Murder is the subject of this large-scale wind ensemble work. Accordingly, it's aggressive, tough music seeking an example of modernism that does not follow the twelve-tone system. George Rochberg (born in 1918 in Patterson, NJ) studied composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia on the G.I. Bill. He was an infantry lieutenant during World War II and was seriously wounded at Normandy. The war, he has said, made him come to grips with his own time, which meant embracing and that he needed to use the twelve-tone method. To that end, he returned to Europe to study with Luigi Dallapiccola, the Italian pioneer in Schoenberg's method. Shortly before he wrote this work, a personal tragedy prompted an artistic crisis in Rochberg's approach to music. In 1964, his son Paul died at the age of 20 of a brain tumor. Rochberg found that the twelve-tone system had no capacity for him to create music that dealt with his despair in a meaningful way. Rochberg stopped using serialism as a system. Instead, he wrote in a freely polystylistic manner, sometimes writing atonal music, sometimes tonal, sometimes frankly Romantic, and at times, all in the same piece. One of the works he wrote out of his despair was a wind ensemble piece called Apocalyptica. He received a commission for a ballet score from Lincoln Center and Apocalyptica provided its musical materials. The ballet itself, by choreographer Anna Sokolow (1910—2000), was called The Act. She devised it as part of a television project the Lincoln Center developed for WNET Television in New York, the "act" of the title is the act of murder. Rochberg had to write music that was relentless, brooding, violent, and consistently dark in tone. Hence the name of the orchestral score, Black Sounds. It did not have to be atonal, so Rochberg turned for an example to a leading composer who went his own way, writing music that was thoroughly modern but without reference to anyone else's esthetic method: Edgard Varèse. Rochberg accordingly fashioned this work as an overt homage to the pioneer modernist. In style, Black Sounds is much like middle-period Varèse works such as Hyperprisme and Intégrales, and is scored for an ensemble much like the latter: about 12 winds and four or five percussion players who deploy a large battery of instruments. Using his own musical material, Rochberg does use a typical Varèse gesture, a repeated-note rhythmic figure preceded by a short, upbeat melisma or grace note. Large, heavy chords frequently form and are entirely non-functional. Like Varèse's music, it does not matter if the listener does or does not perceive a tonal center. The television program Pioneers aired on September 24, 1965, and Rochberg and Sokolow's ballet won a Prix d'Italia for television in 1966.

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