As the geographer Kenneth Hewitt argues, ruins are ‘literally composed’ through the process of place annihilation and are therefore ‘endowed with an existence and a history that define the human attributes of a world’.Footnote ¹ One such ruined site is the French city of Saint-Lô, which suffered near total destruction as Allied troops confronted the German Army during the Norman campaign in the Second World War. A central crossroads since the Middle Ages, Saint-Lô was nestled in a crook of the tranquil Vire River and possessed a city centre ‘rich in historic and architectural treasures’, among them its Notre-Dame cathedral that dated back to the thirteenth century.Footnote ² For the Allies, however, it was a crucial inland choke point at which to delay German reinforcements to the coast.Footnote ³ During the initial Allied airstrike (5 June 1944) seventy-two American bombers dropped over 200,000 pounds of explosives on the city centre, followed by a subsequent round of 14,000 pounds dropped by the British RAF squadrons.Footnote ⁴ In the following days, Allied planes would make ‘concentrated and repeated attacks that seemed to the inhabitants to have been motivated by the sole intention of destroying the city … with bombers return[ing] every day for a week to increase the devastation’.Footnote ⁵ Afterwards, US reconnaissance forces reported that the bulk of the firestorm had fallen directly on the city centre, which suffered nearly 95 per cent destruction.Footnote ⁶ It was reduced to what one eyewitness described as ‘no more than a heap of smoking rubble’.Footnote ⁷

The casualties – both human and architectural – were staggering. As Lois Gordon notes, ‘Saint-Lô was charred and broken, every landmark now ash: homes, shops, the city hall, prefecture, hospital, theatres, hotel, prison, asylum … and finally, the great church, Notre Dame, which had taken three and a half centuries to build. Beneath the ruins were the dead and maimed. The town had become, in a great part, a living cemetery.’Footnote ⁸ The city's ruination quickly became a literary symbol for the impact of the war on Western culture and society. In his essay, ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, Samuel Beckett described the city as ‘a heap of rubble … a sea of mud’ and reflected on its existential significance:Footnote ⁹

As literary scholar Dúnlaith Bird contends, Saint-Lô represented a post-war paradox; capturing ‘both the regrowth of civilization and the acme of its ruination’ and raising timely questions about whether post-war culture might ever ‘emerge from the ashes’ or if it would lay ‘irrevocably shattered and lost’.Footnote ¹¹

Composer George Rochberg (1918–2005), who had marched through the devastated Saint-Lô as an infantryman with the United States Army, similarly believed the war had left humanity in tatters.Footnote ¹² In his private writings, he wrote movingly of his first glimpse of the rubble, an image that would haunt his traumatic flashbacks and nightmares: ‘[We] passed through St Lô [which] had been chewed up something ferocious. Giant eggbeaters had been applied to the town and environs. Nothing but ruination and destruction all around.’Footnote ¹³ Rochberg would consistently interpret the ruins of Saint-Lô not as mere geographical sites, but as ‘material attributes [that revealed] vital clues to its larger meanings’ for post-war society.Footnote ¹⁴ Place mortality and cultural morality had become interlaced conceptually, specifically suggesting to him that Western culture had suffered a grave injury.

Shortly after this encounter, Rochberg was seriously wounded and ferried to England, where he convalesced for the next two-and-a-half months before returning to the front. Upon release, the British nurses gifted him small sketchbooks that he filled with his musical ideas during his second tour of duty.Footnote ¹⁵ His musical sketches were all truncated settings – the gruelling marching and violent battles often left him too exhausted to compose – with the average length ranging between eight to sixteen bars. After the war, Rochberg developed some of these fragments into his first post-war work: a three-movement sonatina for piano (1945).Footnote ¹⁶ But the majority of his wartime ideas remained unrealized – compositional rubble at the bottom of his desk drawer.

