Music like NACH

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.

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, 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. 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.