Nach Bach

Nach Bach (German for "After Bach", subtitled Fantasia for harpsichord), is a composition for harpsichord or piano by American composer George Rochberg, written in 1966 and dedicated to his friend Igor Kipnis, who premièred the work in Annenberg Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania on 27 January 1967 (Anon. n.d.; Dixon 1992, 99).

Rochberg composed this piece while still serving as chairman of the music department at the University of Pennsylvania. He had just abandoned serialism three years previously in 1963 (Freedman and Rochberg 1976, 12), the year before his father died, in the spring, and in November of the same year his teenage son, Paul, died because of brain tumor (Dixon 1992, 14). The composer said it was after his son died that

it became crystal clear to me that I could not continue writing so-called 'serial' music... It was finished...hollow...meaningless. It also became clearer than ever before that the only justification for claiming one was engaged in the artistic act was to open one's art completely to life and its entire gamut of terrors and joys (real and imagined); and to find, if one could, new ways to transmute these into whatever magic one was capable of. (Rochberg, quoted in Dixon 1992, 74)

He also said he had found serialism to be a style incapable of expressing "serenity, tranquility, grace, wit, energy and perhaps most importantly, joy" (Reise 1980–81, 397). His last serial work was the Trio for violin, cello, and piano, written in 1963 (Thomas 1987, 9).

Rochberg composed the work at Tanglewood in the summer of 1966, on a commission from the harpsichordist Igor Kipnis. At the time, Rochberg knew virtually nothing about the technical problems of the harpsichord, so before setting to work had a long discussion with Kipnis who demonstrated the use of pedals, the attack and timbral characteristics of the instrument, which enabled the composer to incorporate every possible color combination available on Kipnis's custom-built instrument into the structure of the piece (Dixon & 1987 98–100). The manuscript score is dated July 6, 1966, and at that point was designated only for the harpsichord (Rochberg 1966). The score was revised for publication, to include registration markings for the harpsichord added by the dedicatee, Igor Kipnis, and accommodations for performance on the piano, including dynamic markings, indications for pedaling, and ossia passages (on pages 4.1, 4.2, and 8.2) in which some notes are to be played an octave higher on the piano than in the version for harpsichord (Godwin 1968;Thomas 1987, 126).

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