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Alexander Goehr

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Alexander Goehr
Goehr in 2007
Born
Peter Alexander Goehr

(1932-08-10)10 August 1932
Berlin, Prussia, Germany
Died25 August 2024(2024-08-25) (aged 92)
Cambridgeshire, England
EducationRoyal Northern College of Music
Occupations
  • Composer
  • academic teacher
OrganizationsUniversity of Cambridge
Children4, including Lydia Goehr
ParentWalter Goehr

Peter Alexander Goehr (German: [ɡøːɐ̯]; 10 August 1932 – 25 August 2024) was a German-born English composer of contemporary classical music and academic teacher. A long-time professor of music at the University of Cambridge, Goehr influenced many notable contemporary composers, including Thomas Adès, Julian Anderson, George Benjamin, Robin Holloway and Chen Yi.

Born in Berlin, Goehr's childhood was spent in London surrounded by musicians, including his father, the conductor Walter Goehr. Goehr emerged as a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers, including Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, in his early twenties. He joined Olivier Messiaen's masterclass in Paris in 1955. Back in England and working for the BBC, he experienced an international breakthrough in 1957 with his cantata The Deluge in 1957, conducted by his father Walter Goehr. He composed Little Symphony in 1963 as a memorial to his father, arriving at a serialism that allowed expressive freedom. He combined avant-garde techniques with elements from music history in works of many genres including the Piano Trio (1966), the first opera Arden Must Die (1966), the music-theatre piece Triptych (1968–70), the orchestral Metamorphosis/Dance (1974), and the String Quartet No. 3 (1975). He founded the Music Theatre Ensemble in 1967.

Goehr first lectured in the United States, at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston from 1968 and at Yale University, then at the Southampton University from 1970. He was professor of music at the University of Leeds from 1971 and at Cambridge University from 1976 to 1999. Goehr returned to a more traditional way of composing with Psalm IV in 1976, and focused on chamber music in later years.

Life and career

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Youth and studies

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Peter Alexander Goehr[1] was born in Berlin,[2][3] on 10 August 1932.[4][5] He came from a musical Jewish family; his mother Laelia née Rivlin, from Kyiv, was a classically trained pianist who had appeared with Vladimir Horowitz at age 12,[4] and his father Walter Goehr was a Schoenberg pupil[6] and pioneering conductor[3] of Schoenberg, Messiaen and Monteverdi. The family moved to Britain when the boy was only a few months old.[3][7] His father became an influential conductor in London, leading the world premiere of Tippett's A Child of Our Time.[5] The boy attended Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, where he was known as "an anti-establishment political activist, flirting with the Communist Party".[4] He grew up in a household populated by composers, including Mátyás Seiber and Michael Tippett. He received lessons from a composer colleague of his father, Allan Gray.[8] Although these premises pointed to Goehr's future in music, his efforts as a composer were not encouraged by his father.[5][4]

Goehr worked for the music publisher Schott after leaving school. A girl that he met on the train to work won him for a left-wing Zionist party, and he spent two years in a training kibbutz in Essex. He was then sent to Manchester for political work, where he wrote his first piece, described as "actually a sort of Zionist pageant with songs".[4]

Goehr studied composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1952 to 1955, with Richard Hall.[6] He there became friends with Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, trumpeter Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon.[5] He influenced Davies, a clarinetist, and Birtwhistle who studied to teach, to focus on composition.[4] The five founded the New Music Manchester Group,[4][2][3] a "distinctive, progressive force in what was the generally parochial and conservative world of British music in the early 1950s", as Andrew Davies phrased it in 2024.[5] The group performed not only works by its members but also introduced compositions of the European avant-garde.[5]

A seminal event in Goehr's development was hearing the UK premiere of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony in 1953,[4] conducted by his father.[4][5] The interest in non-Western music (for instance Indian raga) sparked by the meeting with Messiaen's music combined with the interest in medieval modes shared with Davies and Birtwistle largely influenced Goehr's first musical imaginings. His first acknowledged compositions date from these years: Songs for Babel (1951) and the Piano Sonata, Op. 2, which was dedicated to the memory of Prokofiev who had died in 1953.

