You are on page 1of 3

A guide to Alexander Goehr's music | Music | The Guardian

11/2/15, 23:58

A guide to Alexander Goehr's music


Without Goehr's appreciation of history, musical modernism would have taken even longer to
reach Britain than it did
Tom Service
Monday 1 April 2013 13.59 BST

The 20th century's accumulation of musical history was arguably the single biggest hurdle for
its composers to negotiate. If you think it was hard for Brahms to write string quartets and
symphonies in the 1860s and 70s, then imagine what it was like for composers in the second
half of the 20th century, with the freight of all of those late Romantic, modernist, and avant
garde traditions on their shoulders to add to everything else in the historical pantheon.
If you're Stravinsky, you escape these historicist pressures by well, by being Stravinsky and
viewing the past, the present, and the future through the prism of your own creative genius; if
you're Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen, you have the self-assurance and arrogance of
youth to believe what you're doing is the only possible option for new music, the ne plus ultra
to which the trajectory of music history has been leading. Or, like John Cage or Steve Reich,
you simply acknowledge the past in order to forget it, to start again in an ever-present now.
But what do you do if you're a composer of supreme historical awareness, who understands
only too well the achievements of your predecessors, from Monteverdi to Schoenberg, if you're
somebody for whom the act of writing a single note or chord is already at best a conversation
and more often than not a confrontation with the musical past and one, inevitably, that
you're not going to win every time you compose a new piece? Alexander Goehr is, I think,
exactly that sort of composer: a musician for whom there is no such thing as an innocent note,
someone for whom nearly every work is the hard-won prize of a historicist battle
, and in which each gesture, each phrase, is loaded with musical and cultural meaning. That's
what gives his music its craggy, conflicted, and essentially pessimistic character. Goehr's is a
voice that matters because, on his own terms, his music reveals one of the signal sounds of the
20th and 21st centuries in the heightened consciousness of its negotiation with history, and
also because of the effect that his personality and his leadership had on British music in the
postwar period
.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/apr/01/contemporary-music-guide-alexander-goehr

Page 1 of 3

A guide to Alexander Goehr's music | Music | The Guardian

11/2/15, 23:58

That's because without Goehr, musical modernism would have taken even longer to arrive in
Britain than it did. Goehr's family moved to Britain from Berlin shortly after his birth in 1932,
and in the 1950s, Goehr became the eldest and most musically experienced member of the socalled Manchester school, along with Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle it was
Goehr who founded the New Music Manchester group. Goehr's father Walter had been a pupil
of Schoenberg's, and a conductor who brought both the extremes of music history the Second
Viennese school, the British premiere of Olivier Messiaen's Turangalla Symphony, and
Monteverdi's Vespers to life for British audiences, and so Alexander was the conduit between
the recent music of continental modernism and his fellow students in Manchester. Goehr
continued his European education in the formative time he spent during 1955 and 1956 in one
of the solar plexuses of postwar 20th century music: Olivier Messiaen's class at the Paris
Conservatoire. His account of that time, of Messiaen's teaching, and of the reactions and
rebellions of his fellow students Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, is one of the most
riveting accounts of postwar music.
Goehr couldn't follow Stockhausen or Boulez into the brave new world of the avant garde; his
open letter to Boulez (published in Finding the Key, a collection of his writings) is a powerful
creative credo, refuting the scorched-earth policy to the past that the young turks of Darmstadt
indulged in. As he writes, the music sanctioned by Boulez's ideological approach to serialism
would mean "a conscious elimination of sensuous, dramatic or expressive elements, indeed of
everything that in the popular view constitutes music".
Reading on mobile? Listen here on Spotify
He has not been afraid to put his money where his mouth is, either; in 1961, after the fiasco of
the premiere of his cantata Sutter's Gold in Leeds, Goehr's feeling was that his choral parts may
simply have been too difficult: how can you imagine the possibility of the autonomous work of
modernist music, he writes, "when people who sing for pleasure [like the amateur choir who
performed Sutter's Gold] are deprived of true satisfaction in the performance of new work?"
Goehr's alternative path, as composer, teacher and proselytiser, was a commitment to
contemporary music's power to communicate the social and cultural conflicts of the 20th
century by remaining true to a Schoenberg-like belief in the continuity of musical traditions.
Which all rather raises the question: what does Goehr's music sound like? Even as he
articulates the necessity for modern music to be sensuous or pleasurable, his music only rarely
gives you that simple satisfaction. Which is precisely its strength. Instead, Goehr's works like
the dark drama of the misleadingly titled Little Symphony, the bleaker-still strains of the
Symphony in One Movement, the heightened emotional drama of the Piano Concerto, or the
concentrated drama of Behold the Sun for soprano and ensemble are invitations to get stuck
into the labyrinths of contemporary music's tussle with the musical past, to feel the mud on
music's historical shoulders (to paraphrase Edoardo Sanguineti, one of Luciano Berio's
favourite writers, another composer who refused to reject the past). Or listen to his involvingly
knotty Third String Quartet
http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/apr/01/contemporary-music-guide-alexander-goehr

Page 2 of 3

A guide to Alexander Goehr's music | Music | The Guardian

11/2/15, 23:58

: music like that quartet, or Goehr's other chamber works, makes me think of him as a kind of
21st century Brahms, as a composer as released as he is trapped by tradition. The intensity of
the quartet's drama is catalysed by that essential dichotomy. But there are simpler pleasures to
be had from Goehr's music: his reconstructions around Monteverdi's mostly lost opera
Arianna, or the joyful neo-classicism of Marching to Carcassonne for piano and ensemble, one
of his most unbuttoned and sheerly joyful and tuneful pieces.
Two other works show the depth of Goehr's engagement with musical traditions and how he
attempts to transcend them. He has composed a series of piano pieces designed as a
contribution to piano-playing pedagogy, studies in contemporary counterpoint called
Symmetry Disorders Reach. In its conscious debt to Bach, this results in some of Goehr's most
direct music. As does, for me, his opera Promised End
, that fragmentary retelling of King Lear, that story of "old men who get it wrong when they
have power and influence and then get into a mess", as he described it to me. Goehr's music
is defiantly uneasy listening. But its expressive unease sounds out a relationship with the
musical past that is one of fundamental legacies of 20th and 21st century music.

Five key links


String Quartet No 3
Little Symphony
Arianna
Marching to Carcassonne
Promised End

More blogposts

Topics
Classical music

Save for later Article saved


Reuse this content
http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/apr/01/contemporary-music-guide-alexander-goehr

Page 3 of 3

You might also like