A leading British composer died today
RIPSchott UK have announced the death early this morning of the influential composer Alexander Goehr.
Sandy was 92.
A Hitler refugee, born in Berlin to the Schoenberg-trained conductor Walter Goehr, he studied in 1950s Manchester alongside Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, John Ogdon and Elgar Howarth. Goehr brought a much-needed cosmopolitan dimension to the insular group, having also studied with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod in Paris.
While Harry and Max achieved international renown, Sandy’s compositions were more intellectual and introspective. They include four symphonies and several concertos. He was rwice composer in residence at Tanglewood. Meanwhile he taught two generations of composers at the University of Cambridge.
Schott release follows.
It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Alexander Goehr at the age of 92. Distinguished composer and teacher, Goehr’s substantial impact on contemporary music in Britain and abroad is perceptible through his significant compositional output as well as the many noteworthy composers whom he taught.
Goehr was born in Berlin on 10 August 1932, the son of conductor Walter Goehr, and brought to England in 1933. He studied with Richard Hall at the Royal Manchester College of Music and with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod in Paris. In Manchester, Goehr was a conduit between the recent music of continental modernism and his fellow students, and together with Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies and John Ogdon, he formed the New Music Manchester Group. In the early 1960’s he worked for the BBC and formed the Music Theatre Ensemble, the first ensemble devoted to what has become an established musical form. From the late 1960’s onwards he taught at the New England Conservatory Boston, Yale, Leeds and in 1975 was appointed to the chair of the University of Cambridge, where he remained Emeritus Professor until his death. He also taught in China and was twice Composer-in-Residence at Tanglewood.
The year of Goehr’s appointment at Cambridge coincided with a turning point in his output, with the composition of a white-note setting of Psalm IV (1976). The simple, bright modal sonority of this piece marked a departure from post-war serialism and a commitment to a more transparent soundworld. Goehr found a way of controlling harmonic pace by fusing his own modal harmonic idiom with the long abandoned practice of figured bass, achieving a highly idiosyncratic fusion of past and present. The output of the ensuing years testifies to Goehr’s desire to use this new idiom to explore ideas and genres that were already constant features of his work.
Goehr’s orchestral works include four symphonies, concertos for piano, violin, viola and cello, works for chamber, string and wind orchestra, as well as ensemble works. He wrote five operas, a number of ambitious vocal scores, and a rich body of chamber music. Goehr held a particularly close working relationship with Oliver Knussen, who recorded and gave premiere performances of many works including … a musical offering (J. S. B. 1985)… (1985), Idées Fixes (1997) and To These Dark Steps/The Fathers Are Watching (2011-12) for tenor, children’s choir and ensemble. Associations with other world-class orchestras, soloists and conductors produced numerous works: The cello concerto Romanza (1968) was written for Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim, Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic Orchestra premiered Metamorphosis/Dance (1973-74), Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered Colossos or Panic (1991-92) under Seiji Ozawa, and Two Sarabandes (2014) was commissioned by Bamberg Symphony who premiered the work with Lahav Shani.
Through the chamber music medium, Goehr gained an unprecedented rhythmic and harmonic immediacy, while his music remained ever permeable by the music and imagery of other times and places. Marching to Carcassonne (2003) for Peter Serkin and London Sinfonietta, flirts with neoclassicism and Stravinsky. The set of solo piano pieces Symmetries Disorder Reach (2007), a barely disguised baroque suite, was premiered by Huw Watkins, and …between the lines… (2013), written for the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, traces its lineage back to Schoenberg and Schubert and Shakespeare inspired Since Brass, nor Stone… written for percussionist Colin Currie and the Pavel Haas Quartet which won the chamber category of the 2009 British Composer Awards.
Goehr’s work and commitment to new music was recognised in his lifetime by numerous prestigious organisations. An honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a former Churchill Fellow, in 2019 Goehr was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society in recognition of his lifelong contribution to musical culture. An archive of Goehr’s manuscripts is curated by the Berlin Akademie der Künste where it will be available to future students of composition and researchers.
