Alexander Goehr

Alexander Goehr
Goehr in 2007
Born	Peter Alexander Goehr (1932-08-10)10 August 1932 Berlin, Weimar Germany
Died	25 August 2024(2024-08-25) (aged 92) Cambridgeshire, England
Education	Royal Northern College of Music
Occupations	Composer academic teacher
Organizations	University of Cambridge
Works	List of compositions
Children	4, including Lydia Goehr
Parent	Walter 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 and Robin Holloway.

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. He wrote the opera Arianna in 1995, setting the libretto of Monteverdi's lost opera. He focused on chamber music in later years.

Life and career

Youth and studies

Peter Alexander Goehr was born in Berlin, on 10 August 1932. 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, and his father Walter Goehr was a Schoenberg pupil and pioneering conductor of Schoenberg, Messiaen and Monteverdi. The family moved to Britain when the boy was only a few months old. His father became an influential conductor in London, leading the world premiere of Tippett's A Child of Our Time. The boy attended Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, where he was known as "an anti-establishment political activist, flirting with the Communist Party". 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. Although these premises pointed to Goehr's future in music, his efforts as a composer were not encouraged by his father.

Goehr worked for the music publisher Schott after leaving school. A girl he met on the train to work recruited 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 "a sort of Zionist pageant with songs".

Goehr studied composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1952 to 1955, with Richard Hall. He became friends there with Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, trumpeter Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon. He influenced Davies, a clarinetist, and Birtwhistle who studied to teach, to focus on composition. The five founded the New Music Manchester Group, 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. The group performed not only works by its members but also introduced compositions of the European avant-garde.

A seminal event in Goehr's development was hearing the UK premiere of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony in 1953, conducted by his father. 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. The piano sonata in one movement was played at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1954 by Hedi Stock-Hug.

In 1955, Goehr left Manchester to go to Paris and study with Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris, and he studied counterpoint privately with Yvonne Loriod. He remained in Paris until October 1956, becoming friends with Pierre Boulez and involved in the serialist avant-garde movement of those years. Goehr experimented with Boulez's technique of bloc sonore.

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.

Return to the UK, 1956–76

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

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. 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.

Goehr worked for the BBC as musical assistant from 1960 to 1967. He received two more cantata commissions from the BBC; Sutter's Gold for choir, baritone and orchestra was no success. Singers found it impossibly difficult to perform, and critics dismissed it 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.

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. 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. 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). He wrote Romanza, a cello concerto, in 1968 for Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim. The orchestral Metamorphosis/Dance was premiered in 1974 by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink. He composed the String Quartet No. 3 in 1975–76.

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 of a Jacobean morality play, a text compiled by Erich Fried. The opera was premiered at the Hamburg State Opera in 1967.

In 1967 he founded the Music Theatre Ensemble, as a pioneer of musical theatre in England; 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 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, and went on to teach at Yale University as an associate professor of music. 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. Goehr left Leeds in 1976 when he was appointed Professor of Music at Cambridge University where he taught until his retirement in 1999. His students included some of England's most notable composers to come, such as Thomas Adès, Julian Anderson, George Benjamin and Robin Holloway. In Cambridge he became fellow of Trinity Hall.

1976–1996

In 1976, Goehr composed Psalm IV in a "bright modal sonority", in a departure from serialism, towards more transparent sounds. He found a fusion of modal harmonics and the tradition of figured bass. 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. In 1985 he composed ... a musical offering (J. S. B. 1985) ..., written in memory of Johann Sebastian Bach. It was premiered by Oliver Knussen, who remained a close collaborator.

Goehr focused especially on vocal music, with many works reflecting socio-political themes. 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)—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. The opera was first performed at the Royal Opera House in London. His engagement with Monteverdi's music dates back to the cantata The Death of Moses, which he described as "Monteverdi heard through Varèse". 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.

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.

Goehr's Colossos or Panic was premiered in 1992 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa.

1996–2024

Although the last fifteen years of Goehr's output received less generous coverage in terms of both academic writing and frequency of performances, they represent an interesting phase of composition. He wrote the opera Kantan and Damask Drum in 1999, premiered at the Oper Dortmund. It combined two plays from the Japanese Noh theatre tradition, separated by a short kyogen humorous interlude, with Japanese texts dated back to the 15th century adapted by the composer. The music is inspired by the relationship between music and drama in Noh theatre.

