined cultural golden age in Western civilization. Scholars contrast the “reactionary” neoconservatism of Rochberg with a “radical” strand of musical postmodernism that juxtaposes different styles and genres in an attempt to criticize accepted cultural standards. Although it has gained a degree of currency within musicological circles, this binary model of postmodernism is not without problems, and the characterization of Rochberg's Third Quartet exemplifies its limitations. In particular, it provides no understanding of the quartet contemporary to its composition and early reception; the question arises as to whether a critical conceptual model that ignores historically-grounded perspectives sufficiently explains a piece of music. An examination of Rocbherg's writings from the time that he completed the quartet in 1972 reveal a composer who advocates using styles from all historical periods in the making of new music, an approach which he labeled as ars combinatoria. This conception of composition may be understood as part of a larger intellectual discourse in which historical cultural forms have currency in the living present. Within this discourse, the Third Quartet is not a regression into the past but rather an expression of contemporary historical concepts. This tension between a historical interpretation of Rochberg's Third String Quartet and the notion of the piece as neoconservative postmodernism can be used as a starting point in the reconsideration of this binary model and its implementation to the study of concert music.