In 1955, Goehr left Manchester to go to Paris and study with Messiaen[7] at the Conservatoire de Paris, and privately with Yvonne Loriod.[2][3] He remained in Paris until October 1956 where the music scene impressed him. He became good friends with Pierre Boulez and was involved in the serialist avant-garde movement of those years. Goehr experimented with Boulez's technique of bloc sonore, particularly in his first String Quartet of 1956–57. Boulez was a sort of mentor to Goehr in the late fifties, programming his new compositions in his concerts at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris.

Eventually Goehr's sensibility parted from Boulez's serialism. What disturbed Goehr was mainly his perception that by the mid-fifties, serialism had become a cult of stylistic purity, modelling itself on the twelve-tone works of Anton Webern. Reference to any other music was forbidden and despised, and spontaneous choice replaced with the combinatorial laws of serialism:

Choice, taste and style were dirty words; personal style, one could argue, is necessarily a product of repetition, and the removal of repetition is, or was believed to be, a cornerstone of classical serialism as defined by Webern's late works [...] All this may well be seen as a kind of negative style precept: a conscious elimination of sensuous, dramatic or expressive elements, indeed of everything that in the popular view constitutes music.[9]

Return to the UK, 1956–76

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Upon his return to Britain, Goehr experienced an international breakthrough as a composer with the performance of his cantata The Deluge in 1957, conducted by his father.[4] The ambitious work was inspired by the writings of Sergei Eisenstein — one of Goehr's many extra-musical sources of inspiration. The soundworld could be seen to have derived from the twelve-tone cantatas of Webern, but it implicitly strives for the imposing harmonic tautness and full sonority of Prokofiev's Eisenstein cantatas. It was regarded "to have more harmonic coherence and considerably more dramatic impact than most serial music of the time", as his obituary in The Telegraph noted.[4]

Goehr worked for the BBC as musical assistant from 1960 to 1967.[4][5][6] He received two more cantata commissions from the BBC;[4] Sutter's Gold for choir, baritone and orchestra was no success.[4] Singers found it impossibly difficult to perform, and critics dismissed it[4] when it was first performed at the 1961 Leeds Festival. Goehr listened to criticism and described the position of the avant-garde composer and his music:

If one wishes, one can just say that music has to be autonomous and self sufficient; but how to sustain such a view when people who sing for pleasure are deprived of true satisfaction in the performance of new work? [...] We can talk about music in terms of the ideas that inform it; we can talk about structure and techniques; we can talk about aesthetics or ethics or politics. But we have to remember that while all this, realistic or not, is of great importance to composers and to anyone who likes to follow what composers are doing, what is being discussed is not the music itself but the location of the music, the place where it exists.[10]

Goehr continued to compose choral works. Encouraged by his friendship with the choral conductor John Alldis, who was strongly committed to new music, Goehr composed his Two Choruses in 1962, which used for the first time the combination of modality and serialism which was to remain his main technical resource for the next 14 years.[4] His search for a model of serialism that could allow for expressive freedom led him to his Little Symphony, Op. 15 (1963). He composed it as a memorial to his father who had unexpectedly died, and it is based upon a chord-sequence subtly modelled upon (but not quoting) the "Catacombs" movement from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, to which his father had devoted a harmonic analysis.[4][11] This flexible approach to serialism, integrating harmonic background with bloc sonore and modality was representative of the type of writing that Goehr developed as an alternative to the strictures of total serialism. It was no coincidence that Boulez, who had earlier facilitated the performance of Goehr's music, refused to program Little Symphony. Goehr composed works of many genres including the Piano Trio (1966), the orchestral Metamorphosis/Dance (1974), and the String Quartet No. 3 (1975–76).[4]

Goehr founded the Wardour Castle Summer School in Wiltshire with Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle in 1964, and most importantly, the beginning of Goehr's preoccupation with opera and music theatre. In 1966 he wrote his first opera, Arden Must Die, a Brechtian setting[4] of a Jacobean morality play which had uncomfortably contemporary political and social resonances. Goehr's striking setting of a text composed by Erich Fried in rhyming duplets makes the most of the idea of simple musical ideas that are continually distorted to a sinister and sarcastic effect.

In 1967 he founded the Music Theatre Ensemble,[3][5][7] as a pioneer of musical theatre in England;[5] in 1971 he completed a three-part cycle for music theatre Triptych of three works, Naboth's Vineyard (1968) and Shadowplay (1970) both explicitly written for the Music Theatre Ensemble[5] while the later Sonata about Jerusalem (1971) was commissioned by Testimonium in Jerusalem and performed there by the Israel Chamber Orchestra and Gary Bertini.