In the following years, Goehr focused on chamber music. He composed works of "unprecedented rhythmic and harmonic immediacy", such as the Piano Quintet in 2000 and the Fantasie for cello and piano in 2005, with sonorities reminiscent of Ravel. Marching to Carcassonne was written in 2003 for pianist Peter Serkin and the London Sinfonietta, alluding to neoclassicism. A set of piano pieces, Symmetry Disor.der Reach, recalling a Baroque suite, was premiered bv Huw Watkins in 2007. Manere for violin and clarinet, based on a fragment of medieval plainchant, was a typical foray into the art of musical ornament, written in 2008. Since Brass nor Stone for string quartet and percussion, written in 2008 as a memorial to Pavel Haas for percussionist Colin Currie and the Pavel Haas Quartet, was inspired by a Shakespeare sonnet from which it borrows its title. It achieved the chamber category of the 2009 British Composer Awards. Goehr wrote …between the lines… in 2013 for the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin.

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. In the same year came When Adam Fell, a BBC commission for orchestra based on the chromatic bass from the Bach chorale setting "Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt" BWV 705, 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 of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Knussen 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), written on a commission from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, was a monothematic work of four movements played without a break, in acknowledgement of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony op. 9. Two Sarabandes was composed for the Bamberg Symphony and premiered by them conducted by Lahav Shani. A string quartet Ondering was premiered by the Villiers Quartet at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2023.

Goehr died at his home in Cambridgeshire on 25 August 2024, at the age of 92.

Works

Main article: List of compositions by Alexander Goehr

Musical style

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).

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 inspired or appear in Das Gesetz der Quadrille (1979).

On a strictly technical musical level, Goehr's tried 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. He went to Paris not only to attend the classes of Messiaen, but also to study counterpoint and serialism with Schoenberg scholar and composer Max Deutsch. Goehr remained indebted to Messiaen, apparent his 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

Schott Music provides a full discography by work: Goehr discography

Writings

Sources:

Books

• Goehr, Alexander (1978). Musical Ideas and Ideas about Music. London: Birkbeck College. OCLC 16422090.
• —— (1998). Puffett, Derrick (ed.). Finding the Key: Selected Writings of Alexander Goehr. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-19310-3. OCLC 38844411.

Articles

• Goehr, Alexander (January 1965). "Tippett at Sixty". The Musical Times. 106 (1463): 22–24. doi:10.2307/948584. JSTOR 948584.
• ——; Smalley, Roger; Crosse, Gordon; Tavener, John; Ginastera, Alberto (Summer 1967). "Personal Viewpoints: Notes by Five Composers". Tempo. 81 (Stravinsky's 85th Birthday): 19–29. JSTOR 943883.
• ——; Sadie, Stanley (July 1968). "Naboth's Vineyard: Alexander Goehr talks to Stanley Sadie". The Musical Times. 109 (1505): 588–590. doi:10.2307/952669. JSTOR 952669.
• —— (June 1973). "The Study of Music at University—5". The Musical Times. 114 (1564): 588–590. doi:10.2307/955547. JSTOR 955547.
• —— (1973–1974). "The Theoretical Writings of Arnold Schoenberg". Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association. 100: 85–96. doi:10.1093/jrma/100.1.85. JSTOR 766177.
• —— (Spring–Summer 1975). "The Theoretical Writings of Arnold Schoenberg". Perspectives of New Music. 13 (2): 3–16. doi:10.2307/832080. JSTOR 832080.
• —— (November 1983). "Richard Hall: A Memoir and a Tribute". The Musical Times. 124 (1689): 677–678. doi:10.2307/961421. JSTOR 961421.
• —— (March–July 1985). "Schoenberg and Karl Kraus: The Idea behind the Music". Music Analysis. 4 (1/2): 59–71. doi:10.2307/854235. JSTOR 854235. [University of Southampton lecture, 1983]
• ——; Wintle, Christopher Wintle (July–October 1992). "The Composer and His Idea of Theory: A Dialogue". Music Analysis. 11 (2–3): 143–175. doi:10.2307/854024. JSTOR 854024.
• —— (October 1994). "Guest Editorial". The Musical Times. 135 (1820): 610–611. doi:10.2307/1003125. JSTOR 1003125.
• —— (March 1997). "For Derrick Puffett". Music Analysis. 16 (1): 1–3. doi:10.2307/854111. JSTOR 854111.
• —— (Summer 1999). "The Ages of Man as Composer. What's Left to Be Done?". The Musical Times. 140 (1867): 19–28. doi:10.2307/1193892. JSTOR 1193892.
• ——; Kemp, Ian; Neighbour, Oliver; Miller, Karl; Wood, Hugh; Matthews, David; Maconie, Robin; Payne, Anthony (April 2010). "Daivd Drew: Tributes & Memories". Tempo. 64 (252): 14–20. doi:10.1017/S0040298210000136. JSTOR 40794440.

