Alexander Goehr

Alexander Goehr
Alexander Goehr – Jerusalem, 2007
Born	(1932-08-10) 10 August 1932 (age 91) Berlin, Germany
Children	Lydia Goehr, Julia Goehr, Clare Goehr
Parent(s)	Walter Goehr Laelia Goehr
Academic background
Alma mater	Royal Northern College of Music
Academic work
Institutions	University of Cambridge

Peter Alexander Goehr (German: [ɡøːɐ̯]; born 10 August 1932) is an English composer and academic.

Goehr was born in Berlin in 1932, the son of the conductor and composer Walter Goehr, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. In his early twenties he emerged as a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers. In 1955–56 he joined Olivier Messiaen's masterclass in Paris. Although in the early sixties Goehr was considered a leader of the avant-garde, his oblique attitude to modernism—and to any movement or school whatsoever—soon became evident. In a sequence of works including the Piano Trio (1966), the opera Arden Must Die (1966), the music-theatre piece Triptych (1968–70), the orchestral Metamorphosis/Dance (1974), and the String Quartet No. 3 (1975–76), Goehr's personal voice was revealed, arising from a highly individual use of the serial method and a fusion of elements from his double heritage of Schoenberg and Messiaen. Since the luminous 'white-note' Psalm IV setting of 1976, Goehr has urged a return to more traditional ways of composing, using familiar materials as objects of musical speculation, in contrast to the technological priorities of much present-day musical research.^[1]

Life and works

Youth and studies

Alexander Goehr was born on 10 August 1932 in Berlin, and his family moved to Britain when he was only a few months old. Alexander came from an extremely musical family: his mother Laelia was a classically trained pianist, and his father was a Schoenberg pupil and pioneering conductor of Schoenberg,

Although these premises point all too clearly to Goehr's future as a composer, his efforts as a composer were not much encouraged by his father, and he initially intended to study classics at

.

In his composition classes Goehr became friends with young composers

Prokofiev

, who had died that year.

In 1955, Goehr left Manchester to go to Paris and study with Messiaen, and he remained in Paris until October 1956. The music scene of Paris would make a great impression on Goehr, who 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 Marigny Theatre in Paris.

Eventually Goehr's sensibility parted from Boulez's

. 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.[3]

Return to the UK, 1956–76

Upon his return to Britain, Goehr experienced a breakthrough as a composer with the performance of his

is one that Goehr would explore over and over again throughout his career.

Indeed, following the success of The Deluge, Goehr was commissioned a new cantata, Sutter's Gold for choir, baritone and orchestra. However, the new work proved highly unpopular particularly with the singers, who found it impossibly difficult to perform. Indeed, the difficulty of performance is one of the reasons why Sutter's Gold was dismissed by critics upon its performance at the Leeds festival in 1961. This débacle, however, had a constructive impact on Goehr: rather than dismissing criticism as the mere result of incompetence on the part of critics and performers, he genuinely faced the questions of 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.^[4]

Despite this, Goehr continued to compose choral works. Encouraged by his friendship with the choral conductor

which was to remain his main technical resource for the next 14 years. His search for a model of

This flexible approach to serialism, integrating harmonic background with bloc sonore and modality is very representative of the type of writing that Goehr developed as an alternative to the strictures of total serialism. It is no coincidence that Boulez—who had earlier facilitated the performance of Goehr's music—refused to programme Little Symphony: by 1963 Goehr had neatly departed from the style of his Parisian days.

The sixties saw Goehr founding the

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, and in 1971 he completed a three-part cycle for music theatre—Triptych—made up of three works: Naboth's Vineyard (1968) and Shadowplay (1970) were both explicitly written for Music Theatre Ensemble while the later Sonata about Jerusalem (1971) was commissioned by Testimonium, Jerusalem and performed by the Israel Chamber Orchestra and Gary Bertini.

The end of the sixties also saw the beginning of a string of prestigious academic appointments for Goehr. In 1968–9 he was composer-in-residence at the

.

1976–96

The year of Goehr's appointment at

—thus achieving a highly idiosyncratic fusion of past and present.

The output of the ensuing twenty years testified to Goehr's desire to use this new idiom to explore ideas and genres that had already become constant features of his work, such as the exploration of

(1987). Yet these years' output is disseminated most notably with a great number of ambitious vocal scores.

A common feature of many of the vocal compositions of these years is the choice of subjects that function as allegories for reflection upon socio-political themes. The Death of Moses (1992) uses

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.[7]

1996–2014

Although the last fifteen years of Goehr's output have not received the generous coverage (both in terms of academic writing and frequency of performance) of his previous work, they arguably 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, premiered at the

animates the whole work. Again, with Kantan and Damask Drum the search continues for an expressive synthesis; in this case, it is one of western and eastern, past and present.

In the following years, Goehr devoted himself almost exclusively to chamber music. This is perhaps a response to the difficulties he experienced in the staging of his operas: the limited amount of financial support needed for a chamber music performance allows for music and performance venues that stray off the beaten path while allowing the composer more control over the quality of the performance.^[8] Through the chamber music medium Goehr gains an unprecedented rhythmic and harmonic immediacy, while his music remains ever permeable by the music and imagery of other times and places: the Piano Quintet (2000) and the Fantasie for cello and piano (2005) are haunted by rich sonorities of a thoroughly

-like quality.

The set of piano pieces Symmetry Disorders Reach (2007) is a barely disguised baroque

After an almost ten-year hiatus from the operatic medium, Goehr returned to the form with Promised End (2008–09), first performed by

concerning the bombing of Gaza during the Iraq war and was premiered in a concert marking Goehr's 80th birthday.

Largo Siciliano (2012) is a trio praised for its mastery of aural balance between the unusual combination of violin, horn and piano, 'from opening crepuscular melancholy to an ending which just seems to vanish into oblivion.'[11] The chamber symphony ...between the lines... (2013), the latest commission in a long-standing relationship with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, is a monothematic work of four movements played without a break, in direct acknowledgement of Arnold Schoenberg's own Chamber Symphony op. 9.

In 2004 Goehr was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from

]

Musical style

Eclecticism and synthesis

Many of Goehr's works are studies in the synthesis of disparate elements. Examples include The Deluge (1957–58), which was inspired by

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

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