The collaborative book Composing a Life by Goehr and composer-musicologist and former pupil Jack Van Zandt was published by Carcanet in October 2023. One of Goehr’s final work, Ondering (2023) for string quartet was premiered by the Villiers Quartet at the Royal Northern College of Music to mark the occasion.
The world premiere of Goehr’s Seven Laments for solo clarinet performed by Ib Hausmann will be part of Langenselbolder Klassik-Festival in October 2024 and Ensemble 10:10 conducted by Geoffrey Paterson will perform Sinfonia (1979) in Liverpool in March 2025.
Sandy (to all who knew him) passed away on 26 August 2024 at home in Cambridgeshire.
photo: Tom Hurley
Sandy was a marvelous composer. He was also a first rate colleague. It was a privilege to prepare his Triptych in Paris in 1978 / 1979.
R. I. P., Maestro
A great and wise man. So lucky to have studied with him at Cambridge. He had a gentle way of pointing out fault without being judgmental or dogmatic, which, given his very big brain, must have been tempting at times. He made it clear that we all stood on the shoulders of giants, and that being a good composer required a dose of humility as well as an assertion of talent.
He was right, and he knew this by experience.
His erudition was very impressive, as was his analytical prowess.
His musicality, not so much.
RIP, master. I believe Chris Best studied with you in Cambridge in the mid-1980s.
The Little Symphony is a nice piece
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7-jrgjPmxQ
Goehr was an ‘intellectual composer’. Through his father he inherited a Schoenbergain way of thinking about modernity and tradition, claiming that he entirely understood Schoenberg’s intellectual world. The video with his one-movement Symphony makes this very clear.
I worked with him for a Cambridge Masters in the eighties, which offered a profound insight in Schoenberg’s musical problems. Goehr took distance from atonal modernism and sought ways to revive something of the classical tradition, but always through the lense of intellectualism he learned from Schoenberg. In my opinion, this was not effective at all, which got very clear in the opera ‘Behold the Sun’ of which I witnessed the premiere in Düsseldorf. I found working with him very fruitful and in the same time, extremely painful: seeing a brilliant mind twisted in musical contraditions.
Interestingly – and not often mentioned – he was fascinated by the total opposite of Schoenberg: Debussy, who simply threw all intellectualism out of the window and opened-up entirely new worlds of musical imagination, without a system, without a real philosophy of music, and achieving everything where Schoenberg stumbled and struggled and eventually got stuck. ‘How did he do it?’ as Goehr often puzzled in his lectures on Debussy. That someone could create music apparently out of nowhere without intellectual deliberation or a coherent method, was beyond his understanding.
Also he was fond of the french impressionist painters. Being a fan of Monet’s very large canvasses of his very large pond with water lilies, Goehr imitated him on a tiny scale with a pond of some 70 square cm with goldfish and lilies, of which one half stuck out of, and the other half was dug into the hillside where it was located in his garden.
Was Schoenberg really the opposite of Debussy though? Both pushed musical boundaries and while later on Schoenberg became more systematized his early atonal and expressionist works are completely intuitively composed. Besides Schoenberg obviously had an affinity for Debussy as he orchestrated Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun for chamber orchestra.
Of course he wasn’t, what utter nonsense.
Yes, for a couple of years, in his ‘expressionist period’, Schoenberg wrote in the way Debussy wrote, but he could not reconcile it with his intellectualism, because he thought that ‘musical greatness’ (according to Beethovenian standards of organisation) did need thorough, analysable structuring. Also their outlook was opposite: while Debussy looked outwards, interpreting nature, Schoenberg made his own inner anxieties the subject of his music (except nr 3 of the Five Orchestral Pieces).
Ironically, Debussy’s music is always carefully structured according to many different parameters, revealing a superb intelligence, but exclusively as a means to an end – that music should sound like a spontaneous improvisation. Therefore he did not want his music be analysable.