Reviews

• Goehr, Alexander (December 1960). "Review: Harmony without Function". The Musical Times. 101 (1414): 762. doi:10.2307/948913. JSTOR 948913.
• —— (November 1963). "Review: Schoenberg Exercises". The Musical Times. 104 (1449): 795–796. doi:10.2307/950161. JSTOR 950161.
• —— (November 1964). "Review: Schoenberg's Letters". The Musical Times. 105 (1461): 820–821. doi:10.2307/950438. JSTOR 950438.
• —— (January 1968). "Review: Schoenberg Fundamentals". The Musical Times. 109 (1499): 35–36. doi:10.2307/951415. JSTOR 951415.
• —— (September 1975). "Review: Style and Idea". Tempo (114): 25–28. JSTOR 943695.
• —— (March 1981). "Review: The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi". Tempo (136): 25–28. JSTOR 946378.

Honours

Goehr was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Churchill Fellow. In 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Plymouth. He became an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society. His manuscripts are held by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

References

Cited sources

• Boynton, Neil (July–October 1992). "Alexander Goehr: A Checklist of His Writings and Broadcast Talks". Music Analysis. 11 (2/3): 201–208. doi:10.2307/854026. JSTOR 854026.
• Clements, Andrew (27 August 2024). "Alexander Goehr: composer who brought European avant garde sensibilities to stuffy 50s Britain". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 August 2024.
• Goehr, Alexander (1998). "A Letter to Pierre Boulez". In Puffett, Derrick (ed.). Finding the Key: Selected Writings of Alexander Goehr. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-19310-2.
• Goehr, Alexander (2 August 1992). The Death of Moses (Program notes). BBC Proms. p. 8.
• Goehr, Alexander (September 1995). Arianna (Program notes). Royal Opera House.
• Grünzweig, Werner (2024). "Alexander Goehr / "Fings ain't wot they used t'be"". Wolke-Verlag. Retrieved 1 September 2024.
• Hoffman, Gary (October 2010). "Alexander Goehr (1932–2024)". Opera Today. Retrieved 30 August 2024.
• Holloway, Robin (2003). Latham, Alison (ed.). Sing, Ariel : Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr's Seventieth Birthday. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-0-7546-3497-3.
• Peter, Christopher (26 August 2024). "Alexander Goehr (1932–2024)". Schott Music. Retrieved 26 August 2024.
• Williams, Nicholas (2001). "Goehr, (Peter) Alexander". Grove Music Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/omo/9781561592630.013.60000200868. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
• Williams, Nicholas (2017). "Alexander Goehr". Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (in German). Retrieved 27 August 2024.
• "Allan Gray (Josef Zmigrod)". amershammuseum.org. Retrieved 26 August 2024.
• "To These Dark Steps". Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. 2024. Retrieved 1 September 2024.
• "Kantan and Damask Drum". British Music Collection. 2024. Retrieved 1 September 2024.
• "Alexander Goehr dies aged 92". British Music Society. 27 August 2024. Retrieved 27 August 2024.
• "Alexander Goehr". Cambridge University. 26 August 2024. Retrieved 26 August 2024.
• "Ferienkurse für internationale neue Musik" (PDF). Internationales Musikinstitut. 2024. Retrieved 12 July 2019.
• "Arianna". Schott Music. 2019. Retrieved 12 July 2019.
• "Alexander Goehr". Schott Music. Retrieved 26 August 2024.
• "Alexander Goehr, last of the Manchester School composers, whose music felt like 'thinking in notes' – obituary". The Telegraph. 29 August 2024. Retrieved 29 August 2024.
• "Kantan and Damask Drum". University of Cambridge. 6 March 2002. Retrieved 1 September 2024.
• "University of Plymouth honorary doctorates". University of Plymouth. Retrieved 12 June 2024.

Further reading

• Griffiths, Paul (1985). "Alexander Goehr". New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 13–21. ISBN 978-0-571-10061-3.
• Latham, Alison (ed.). 2003. Sing, Ariel: Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr's Seventieth Birthday. With compact disc. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ISBN 0-7546-3497-3
• Northcott, Bayan (ed.). 1980. The Music of Alexander Goehr: Interviews and Articles. Schott & Co Ltd. ISBN 978-0-901-93805-3
• Van Zandt, Jack (2023). Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors and Models. Foreword by Sally Groves. Manchester: Carcanet. ISBN 978-1-80017-357-6. OCLC 1400116589.

External links

• Alexander Goehr – Stageworks / Opera and Music Theatre Archive
• Alexander Goehr page Archived 21 February 2011 at the Wayback Machine on LoganArts Management's website
• Alexander Goehr at IMDb
• Alexander Goehr discography at Discogs
• Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors, and Models by Jack Van Zandt Online Launch (2024) on YouTube