The Repercussions of George Rochberg's Rubble Rhetoric

Abstract

Abstract During the Second World War, the American composer George Rochberg served as an infantryman with the US Army in Europe. There, he witnessed first hand the aftermath caused by massive firebombing of the French countryside by both Allied and Axis bombers, an image that would remain with him for the remainder of his life. In his post-war writings, the rubbled city of Saint-Lô soon became a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture, which he believed had suffered a grave injury. This article considers how Rochberg reconstructed his wartime sketches – short miniatures composed during the European campaign – into material for his Sixth Symphony (1986). I argue that Rochberg clearly conceived of musical reconstruction as a means by which to symbolically confront the modernist forces he believed accountable for the decline of Western culture that he increasingly perceived towards the end of his life. The article ends with a cautionary epilogue to this time-worn narrative of rubble, reconstruction, and redemption that challenges Rochberg's false sense of moral superiority and the motivations of ‘rubble narratives’ more generally.