And indeed both consciously ‘pushed boundaries’ and saw themselves as pioneers into unchartered territory (a flaw of both), but later in life Debussy dropped that idea and wrote his last sonatas, returning to quasi-traditional aesthetics, which was again creating something new, but no longer as a conscious goal.
Of the two, it seems clear that Debussy was the most revolutionary composer, while in the same time adhering to the musical dynamics underneath the surface which had fed music since the Middle Ages. Therefore, a,most all of his music has entered the regular repertoire, and of Schoenberg only his early, late-romantic works.
I have to think of Constant Lambert’s funny description of Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (atonal song cycle of great expression) as ‘… a normal, oldfashioned Lieder recital going terribly wrong’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TKh3xvG_x0
Meanwhile Pierrot is, in all its extremism, a master piece.
My one experience with a Goehr piece was hearing the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s world premiere (and the only performance of the work in Boston) of “Colossos or Panic.” I remember my reaction at the time: It seemed as if Goehr was trying to split the difference between atonal music a la Schoenberg, Carter, Babbitt, and large-scale post-romantic music, and badly failed. I don’t believe the BSO programmed any other Goehr works in Boston after that.
The other thing I remember is that the work required a HUGE orchestra on stage – bigger than that for even the last 3 Bruckner symphonies.
What is it about new/modern works that seem to require ever-larger orchestras, yet for such (small) results? Are there any modern composers who write for a Beethoven-sized orchestra?
There is a simple thumb-rule for composers, based on practice: don’t use more instruments than the music needs. But how to know what the music needs? It depends upon the idiom and the differentiation of the textures. Mozart could do everything he wanted with a ‘tiny’ orchestra, and looking into a score of a Brahms symphony is quite surprising: there are not many notes there and everything is clear-cut, while the music often sounds so full. In the last century, the interest in pure sound and pure patterns stimulated composers to focus on the outside of music instead of the inside (the musical content), with the result that so often all we hear is material, the outside, and not much more. And that blunts the interest, after the first impression.
A brilliant summary of the Schönberg problem. VIVA HAUER !!!
And with Goehr’s death, the Manchester School takes a step closer towards passing into history (I believe only Elgar Howarth remains of the original group).
In spite of his pronounced intellectual stance, his music, challenging as it could be, has never struck me as hermetic. The best of it will stand the test of time.
R.I.P.
Why calling a group of composers a ‘school’? It is imitating the idea of grouping Schoenberg and his two best students, Berg and Webern, into a ‘school’ and naming it the ‘Second Viennese School’. The absurd idea is, that this means that the first ‘Viennese School’ consisted of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, forming the basis of the European Classical Tradition (they would have been quite surprised), and giving them an academic podium (they would have been profoundly shocked). The incredible arrogance of both capping these innocent, one-off brilliant composers with an academic accolade and prematurely putting the ‘Second School’ in the position of simply a second form of the former and thus, on the same level of importance, is breathtaking. So, ‘Manchester School’ betrayed an academic intention to make already some sort of reservation of a place in music history. All of this nonsense, which has nothing to do with concert life and everything with marketing and intellectual posturizing, turns what had been intended as an asset into a silly label in hindsight.
Didn’t they refer to themselves by that title anyway? No point taking issue with that since they are now dead and gone, is there?
The point is, to understand the modenist mindset, and hence to understand why it was possible for many people to invade concert life with destructive ideas which brought great damage to the art form. Arrogance, rewriting history to fit an ideology, academism, materialism, dehumanization, all of this had never been seen (or heard) in music history before, and they were the fruits of a destructive age. It is not about the people but about the ideas and practices, and the political mongering.
PS:
As an example: for Goehr, ‘new music’ was a ’cause’, something to fight for, against the routines of traditional music life where there was much resistance against atonal modernism. So, this resistance was ‘wrong’ and thus, became an obstacle to renewal and progress. But Goehr knew that you cannot simply throw the entire Western tradition into the dustbin and begin from scratch. So, he tried to square the circle, or rather: to get the square into a circular shape. His interest in tradition he had from Schoenberg, but he also inherited Schoenberg’s twisted ideas about it.