After his retirement from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, Rochberg began a concentrated period of symphonic composition that he viewed autobiographically as ‘continuing self-discovery and revealing of layers of existence’.Footnote ¹⁷ He had also begun to sift through his personal papers, a process that unearthed the old sketches from the war and ultimately sparked a new series of works.Footnote ¹⁸ As he remarked to his friend, the Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt, a few excerpts showed particular musical promise despite the passing decades. But mostly, the process triggered memories of the war and its aftermath. In a few rare moments, he would remember times of ‘unhampered peacefulness’, but more often he had traumatic flashbacks that caused him to ‘feel the force of gravity, the heaviness of being’.Footnote ¹⁹ ‘Life for us humans’, he explained to his friend, ‘has a way of accumulating events’ that demand our repeated attention. ‘I have war on the brain. That is what dominates me as I struggle to give life and shape to what I feel and hear.’Footnote ²⁰

Some of these wartime sketches became the thematic material for his Sixth Symphony (1986–7), which Rochberg subtitled ‘in tempore belli’ (‘in the time of war’). The work unfolds in two movements – Fantasia and March – and incorporates fragments of Rochberg's more playful wartime compositions. The fantasia references Rochberg's ‘Song of the Doughboy’ (1944), a light-hearted, comical march written during his basic training service at Camp Shelby in Mississippi.Footnote ²¹ The second movement features three marches drawn from his early Suite for Orchestra (1947), his solo piano work Carnival Music (1971), and his unpublished ‘March of the Halberds’ (1943), an instrumental piece dedicated to the 65th Infantry Division Band.Footnote ²² At the bottom of the Sixth Symphony's manuscript, Rochberg specifically noted that the symphony had been ‘reconstructed February 1986’ rather than ‘composed’ or ‘completed’, as is more typical in his manuscripts. His deliberate rhetoric speaks to reconstruction as a compositional conceit guiding the symphony, most literally in its rebuilding of the symphony from surviving fragments of past works.

Rochberg clearly conceived of reconstruction not simply as a synthetic structuring of his musical shards, but also as a means by which to symbolically confront the modernist forces he believed were accountable for the levelling. In his post-war writings, he increasingly associated modernist aesthetics with a fascist or totalitarian mentality, citing a long list of international composers as destabilizing agents: Milton Babbitt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern. Without irony, he read their musical techniques allegorically, as musical reflections of the very physical mechanisms of modern warfare that he had experienced during the war – ‘sheer clutter, [which overloads one's] reception mechanism [and] consequently chokes off mental oxygen and produces carbon monoxide, poison fumes’.Footnote ²³ Thus, when Rochberg juxtaposed his own neo-Romantic themes with more modernist soundscapes, he was, in his own words, commenting ‘on the way the events of our time and the aesthetics of the same time are different aspects of … dread internal changes which have their outward reflection in external history as it unfolded’.Footnote ²⁴

Specific compositions such as the Sixth Symphony were intended to expose modernist aesthetics as evidence of a broader moral and humanistic injury within Western culture. Throughout the symphony, Rochberg bombards the pre-existing marches with compositional techniques drawn from one well-known target of his: Igor Stravinsky. In bars 99–100 of the fantasia, the Doughboy motive meets resistance in the form of a counter-motive in the brass that dissonantly accumulates into a sustained chord marked ‘brutale’ in the score.Footnote ²⁵ This chord, which features prominently in Stravinsky's ‘Lacrimosa’ from the Requiem Canticles (1966), initiates a series of musical conflicts: between tonal and atonal forces, between lighter tropes and more imposing textures, between a single voice and an overwhelming larger entity.Footnote ²⁶ As Rochberg notes, the intent was to overcome the original march with a forceful and dissonant mass to call attention to the ‘false glories’ and ‘underlying tragic implications’ of warfare.Footnote ²⁷

