America's first high-profile serialist composer goes tonal to the consternation of the serious music establishment. Rochberg created some well respected serial work (most notably his second symphony from 1955-56), but abandoned it in the mid sixties because he thought serial music lacked the capacity to express emotion. Rochberg challenged the modernist concept of stylistic obsolescence & "requisite nowness", instead championing “all human gestures available to all human beings at any time” prefiguring an attitude which would later come to be called "Postmodern". This storm crested with the Mahleresque gestures of his String Quartet No. 3, though the modern ear from the twenty teens hears a foreshadowing of the sampler in the repeated pizzicato backgrounding that appears in the first and third parts.
When the "avant garde" is the establishment, what truly is avant garde?
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