In a mood perhaps influenced by a dull and overcast day—or by aggravated back pain brought on by a particularly uncomfortable hotel bed—Rochberg picked up his journal for the first time in a while. It was the spring of 1999, and he had been invited by Lincoln Center to participate in a public interview with the composer Bruce Adolphe on the subject “Breaking with Modernism,” a title the composer had suggested himself. “I feel like a fraud,” he admitted freely, “I basically don't know anything but feel a great deal about the twentieth century which I’ve lived in my own way—which I know is only a sliver of human experience; how could it be otherwise?” In many ways, the engagement had made him feel his age (on the cusp of eighty-one) and his senior status in the field (as one of the “elder statesmen of composers”), but even more he felt increasingly irrelevant to the active compositional world. Lincoln Center had invited him as a “historical figure” to discuss his role in American music over the past fifty years, but the event limited itself primarily to his confrontation with modernism in the 1960s and 1970s. His receipt of the ASCAP Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award that year only cemented the feeling that he was nearing the end of his relevance. “What am I doing still living at eighty-one,” he wrote, when “my music died at [age] sixty-one [in 1979]? Often I have thought how much better it would have been if I’d died in the war.”

In many ways, 1999 was another turning point in his life. He had retired from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, hoping that the release from service and teaching would renew his creative energies, which it ultimately did.

As moments in this book reveal, Rochberg had always understood music as a “direct expression and uncompromised projection of the states of the human heart and soul.” He believed deeply in the personal Innerlichkeit of art, a romantic notion that “compositions were fragments of autobiography” that revealed the causal relationship between the “outer world of human actions and behavior and the inner world of mental-spiritual states.” It therefore comes as no surprise that his personal journals, in which he wrote regularly between 1948 and 2005, record strikingly candid reflections about how his lived experiences—whether consciously or subconsciously, positively or negatively— fed the spiritual content of his music. As he remarked in one entry from 1996, at age seventy-eight: “Dreaming is a little like writing music. You can't dream what you want to when you want. I keep thinking I’m on the road to the Falaise Gap, and I’ve walked it in memory. Stretches of it come back to me. It remains an unknown and is wrapped in pain and fear, inside and outside, all around. It has grown into a major, giant symbol within my life.”

In his journals, Rochberg detailed decades of residual trauma linked to his experiences during World War II. He describes a host of symptoms that correlate with the four diagnostic clusters recognized as clinical indicators of posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD: re-experiencing, avoidance, negative cognitions and mood, and hyper-arousal. Among those he directly linked to his war experience were nightmares, flashbacks, a persistent sense of fatalism, debilitating bouts of depression, feelings of social isolation, and episodes of insomnia. Although PTSD is a fairly recent psychological designation—the American Psychiatric Association first established its diagnostic criteria in 1980—warrelated emotional trauma was already acknowledged in the colloquial military speak of the times: shell shock, effort syndrome, combat exhaustion, battle fatigue. As the army's chief neurologist Frederick Hanson belatedly determined, “Even the most normal of soldiers may be brought to neurotic decompensation by war,” and the emotional stress they suffered appeared “almost directly proportional to the time spent in combat.”

Rochberg began his formal musical studies in 1938 as a twenty-year-old student at Montclair State Teachers College in New Jersey. The courses he took stressed the canonical repertory, specifically the Austro-German symphonists and the large-scale works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and provided him with his first intellectual engagement with music. “It was a level of school,” he described, “where only the most ‘popular’ pieces of those masters were played, and I knew little of music then except that I liked it tremendously… . The grandeur and solidity of [these] names—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms—caught my fancy.” He auditioned for and was accepted to the Mannes School of Music in New York City and began his first compositional studies with Hans Weisse, a Viennese theorist widely recognized as one of the fathers of American Schenkerism. As a teacher, Weisse rarely discussed Schenkerian analysis with Rochberg. Rather, he immersed his student in detailed studies of counterpoint and the German masters. “I studied Bach in a way I’d never dreamed possible,” Rochberg wrote about his earliest mentor. “He was tied more to traditional models than other people of his generation … [but he taught] me what I hungered to know about the mysteries of writing music.”

