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George Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater: Beyond Discontinuity, Beyond Postmodernism

Mark A. Berry

Scholars have begun to challenge the standard interpretation of George Rochberg’s Music

for the Magic Theater as a radical form of postmodern discontinuity by analyzing formal

connections between its musical quotations. Their work reveals the need for an alternative

interpretive framework to postmodernism, and this paper shows how a contextual approach

guided by Rochberg’s own aesthetic concerns not only strengthens previous analytical findings

but also moves us further beyond the limitations of the postmodern rubric.

In the late 1950s, Rochberg formulated his concept of space-form to reassert the

composer’s control over expressive sound objects, employing it in his 12-tone works as a

corrective to the formal incomprehensibility of indeterminacy and serialism. By 1965, he also

began to invoke John von Neumann’s notion of a cognitive alpha language to justify using music

from past historical periods as another solution. Music for the Magic Theater represents

Rochberg’s attempt to incorporate this alpha-language pluralism into a space-form framework.

The composer treats originally composed atonal outbursts and tonal quotations from Mahler,

Mozart, and Miles Davis as distinct sonic units, and creates relationships between them with

timbral, textural, and motivic techniques similar to those found in his dodecaphonic music.

From this perspective, Music for the Magic Theater is not discontinuous postmodern

pastiche but is part of Rochberg’s ongoing aesthetic project to address the perceptual challenges

posed by contemporary compositional methods. This interpretation re-orients discussion on the

piece away from an abstract postmodern categorization and toward its place within the vivid

historical context surrounding its composition.