George Rochberg, who died Sunday at 86, was one of the leading post-World War II American composers, credited by many with restoring traditional tonality to a respectable role in classical composition.

Rochberg’s career embodied some of the major trends in American composition, as he was among the salient American serialists during the 1950s, only to reject its strictures in favor of a more emotional pastiche that in some ways prefigured postmodernism.

A critical lightning rod, especially within academe – he was chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s music department for much of the 1960s and was on the faculty until 1983 – Rochberg was also well known for his essays, collected in “The Aesthetics of Survival” (1982, revised edition recently published).

He famously rejected the aleatory, or chance-driven, approach favored by such composers as John Cage that represented perhaps the biggest rival to serialism. Rochberg wrote that he had “an unshakeable aversion to any type of art that ignores the human situation by avoiding responsible choice.”

In part for the same reason, Rochberg came to feel the constraints of the rule-bound 12-tone system, even as he became one of its exemplars. “The hope of contemporary music lies in learning how to reconcile all manner of opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, the past with the present, tonality with atonality,” Rochberg wrote.

His work was embraced by some of the leading conductors and performers of his time. At the New York premiere of his Concord Quartets, in 1979, Leonard Bernstein bear-hugged Rochberg and proclaimed them masterpieces. Isaac Stern performed his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra 47 times between 1975 and 1977. Stern said the work was popular “because it’s largely tonal, and it also has tunes one can whistle.”

Rochberg grew up in Passaic, N.J., the son of Ukrainian immigrants. His father was an upholsterer. He played piano from age 10, and began to compose almost immediately. In high school, he composed popular tunes with lyrics by a friend, Bob Russell, who later became a lyricist for Duke Ellington.

Rochberg was educated at Montclair State Teachers College and then won a scholarship to the Mannes School of Music, in New York City, where he studied counterpoint with George Szell. After interrupting his education to serve in the Army during World War II, Rochberg returned to study composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia under Rosario Scalero and Gian Carlo Menotti.

In 1950, he won a Fulbright Fellowship and the Prix de Rome and went to Italy, where he befriended 12-tone composer Luigi Dallapiccola. Returning to America to teach at Curtis, he soon began composing as a serialist. Among his significant early compositions was “Twelve Bagatelles” for solo piano (1952), reworked a decade later in an orchestral setting as “Zodiac.” His Second Symphony (1956) is cited as among his best work in the serialist vein. Among his innovations in the form was breaking the 12-note tone row in halves he called “hexachords,” which then became the motifs of the music.

Rochberg said that it was the death of his son, Paul, in 1964, of brain cancer, that caused his break with serialism. The 12-tone palate became for him “finished, empty, meaningless,” he told the critic Tim Page in 1983, when presented with the aesthetic challenge of communicating his grief over the death of his son. In “Contra Mortem et Tempus” (1965), Rochberg began integrating tonal elements. Later that year, in “Music for the Magic Theater,” he began employing the “collagist” techniques of quoting from diverse musical sources that would characterize much of his later work. The new work was not always well received.

“I was accused of betraying, in the following order, the church and the state. I was a traitor, a renegade,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2001. “I never once responded. If you’re going to be a composer, you have to have an iron stomach, fire in the belly and fire in the brain.”

Rochberg continued to compose prolifically through the mid-1990s. His last major commission was Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (1996), given its premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Rochberg also completed a multivolume book on music theory, as well as his memoirs, “Five Lines and Four Spaces.” Both await publication.

George Rochberg

Born July 5, 1918, in Paterson, N.J.; died May 29 at Bryn Mawr Hospital of complications following surgery; survived by his wife, Gene, and his daughter, Francesca.