In 1941, Weisse passed away from a brain tumor, after which Rochberg studied briefly with Leopold Mannes before being transferred to the compositional guidance of the Hungarian conductor George Szell. According to Rochberg, World War II had played a role in bringing the two together. Szell had held positions at premiere institutions throughout central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, but the outbreak of war had occurred during a series of guest appearances in South America. Like many artists of stature, he chose to relocate his activities to the United States, where he initially conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra and taught at Mannes.

Rochberg's compositional indictment of modernism in the Third Symphony would find its literary translation two years later in “Humanism versus Science” (1970). The essay lamented the replacement of “singing and dancing in the traditional musical sense” with “conscious counting” and the desire of modernist composers to achieve a “frozen” aesthetic—“sound events designed in time” but lacking human pulse and personal cosmologies. His diagnosis of the situation again targeted a cultural fascination with “mathematics, logic, and science [that] have taken on the rational madness of their scientific confreres,” with music now reduced to a “new form of applied science, a kind of acoustical technology.” At the conclusion of the essay, Rochberg described musical composition as being held hostage, expressing a fear that “any sense of the human limits of music has been lost.” He concluded with a passage from The Physicists (1961) by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt: “I am poor King Solomon. Once I was immeasurably rich and wise and god-fearing… . But my wisdom destroyed my fear of God, and when I no longer feared God, my wisdom destroyed my riches. Now all cities are dead over which I ruled; the empire which was entrusted to me is empty … I am poor King Solomon.” It is the lamentation of a modern-day scientist who realizes too late the human consequences of his creations.

King Solomon is also a Jewish figure, and his deliberate presence in Rochberg's text points to another lesser explored subject-position in the composer's biography: his identification as a secular Jew. In a letter to Anhalt, he described his relationship to Judaism as a “war [he had felt] in [him]self since [he] was fifteen to seventeen [years old],” and it begged of him many complex existential questions. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rochberg confessed to a “growing need to confirm and reaffirm my Jewishness—not in the ordinary sociological sense [of] joining a congregation … but in the spiritual sense.

In 1984, George Rochberg dashed off an irritated letter to his friend, the Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt, about the Ronald Reagan presidency (“so many small people, luft menschen”) and a film he had recently viewed: “I saw an 1½ hour documentary of World War I … which stunned me with the utter stupidity of what we so euphemistically always refer to as ‘mankind.’ Such pride, arrogance, wrong-headedness, lack of understanding, brutality; such unwillingness on all sides to let go of all the falsities that govern men's behavior when they are in positions of power and authority.” As he wrote to Anhalt with some vigor, “Stick a uniform on someone, give him a high-sounding title, tell him the fate of the country … depends on him—and suddenly everything that is possible to imagine that is against humanity emerges.” Rochberg's commentary was not unusual for the time; ruminations about totalitarianism and the uncritical participation of Americans in their government were common, in part because the year of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 had finally come. Published in 1949, the book had posed serious postwar questions about how governmental control over messaging could “invade and destroy … relationships: children's belief in their parents; close friendships; the love between a man and a woman.” Indeed, Rochberg had always seen a connection between the memory holes of “Orwell's monsters” and the Nazi propaganda machine run by Joseph Goebbels. “When language no longer reflects reality,” he wrote in his journal on New Year's Day, “it becomes a tool of propagandists … and a means not only for deluding others but oneself as well.”

Rochberg was speaking not only as a cultural critic but also as someone whose life experiences and human relationships had been impacted by the political implications of mid-century nationalist rhetoric—whether Hitler's fascist decrees or Roosevelt's description of the attack on Pearl Harbor as a “day that will live in infamy.”