From the end of the 1960s Goehr held prestigious academic appointments. In 1968–69 he was the first composer-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston,[4] and went on to teach at Yale University as an associate professor of music.[3] Goehr returned to Britain as visiting lecturer at Southampton University (1970–71). In 1971 he was appointed West Riding Professor of Music at the University of Leeds.[7] Goehr left Leeds in 1976 when he was appointed Professor of Music at Cambridge University[3] where he taught until his retirement in 1999.[7] His students included some of England's most notable composers to come, such as Thomas Adès,[4] Julian Anderson,[5] George Benjamin and Robin Holloway.[4] In Cambridge he became fellow of Trinity Hall.[7]

1976–1996

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In 1976, Goehr composed Psalm IV in a "bright modal sonority",[3] in a departure from serialism, towards more transparent sounds. He found a fusion of modal harmonics and the tradition of figured bass.[3] Over the following twenty years he applied this approach to traditional genres such as symphonies, composing Sinfonia in 1979 and Symphony with Chaconne in 1987. He focused especially on vocal music.[6]

Many of his vocal works reflect socio-political themes.[6] The Death of Moses (1992) uses Moses' angry refusal to die as an allegory for the destiny of the victims of the Holocaust; while the cantata Babylon the Great is Fallen (1979) and the opera Behold the Sun (1985)[4]—for which Babylon the Great can be considered to be a sketch study—both explore the themes of violent revolution via the texts from the Anabaptist uprising in Münster of 1543. Non-political vocal works include Sing, Ariel, recalling Messiaen's bird vocalization setting English poetry, and the 1995 opera Arianna to Ottavio Rinuccini's historic libretto for Monteverdi's lost L'Arianna, exploring the sounds of Italian Renaissance music.[5][6] The opera was first performed at the Royal Opera House in London.[4][12] His engagement with Monteverdi's music dates back to the cantata The Death of Moses, which he described as "Monteverdi heard through Varèse".[13] Arianna is also the piece that most overtly displays Goehr's intent to turn his reinvention of the past into a musical process that the audience can hear and identify:

The impression I aim to create is one of transparency: the listener should perceive, both in the successive and simultaneous dimensions of the score, the old beneath the new and the new arising from the old. We are to see a mythological and ancient action, interpreted by a 17th-century poet in a modern theatre.[14]

In 1987 the BBC invited Goehr to present the Reith Lectures. In a series of six lectures, titled The Survival of the Symphony he traces the importance of the symphony, and its apparent fall from grace in the 20th century.[5][6]

1996–2024

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Although the last fifteen years of Goehr's output received less generous coverage in terms of both academic writing and frequency of performancek, they represent the most interesting of Goehr's compositional phases. This last decade's output is heralded by the striking opera Kantan and Damask Drum of 1999,[4] premiered at the Oper Dortmund.[6] This opera combined two plays from the Japanese Noh theatre tradition, separated by a short kyogen humorous interlude. Typically for Goehr, the Japanese texts dated back to the 15th century and were adapted by the composer for setting. The lusciously tonal idiom did not indulge in orientalism, but rather the relationship between music and drama in Noh animated the whole work.

In the following years, Goehr focused on chamber music.[6] He composed works of "unprecedented rhythmic and harmonic immediacy",[3] such as the Piano Quintet in 2000 and the Fantasie for cello and piano in 2005, with sonorities reminiscent of Ravel. Marching to Carcassonne (2003) alluded to neoclassicism,[3] the set of piano pieces Symmetry Disorders Reach (2007) recalled a Baroque suite,[3] and Manere for violin and clarinet (2008), based on a fragment of medieval plainchant, was a typical foray into the art of musical ornament. Since Brass nor Stone for string quartet and percussion, written in 2008 as a memorial to Pavel Haas, was inspired by a Shakespeare sonnet from which it borrows its title.[3]

After an almost ten-year hiatus from the operatic medium, Goehr returned to the form with Promised End (2008–09), first performed by English Touring Opera in 2010 and based on Shakespeare's King Lear.[15] In the same year came When Adam Fell, a BBC commission for orchestra based on the chromatic bass from the Bach chorale Durch Adam's Fall ist alles Verderbt, first introduced to Goehr by Messiaen. To These Dark Steps/The Fathers are Watching (2011–12), written for tenor, children's choir and ensemble, sets texts by Israeli poet Gabriel Levin concerning the bombing of Gaza during the Iraq war and was premiered in a concert marking Goehr's 80th birthday.

