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Building Contexts for American Dodecaphony:

Space-Form and George Rochberg’s Second String Quartet

Mark Berry, January 29, 2011

In his recent book Twelve-Tone Music in America, Joseph Straus sets out to counter the

perception that dodecaphonic practice in the United States has been dominated by a small cadre

of zealots, and presents it instead as a multifaceted, flexible musical tradition stretching back to

the 1920s. Although a questioning of assumptions about 12-tone music’s past is much overdue,

Straus’s focus on pitch-based analysis at the expense of other cultural and artistic criteria limits

insight into the music and hampers the revisionist enterprise as a whole. Straus’s discussion of

Rochberg’s Second String Quartet illustrates these constraints, and in this paper I develop an

interpretive analysis—guided by the composer’s aesthetic concerns—that broadens our

understanding of the piece beyond pitch-class sets.

While writing the second quartet in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rochberg formulated

an idiosyncratic alternative to the rigid strictures of indeterminacy and serialism; space-form was

a concept that allowed post-tonal composers to freely determine musical structure by creating

audible relationships between individual sound objects. Rochberg’s Second String Quartet

unfolds as a musical manifestation of space-form: throughout, gestural units with their own

distinct characteristics interrupt each other, fade away into silence, or emerge from an existing

texture. And although Rochberg uses the 12-tone row to create consistency across these gestural

units, he also exploits dodecaphonic procedures to exaggerate the differences between them. By

showing how one of Straus’s case studies was part of an aesthetic project to rectify the perceived

shortcomings of modernist compositional methods including serialism, this contextual space-

form perspective helps to demonstrate that the American 12-tone tradition was more contentious

and self-reflective than Straus depicts it to be.

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***

To Straus, the broad survey of 38 pieces that he examines in Twelve-Tone Music in

America—from the ultra-modernist Carl Ruggles to Jeff Nichols—indicates the flexibility of

dodecaphony as a “loosely knit cultural practice.” Rochberg’s contribution to this “vigorous and

unbroken tradition” was his awareness of its role in changing the relationship between music’s

temporal and spatial dimensions; Straus cites the composer’s 1963 article “The New Image of

Music” to explain:

The passage of sounding forms in traditional music is dominated and organized by a flow of
measured beats, presenting an image of time in a constant state of flux and movement, of change
and becoming. But in the new music it is the image of space which predominates, an image in
which the sound substance forms itself as the primary object of perception.1

Where “traditional music” used meter to create the impression of moving through time, 20th-

century atonality downplays rhythm, using it primarily as a means to present sound objects

within musical space. Straus cites Rochberg’s second quartet as an example, analyzing it as a

collection of sound blocks that are “intrinsically static, but juxtaposed in a variety of ways.”2

Within each instrumental line, the row statements form separate motivic groups that stand apart

from each other, and when all four voices play together, the result is an aural mosaic of musical

shapes.

In his quartet, Rochberg only uses row forms that contain the same three tetrachords with

specific pitches, and Straus depicts this as the glue binding the individual components together.

Straus shows how these tetrachords appear in what he identifies as the prime row (example 1).

1
Cited in Twelve-Tone Music in America by Joseph N. Straus (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 76. See also “The New Image of Music” by George Rochberg in The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s
View of Twentieth-Century Music, Revised and Expanded Edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004),
23.
2
Straus, 79.
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Tetrachord X Tetrachord Y Tetrachord Z

P-0 C#-C G-F# D-Eb A-G# E-F Bb-B
X1 X2 Y1 Y2 Z1 Z2

Tetrachord Y Tetrachord Z Tetrachord X

RI-7 G#-A D-D#(Eb) B-A#(Bb) E-F C-C# G-F#
Y2 Y1 Z2 Z1 X1 X2
Example 1. The Prime Form of the 12-Tone Row for Rochberg’s Second String Quartet,
According to Joseph Straus.

Each tetrachord consists of two semitone dyads: the first tetrachord, labeled X, contains C#-to-C

and G-to-F#; the Y tetrachord contains D-to-Eb and A-G#; and the Z tetrachord is made up of

the E-to-F and Bb-to-B dyads. Although these semitone groups may appear in different orders,

and notes might be flipped around, they always appear together within their own tetrachords. In

RI-7, for example, tetrachord Y appears first with its dyads reorganized—but intact with the

same pitches—followed by a version of Z and a slightly altered X tetrachord.

The connection between the Second String Quartet and Rochberg’s comments in “The

New Image of Music” is a valid interpretative starting point, but Straus’s reading is highly

selective, providing a very limited—and somewhat misleading—picture. Straus does not mention

that in “The New Image of Music” Rochberg is highly critical of serialism, and warns that its

preoccupation with objectifying musical sound poses insurmountable perceptual problems. In

bolstering his point about the vitality and diversity of American twelve-tone culture, Straus

ignores the possibility that the second quartet was the product of Rochberg’s more pointed

commentary.

