George Rochberg: A Dance of Polar Opposites, edited and with an introduction by Jeremy Gill
Published by University of Rochester Press, 2012
In A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language, the renowned American composer George Rochberg distilled a lifetime of insights about Western music across some three hundred years. Rochberg describes how the asymmetrical tonal language of the late eighteenth century-the era of Haydn and Mozart-evolved, through the gradual incursion of symmetry, into a system based on the juxtaposition of tonal and atonal, asymmetrical and symmetrical-as seen in notable composers such as Webern, Prokofiev, and Rochberg himself. A Dance of Polar Opposites takes us inside the composer’s studio, reveals how he assessed his and our musical past, and paints a picture of what he believed our musical future may be.
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