Composer George Rochberg, author of the famous Violin Concert played 47 times by Isaac Stern, died Sunday in Bryn Mawr, PA.
In the ’60s, Rochberg led his personal revolution by rejecting the algebraic order of serialism in favor of music that sounded “how did we use to put it? — beautiful” [Donal Henahan of the New York Times referring to Rochberg’s Third String Quartet]. Between 1948 and 1964, Rochberg was part of the modernist avant-guard and composed following the rules of atonal serialism. After the death of his son for a brain tumor, however, Rochberg realized that serial music was good at conveying order and structure, not at expressing emotions. Serialism was “gray and dull,” unable to communicate grief, rage, hope, or despair.
He went back to tonal music and declared the right of modern composers to find their own voice and to exercise freedom of expression rather than being forced into the discipline of one specific school (“Modernism ended up allowing us only a postage-stamp-sized space to stand on”). He re-affirmed the right to refer to and reuse the music of the past, rather than be imprisoned the amnesic now of modernism (“There is no greater provincialism than that special form of sophistication and arrogance which denies the past”).
“One of the biggest problems about XXth century music in term of modernism is that very little of it can be remembered. It struck me a long time ago what a painful thing is to be involved as an artist, how painful to spend a lifetime producing work which leaves nothing on the retina of memory.” [From an interview with Terry Gross, 1994]
Rochberg’s dilemma strikes me as such a fundamental one, not only for art critics [I bet one could organize all art production on a continuum between excessively cerebral and excessively sentimental; I wonder where great art would fall on it] but especially from the point of view of the person who is creating an artistic expression. Even outside the boundaries of art, any communication act (including blogs) involves choosing the balance between the expression of feelings and emotions and the intellectual reflection on the underlying structure of the events, between concrete and abstract, between the reaction to an event and the description of it.
Rochberg suggests that the satisfaction we get from expressing ourself — the healing value of creation — comes from choosing the right mix of describing something and expressing our emotional reaction to it.
This sounds very similar to the results of studies that James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth conducted a few years ago on the effect of “expressive writing” on the immune system. Their research shows that writing about traumatic events — as long as writing is used not just as emotional venting but as a way to understand what happened and to build a bridge between reason and emotion — improves people’s immune functions.
So, go ahead and write that post, but make sure to write not just what happened and how you felt about it but also why it happened.
References
Smyth, J., & Helm, R. (2003). Focused expressive writing about stress and trauma. In Session: Psychotherapy in Practice, 59, 227-235.
Murray, B., Writing to heal, The American Psychological Association Monitor, June 2002.
Lepore, S., & Smyth, J. (2002). The writing cure: How expressive writing promotes health and emotional well-being. American Psychological Association press: Washington, DC.
Carpenter, S., A new reason for keeping a diary, The American Psychological Association Monitor, September 2001.
Smyth, J., Stone, A., Hurewitz, A., Kaell, A., (1999). Effects of writing about stressful experiences on symptom reduction in patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis: a randomized trial. JAMA, 17: 1304–9.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162-166.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1993). Putting stress into words: Health, linguistic, and therapeutic implications. Behavior Research & Therapy, 31(6), 539-548.