***

After describing the contemporary musical mindset in “The New Image of Music,”

Rochberg examines how it manifests itself in the dominant compositional trends of

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indeterminacy and serialism. In both cases, he finds that the search for new sound worlds within

the spatial realm has become an obsession that threatens the very comprehensibility of music.

Rochberg quickly dismisses indeterminacy as “utterly discontinuous and perceptually

unpredictable.” He spends more time addressing what he sees as the disturbing contradiction

between the compositional goals of strict serialism and the sounds that result. According to

Rochberg, the more thoroughly composers such as Stockhausen and Boulez organize every part

of their music—giving up their formal decision-making to deterministic serialist procedures—the

more it approaches the “perceptual disorder” of indeterminacy.3 In an article written just before

“The New Image of Music,” Rochberg compares this situation to the process of entropy, noting

that the “ordering of equivalents is analogous to the equal distribution of energy in closed

physical systems.”4 Because all parameters of sound receive the same treatment, every moment

becomes equally important within a serialist piece. There is no way to hear relationships between

individual sections, and over time the music becomes more and more aurally balanced—and less

and less comprehensible. Listeners are left with a collection of sounds that, although rigidly

planned out on paper, appear as random and chaotic.

***

Rochberg’s solution to this musical dead end is space-form. Space-form is not a return to

the temporal conventions of tonal music discourse—what Rochberg calls speech-form—but is a

way to rejuvenate contemporary spatial experimentation by allowing composers to make

subjective artistic decisions about musical structure. In space-form, composers still exploit

musical space by positing sound objects that resonate with listeners as “energy tensions.” But

they also have creative license to decide how each of these energetic sound masses transitions

3
Rochberg, “The New Image of Music,” 18.
4
Rochberg, “Indeterminacy and the New Music,” in The Aesthetics of Survival, 7.
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from one to another, and in these powerful moments, significant relationships develop. There is

no predominantly temporal flow, but there is a sense of change that creates a perceptible

structure, one that is “determined solely by the form it takes in relation to the context it

establishes with other images.”5 By embracing the spatial potential of music while resisting the

hyper-organization of serialism, Rochberg feels he is putting forward a compositional philosophy

that is the musical equivalent of Charles Olson’s projective verse and abstract expressionist art.

As such, space-form is, to Rochberg “as authentic for us as speech-form was for previous

centuries … [it is] a profoundly human musical form, a potentially intense artistic expression.”6

Space-form was Rochberg’s first attempt to present a direct alternative to serialism, and

it’s possible that it was out of his work on the Second String Quartet that the composer

developed the concept. Only a few weeks after mentioning in a 1961 letter to Istvàn Anhalt that

rehearsals for his second quartet were to begin, Rochberg wrote a second letter to Anhalt in

which he discussed some preliminary thoughts about space-form. Here we see a composer who

is attempting to build a career within the dodecaphonic “cultural practice” while grappling with

its limitations.

***

The Second String Quartet consists of a substantial opening instrumental section

followed by a setting of Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy in English translation. In both parts,

Rochberg presents clearly articulated gestural units that differentiate themselves from each other

through timbre, texture, and dynamics. The first gestural unit—and the entire piece—begins with

the second violin, which introduces the prime form of the row (example 2).

5
Rochberg, “The Concepts of Musical Time and Space,” in The Aesthetics of Survival, 118.
6
Rochberg, “The Concepts of Musical Time and Space,” 126.
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Tetrachord X Tetrachord Y Tetrachord Z

P-0 E-F Bb(A#)-B Eb(D#)-D G#-A C#-C G-F#
X1 X2 Y1 Y2 Z1 Z2
(Straus’s Z) (Straus’s X)
Example 2. Beginning of Gestural Unit A; Prime Form of the 12-Tone Row.
Rochberg, Second String Quartet.

This is not the same prime row that Straus identifies, but it does contain the same three

distinctive tetrachords. Here, what Straus labels as the Z tetrachord appears first, and his X

tetrachord is last. (For a full list of rows and row numbers, please see Example 6). The other

three instruments enter in quick succession after the second violin. Each of the lines presents row

forms that contain versions of the tetrachords, adding a degree of consistency to the contrapuntal

texture that develops.

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As instruments enter and drop out of gestural unit A, a certain ebb and flow develops; all

of this is abruptly interrupted by a sudden outburst of loud, short, disjunct notes that announces

the arrival of gestural unit B (example 3).

Example 3. Interruption of Gestural Unit A by Gestural Unit B.

Rochberg, Second String Quartet.

