[1] By the 1970s, Rochberg's use of tonal passages in his music had provoked controversy among critics and fellow composers.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Rochberg attended first the Mannes College of Music, where his teachers included George Szell and Hans Weisse, then the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Rosario Scalero and Gian Carlo Menotti.
A longtime exponent of serialism, Rochberg abandoned this compositional technique upon the death of his teenage son in 1964.
[4] His music has also been described as neoconservative postmodernism[5] Of the works Rochberg composed early in his career, his Symphony No.
"Contra Mortem et Tempus", for example, contains passages from Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Edgard Varèse and Charles Ives.
1, 2, and 5, and the Violin Concerto were recorded in 2001–2002 by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken and conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee and released on the Naxos label.
And that was an extraordinary feeling in the late 1960s for young composers, I think, many of whom felt really constrained to write serial music.
"[6] Rochberg's collected essays were published by the University of Michigan Press in 1984 as The Aesthetics of Survival.
Selections from his correspondence with the Canadian composer István Anhalt were published in 2007 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.