He was my Tutor when I studied for my MPhil at Cambridge back in the 80’s. He was a remarkable thinker, with a unique take on music as an abstract idea, rather than a physical manifestation (He once told me that he didn’t want to hear any of what I had written for a lesson because he didn’t want to be ‘raped by the sound’.) I look back on those lessons as unique; like no other teaching I would ever receive.
Music is not locked-up in abstract ideas, but is brought to life through the performer, who infuses it with subjective life, not abstract ideas.
Working with Sandy (on more than the YouTube Symphony above) was stimulating and delightful. He had a clever and restless creative mind. Each piece questioned as well as enriched the traditions he respected.
In the last century, many composers broke down the grounding in tradition as it had existed before, and then came to puzzle about what could replace it, or what could be saved from that breakdown. In one of his lectures Goehr mused: ‘When we listen to Brahms, we know that something has been lost.’ All of these problems were, under the surface of musical discours, part of the modernist mindset, which claimed that music is a human construct, including its basis: tonality, and that THUS any other musical basis could be invented, without nature if necessary.
I’ll always remember Aldeburgh, Richard!
“Philosophy” (= dogma) is the death of music and much else.
It depends upon which philosophy and how it is conducted. Schoenberg’s philosophy (and Goehr’s) led to a nomans-land, Debussy’s to the richness of nature.
Interesting comment. Although a bit challenging to a non- musician. ‘It depends upon which philosophy ‘! Well, no. Your comment implies that the person behind the philosophy is what determines the musical outcome. I would (as a simple scientist) assume that the ‘value’ accorded that philosophy depends on the ‘ear of the beholder’!
Also, ‘how it is conducted’? By this I’m assuming you mean interpreted by the conductor?
This forum has opened my eyes to the vagaries of the world’s conductors.
A philosophy that describes music as a result of intuitive imagination as related to the formative processes in nature, so: a holistic approach, seems to me better and more artistic than a philosophy which sees music as an intellectual exercise like science, and doomed to progress, again mirroring science.
An example is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHS5buBYIOQ
A very philosophical piece, but in terms of what it conveys musically, it is something very sad, empty, and constipated – looking out from the bars of a prison. And the problem is the role the intellect plays and the idiom, which is very Schoenbergian.
Following the passing of his long-time friend and Cambridge colleague Hugh Wood in 2021, Sandy remarked that “At his best, he (Hugh) wrote excellent pieces” and this might well stand as one possible epitaph for Sandy as well. Of his pre-Cambridge pieces, the cantata The Deluge, the Two Choruses, the Little Symphony, the Third String Quartet and the orchestral piece Metamorphosis Dance all make for excellent listening. Of the later works, the operas Arianna, Behold The Sun and the chamber work… a musical offering (JSB 1985)… (to name but a few), are outstanding and deserve repeated hearings. Let’s hope his music continues to find an audience now he is no longer with us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIfBA7a4j-E
With its juxtaposition of brilliantly characterised material the Piano Trio op.20 is closer to Stravinsky in character, and intent. Despite the effortful feel, this is a piece which does linger in the memory. A pivotal figure on the uk music scene and lively mind into his later years if his final two interviews are anything to go by.
In 2018 The Wellcome Collection hosted a wonderful exhibition ‘Living with Buildings which highlighted some of the brutalist post war housing developments in uk . In a masterstroke of matching image to music , an extract of Goehr’s Little Symphony was chosen.
RIP
We know what brutalist architecture represents, so that choice says something terrible.
As a style it’s not universally hated. Like anything , needs to be judged on a case by case (as opposed to going on the label alone ) basis.
At a lecture, he was once very kind to me when I did not know the meaning of a word and after turned around because he was sitting behind me to ask him and he gave me a clear and lucid definition and asked me if I understood. A brief meeting with a remarkable man. Rest in peace.
A good composer- although he wasn’t an easy man- could be very arrogant & full of himself- one of those who always believed he was right.
Ironically, this was exactly what he criticized in Boulez (he was in the same group as Boulez when studying with Messiaen).