Spiky and abrupt, gestural unit B contrasts sharply with the relatively smooth flow of gestural

unit A, and there is nothing in the music that announces a change; gestural unit A simply stops

and gestural unit B violently begins. Rochberg underscores the sense of interruption by curtailing

the row forms that conclude gestural unit A and using the remaining pitch material to announce

gestural unit B. Rochberg begins the first violin line of gestural unit B with the final E-F dyad

(X1) of row form R-2, which ends gestural unit A. He hardly begins RI-9 in the second violin

before breaking it up. The viola splits RI-3 and the cello divides R-8. Because the row forms
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occur so regularly throughout gestural unit A, their separation here is particularly striking, and

emphasizes the juxtaposition of these two contrasting gestural units.

This sudden, disruptive shift between gestural units is one point of transition that occurs

in the quartet; the gradual disintegration of gestural unit B is another (example 4).

Example 4. Disintegration of Gestural Unit B. Rochberg, Second String Quartet.

At the end of gestural unit B, it sounds as if the music is struggling to stay heard. One by one,

each voice simply gives up, starting with the first violin. The viola follows, with a long F# that

gradually gets softer and dies out. The second violin puts up a good fight with a loud Bb-B dyad

(X2), but the cello gives it all up, ending the section on a low, soft, short F#. After a brief

moment of silence, gestural unit C begins.

In the midst of gestural unit C, an antiphonal melody section gradually emerges from the

dense polyphonic texture, announced by a loud fanfare-like statement(example 5).

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Example 5. Antiphonal Melody Section. Rochberg, Second String Quartet.

The two violins then begin to pass the melody between them as the other two voices churn

underneath. The first half of this section freely uses the characteristic dyads from tetrachords X,

Y, and Z, but in the second half something changes and, for the first time, Rochberg uses

alternative pitch material (example 6).

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I0 I1 I6 I7 I11 I10 I4 I5 I9 I8 I3 I2
P0 E F A# B D# D G# A C# C G F# R2
P11 D# E A A# D C# G G# C B F# F R1
P6 A# B E F A G# D D# G F# C# C R8
P5 A A# D# E G# G C# D F# F C B R7
P1 F F# B C E D# A A# D C# G# G R3
P2 F# G C C# F E A# B D# D A G# R4
P8 C C# F# G B A# E F A G# D# D R10
P7 B C F F# A# A D# E G# G D C# R9
P3 G G# C# D F# F B C E D# A# A R5
P4 G# A D D# G F# C C# F E B A# R6
P9 C# D G G# C B F F# A# A E D# R11
P10 D D# G# A C# C F# G B A# F E R0
RI10 RI11 RI4 RI5 RI9 RI8 RI2 RI3 RI7 RI6 RI1 RI0

Tetrachord U Tetrachord V Tetrachord W

P-11 D#(Eb)-E A-A#(Bb) D-C#(Db) G-G#(Ab) C-B F#(Gb)-F
U1 U2 V1 V2 W1 W2
Example 6. The Row Matrix for Rochberg’s Second String Quartet and
the Alternative Tetrachords.

In the row matrix for the Second String Quartet, half of the forms are made up of the X, Y, and Z

tetrachords; the other half are made up of a different set of three tetrachords that have their own

semitone dyads, and it is these two-note groups that Rochberg uses to conclude the antiphonal

melody section. The first tetrachord (labeled U in Example 6) is made up of the D#-to-E and A-

to-A# dyads. The second, labeled V, contains D-to-C# and G-to-G#; the third has C-to-B and F#-

to-F. These alternative tetrachords are presented in aggregate twice, with the antiphonal melody

stating each of the alternative dyads once. In conjunction with the distinctive melody and

rhythmically uniform voices, this new pitch material differentiates the antiphonal melody section

from gestural unit C and the rest of the Second String Quartet.

In the setting of Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, the antiphonal melody section takes on added

relevance, appearing at two pivotal points in Rilke’s depiction of the spiritual struggle to deal

with the impermanence of existence. It first occurs after the lines “But this having been once
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only: here on earth, can it ever be again no more?” These words ask whether the past has any

relevance in the present or the future; as if to answer in the affirmative, Rochberg brings back the

music that sounds the most like the traditional, outmoded music he discusses in his writings. The

second statement comes on the words “Earth my adored, I obey. / You need no other springs to

win me, / One is more than my blood can endure.” This is the point in the poem where

acceptance of life as only a small part of the flow of eternity sets in, and the antiphonal melody

becomes a musical symbol for the persistence of the past as part of our present-day experience.

This particular use of the antiphonal melody section in Rochberg’s Ninth Duino Elegy setting

could be construed as a possible amendment to the space-form concept, one that warns against

completely abandoning past musical procedures—and foreshadows his future use of tonal

conventions.

***

The case of Rochberg’s Second String Quartet and its relationship to space-form shows

that an attempt to construct a history of dodecaphony requires a rigorous examination not only of

different ways that composers used the technique, but also the motivations behind their choices.

This is but one contextual framework that can help: other scholars have also opened up avenues

of research on the political underpinnings of dodecaphony as well as on new methods for

conceptualizing the listening experience. All of these approaches can build a deep, contextually

grounded historical understanding of dodecaphony and its relationship to American music.