The modernist gestures within the second movement bear a striking similarity to the Rite of Spring, a resonance that Lorin Maazel signalled when he programmed both works for the 1987 premiere of the Sixth Symphony.Footnote ²⁸ Rochberg's dance-like melodies, presented in the winds and strings, are pummelled by the brass section with forceful blows in irregular metres, recalling the sacrificial dance at the Rite's conclusion. A second allusion appears in a later moment, in which a halting ostinato that precedes the ‘March of the Halberds’ (bb. 307–28) references a similarly anticipatory technique Stravinsky employed directly before the ‘Augurs of Spring’. By the end of the movement, the marches are disfigured by the superimposed modernist frameworks, including irregular mixed metres (creating a limping effect); mixed modal scales (generating harmonic ambiguity); and irregular entrances (simulating metric disorientation). The overall effect is the reduction of iconic symbols (the marches) to rubbled fragments by modernist forces, an effect that Rochberg described metaphorically as his ‘testament’ to how individuals can be ‘swept up into a sense of false joy and optimism in the midst of…terrible realities’.Footnote ²⁹

Such comments align with Rochberg's provocative (and problematic) statements about modernism in general and Stravinsky in particular. In his autobiography, Rochberg accused Stravinsky of advancing an ‘unstable [and] psychological’ musical spectrum that threatened classical humanism.Footnote ³⁰ Within the Rite specifically, Rochberg identified a ‘world of dark fear and passion’ akin to the ‘same passions that drive political beliefs, especially [those] witnessed in the twentieth century [that] drove artistic convictions and beliefs to violent extremes’.Footnote ³¹ Such accusations intensified as he grew older and more paranoid, as in a letter to Anhalt that described modernist music as a ‘nihilistic-destructive withdrawal’ that had brought Western culture ‘almost to the breaking point’.Footnote ³² In his mind, post-war modernism – and what he perceived as an almost cultish devotion to its aesthetics – had allowed the ‘sociological-political disintegration in Europe’ to continue after the war. In response, he believed the world needed a hero to fight for Western music's renewal, lest figures such as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart be relegated to the rubble heaps of history themselves.Footnote ³³

Rochberg envisioned himself in such a redemptive role from an early age. After his encounter at Saint-Lô, Rochberg fashioned an artistic mission for himself from his recovery bed in England: ‘I believe the artist's mission is to raise mankind to a higher level of consciousness and appreciation of the beauties inherent in man and nature.’Footnote ³⁴ In the decades thereafter, he authored essays on aesthetic recovery that valued tonality for its ‘beauty and power of expression’ as well as the balance necessary to reclaim ‘sanity and spiritual serenity’.Footnote ³⁵ Among his most influential models for the renewal of music was what he called the ‘promise in Beethoven’, which he understood as an ethical charge to ‘make clarity and beauty against chaos’.Footnote ³⁶ In one exegesis dedicated to the legacy of the Ninth Symphony, he imagined how Beethoven might rail against the post-war language of modernists such as Milton Babbitt and George Perle: ‘Oh friends, not these sounds … The sounds that destroy peace and harmony? The sounds that bring disruption, pain, unhappiness, sadness, depression? Was this a prophetic insight into the darkness yet to break loose in the twentieth century and wreak havoc in music?’Footnote ³⁷

