Rochberg began his formal musical studies in 1938 as a twenty-year-old student at Montclair State Teachers College in New Jersey. The courses he took stressed the canonical repertory, specifically the Austro-German symphonists and the large-scale works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and provided him with his first intellectual engagement with music. “It was a level of school,” he described, “where only the most ‘popular’ pieces of those masters were played, and I knew little of music then except that I liked it tremendously… . The grandeur and solidity of [these] names—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms—caught my fancy.” He auditioned for and was accepted to the Mannes School of Music in New York City and began his first compositional studies with Hans Weisse, a Viennese theorist widely recognized as one of the fathers of American Schenkerism. As a teacher, Weisse rarely discussed Schenkerian analysis with Rochberg. Rather, he immersed his student in detailed studies of counterpoint and the German masters. “I studied Bach in a way I’d never dreamed possible,” Rochberg wrote about his earliest mentor. “He was tied more to traditional models than other people of his generation … [but he taught] me what I hungered to know about the mysteries of writing music.”

In 1941, Weisse passed away from a brain tumor, after which Rochberg studied briefly with Leopold Mannes before being transferred to the compositional guidance of the Hungarian conductor George Szell. According to Rochberg, World War II had played a role in bringing the two together. Szell had held positions at premiere institutions throughout central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, but the outbreak of war had occurred during a series of guest appearances in South America. Like many artists of stature, he chose to relocate his activities to the United States, where he initially conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra and taught at Mannes.