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Reclaiming tonality was not that simple… . I could not give up my own direct heritage, which was that of a man [who] inherited the legacy of the giants of the time: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók. There are still aspects of their music … which I believe to be viable and valid.
—George Rochberg (1976)In 1969, Rochberg assembled ideas drawn from his personal journals into the essay “No Center,” a quasi-poetic manifesto for a new aesthetic philosophy: ars combinatoria, or the art of combination. Therein, he advocated for a postmodern technique of assemblage and collage that would result in “a complex of attitudes and ideas … surrounded by a vague aura of association.” But Rochberg's philosophical conceit was more existential than the mere collection of objects and stylistic gestures into new musical contexts. In his mind, ars combinatoria was not a compositional technique or theory but an “exploration of deep inner space, mental space.” It promoted artistic expressions of human connection that reflected “a state of mind and soul against death and time” as well as “the survival of our inmost, immaterial essence.” At the core of his philosophy were the values of love and inclusivity, which manifested themselves in the repetition and embrace of the canonical repertory. As Rochberg described, “Everything we love belongs to us. That includes the past and the future. We are the present.” He continued: “360 degrees of past, present, future. All around me. I can look in any direction I want… . Inclusivity… . The liberation of the imagination … implies the freedom to move where the ear takes us and to bring together everything which seems good to it… . We can choose and create our own time.” The result was a rich multi-directionality limited only by one's imagination and aural reach.
While it has been suggested that Rochberg drew inspiration from the philosophical ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote about an “art of combination” in his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666), the composer actually seized on the term after reading Labyrinths (1962), a collection of writings by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.
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