Largo Siciliano (2012) was a trio praised for its mastery of aural balance between the unusual combination of violin, horn and piano. The chamber symphony ...between the lines... (2013), the latest commission in a long-standing relationship with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, was a monothematic work of four movements played without a break, in direct acknowledgement of Schoenberg's own Chamber Symphony op. 9.

Goehr died at his home in Cambridgeshire on 25 August 2024, at the age of 92.[1][3][4][5]

Musical style

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Eclecticism and synthesis

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Many of Goehr's works are studies in the synthesis of disparate elements. Examples include The Deluge (1957–58), which was inspired by Eisenstein's notes for a film, itself based on a writing by Leonardo da Vinci. Other works' inspirations range from the formal proportions of a late Beethoven piano sonata (Metamorphosis/Dance, 1973–74) to a painting by Goya (Colossus or Panic, 1990), to the sinister humour of Bertolt Brecht (Arden Must Die, 1966) or to the Japanese Noh theatre (Kantan and Damask Drum, 1999).[16]

Just as The Deluge takes its cue from an unfinished project (Eisenstein never finished the planned film), many of Goehr's works include a synthesis of fragments or unfinished projects left by other artists. The cantata The Death of Moses resonates with Schoenberg's unfinished Moses und Aron; the opera Arianna (1995) is the setting of the libretto of a lost opera by Monteverdi, and posthumously published prose fragments by Franz Kafka inspire or appear in Das Gesetz der Quadrille (1979), Sur terre en l'air (1997) and Schlussgesang (1990).

On a strictly technical musical level, Goehr's endeavour has long been that of unifying the contrapuntal rigour and motivic workings of the First Viennese School and Second Viennese School with a strong sense of harmonic pacing and sonority. It is indicative that Goehr should go to Paris not only to attend the classes of Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, but also to study counterpoint and serialism with Schoenberg scholar and composer Max Deutsch; even more indicative is the anecdote that Deutsch threw Goehr out of his house upon hearing that the young man intended to study with Messiaen as well as with him. Goehr's indebtedness to Messiaen is very strong, as is apparent in Goehr's lifelong commitment to modality as an integration to both serialism and to tonality, as well as his often bird-song inspired melodic writing, particularly in the cantata Sing, Ariel.

Recordings

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Schott Music provides a full discography by work: Goehr discography

Writings

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  • "The Theoretical Writings of Arnold Schoenberg". Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association vol. 100 (1973–74), 85–96.
  • Musical Ideas and Ideas about Music (London, 1978).
  • Finding the Key: Selected Writings of Alexander Goehr', ed. D. Puffett' (London: Faber and Faber, 1998).
  • 'Schoenberg and Karl Kraus: The Idea behind the Music' [University of Southampton lecture, 1983]. Music Analysis vol. 4 (March–July 1985), 59–71.
  • 'The Composer and His Idea of Theory: A Dialogue'. Music Analysis vol. 11, No. 2-3 (July October 1992), 143–175.
  • Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors and Models. Goehr, Alexander and Jack Van Zandt, foreword by Sally Groves. (Manchester: Carcanet, 2023).

Honours

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In 2004 Goehr was awarded an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Plymouth.[17]

Notable students

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For Goehr's notable students, see List of music students by teacher: G to J § Alexander Goehr.

References

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  1. ^ a b British Music Society 2024.
  2. ^ a b c Williams 2017.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Peter 2024.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z Telegraph 2024.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Clements 2024.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i Schott 2024.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Cambridge 2024.
  8. ^ Amersham Museum 2024.
  9. ^ Goehr 1998.
  10. ^ Goehr 1998, p. 5.
  11. ^ Goehr 1998, pp. 291–292.
  12. ^ Schott 2019.
  13. ^ Goehr 1992.
  14. ^ Goehr 1995.
  15. ^ Hoffman 2010.
  16. ^ Holloway 2003.
  17. ^ University of Plymouth 2024.

Cited sources

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Further reading

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