In a mood perhaps influenced by a dull and overcast day—or by aggravated back pain brought on by a particularly uncomfortable hotel bed—Rochberg picked up his journal for the first time in a while. It was the spring of 1999, and he had been invited by Lincoln Center to participate in a public interview with the composer Bruce Adolphe on the subject “Breaking with Modernism,” a title the composer had suggested himself. “I feel like a fraud,” he admitted freely, “I basically don't know anything but feel a great deal about the twentieth century which I’ve lived in my own way—which I know is only a sliver of human experience; how could it be otherwise?” In many ways, the engagement had made him feel his age (on the cusp of eighty-one) and his senior status in the field (as one of the “elder statesmen of composers”), but even more he felt increasingly irrelevant to the active compositional world. Lincoln Center had invited him as a “historical figure” to discuss his role in American music over the past fifty years, but the event limited itself primarily to his confrontation with modernism in the 1960s and 1970s. His receipt of the ASCAP Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award that year only cemented the feeling that he was nearing the end of his relevance. “What am I doing still living at eighty-one,” he wrote, when “my music died at [age] sixty-one [in 1979]? Often I have thought how much better it would have been if I’d died in the war.”

In many ways, 1999 was another turning point in his life. He had retired from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, hoping that the release from service and teaching would renew his creative energies, which it ultimately did.