Around the same time, he began to fashion imaginative representations of rubble landscapes in musical works that featured direct quotations of canonical figures from the Baroque and Classical periods. In 1969, he completed his massive Third Symphony – which I interpret as an earlier companion piece to the Sixth Symphony – in which quotations of Heinrich Schütz, J.S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are overwhelmed by modernistic soundscapes until they crumble.Footnote ³⁸ In his autobiography, Rochberg revealed the explicit subject of this work to be the mid-century catastrophe: ‘I knew it could be done only indirectly, because the means of human expression are insufficient and inadequate to “name” the horrors … [of] the twentieth century. Terms like holocaust, ethnic cleansing, killing fields, gulags, and concentration camps.’Footnote ³⁹ And yet, the Third Symphony also spoke to his belief in stylistic allusions as a means to rebuild musical humanism after what he perceived as total collapse. ‘Despite frequent intensification through atonal, expressionistic chromaticism that clearly identifies it[self] as music of the mid-twentieth century, despite the giant eggbeater’, he wrote, ‘when all is said and done, the overall sense [of the Third Symphony] … is [the character, ethos, and indelibility] of the Baroque.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Embedded in the preceding quotation is a quiet reference to Saint-Lô – the French city torn up by a ‘giant eggbeater’ – which leads me to Rochberg's celebrated Third String Quartet, written three years after the Third Symphony, in 1972. In one set of programme notes, Rochberg describes the first movement as setting the ‘essential gargoyle-like character of the Quartet’, but he points out that these modernist allusions are ‘mixed with music of an opposite character’, namely a set of marching tunes.Footnote ⁴¹ The work therefore anticipates the materials, dramatics, and programmatic language of the Sixth Symphony, but the Quartet offers what the symphony withdrew: the tonal variations of the second movement as an epilogue to the aesthetic war. In a journal entry, Rochberg privately described the second movement as a ‘clear[ing] away of the rubble of twentieth-century mistakes’, envisioning it as an ethical rejection of the brash dissonances heard in the opening movement.Footnote ⁴² Rochberg confirms this therapeutic vision in two later essays, describing the variations as a ‘turning away from … the cultural pathology’ and ‘destructive pressures’ of the mid-century towards the ‘possibility that music can be renewed by regaining contact with the tradition and means of the past’.Footnote ⁴³ The goal, as he noted, was an aesthetics of survival that relied not on total place annihilation but on a reconstruction of cultural memory from the ruins of human tragedy.

At this point, however, I wish to offer a cautionary epilogue to this time-worn narrative of rubble, reconstruction, and redemption. Rochberg's polemical associations of specific styles (modernism) and figures (Stravinsky) with extreme cultural threat ultimately advanced his own false sense of moral superiority. As I read them, I was reminded of how Stravinsky was similarly targeted at the Degenerate Music exhibition (organized by Nazi functionary Hans Ziegler and held in Düsseldorf in 1938) despite having enjoyed a measure of popular success in German musical circles.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Joan Evans notes, Ziegler claimed that his aim was ‘to provide a “helpful contribution to the mental, spiritual and moral renewal of the German people”’ by warning attendees of the dangers of modernist – meaning, racially and politically inferior – music.Footnote ⁴⁵ To that effect, an introductory lecture given by Nazi music and theatre scholar Otto zur Nedden decried the Rite's ‘destructive tendencies’ and accused Stravinsky of consciously ‘demolish[ing] musical form’ in order to ‘stir up the basest instincts’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The most vilified subjects within the exhibition – including the Jewish composers Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill – were also blamed for the desecration of German culture, but the impact on their careers was, by that point, minimal.Footnote ⁴⁷ Stripped of their positions and their lives forever torn apart (both emigrated to the United States and never returned to Germany), they became victims of what happens when vitriolic rhetoric is amplified to national ideology.

I point out these resonances not to equate Rochberg uncritically with the fascism that he abhorred and fought against but to illustrate how seemingly innocuous ‘rubble narratives’ can easily tip into anti-humanist tendencies that require the demonization (if not destruction) of another for their symbolic power. For, as architectural scholar Leen Katrib astutely conveys, ‘rubble is not only a product’; it always holds the potential to become an ‘agent of ruination’ in the hands of custodians who seek to heal the wounds of culture themselves.Footnote ⁴⁸ We must therefore openly acknowledge that within the ‘beautiful rubble clearing’ of the Third String Quartet – with its canonical references to Beethoven and neo-Romantic impulses – lies the dark underbelly of Rochberg's own insecurities, which would gradually emerge in several of his most bigoted public statements: his misogynistic dismissals of women composers, his descriptions of works by homosexual composers as having given rise to a cultural form of AIDS, and his racist attitudes towards cultures he feared were slowly eroding the primacy of Western art music.Footnote ⁴⁹ As he admitted to Anhalt around the time of his eightieth birthday, he could only see himself through his own suffering, as one ‘who tried to make his way through the hail of bullets and orange/red/black flashes of mortar shells. I see all of it as war: symbolic and actual.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Saint-Lô had long been cleared and reconstructed, but nearly fifty years later, the French city persisted symbolically in the indelibility of Rochberg's traumatic encounter with its rubble.