Alexander Goehr (born 10 August 1932 in Berlin) is an English composer and academic. Events 612 BC - Killing of Sinsharishkun, King of Assyrian Empire Year 1932 ( MCMXXXII) was a Leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. Berlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. England is a Country which is part of the United Kingdom. Its inhabitants account for more than 83% of the total UK population whilst its mainland A composer (literally meaning 'one who puts together' is a person who creates Music, usually in the medium of notation, for Interpretation and Performance
He was born in Berlin, the son of Walter Goehr. Berlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. Walter Goehr ( 28 May 1903, Berlin - 4 December, 1960, Sheffield) was a German composer He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (1952-55) where he met Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, John Ogdon and Elgar Howarth. The Royal Northern College of Music or RNCM is a conservatoire in Manchester, England. Year 1952 ( MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Year 1955 ( MCMLV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays the 1955 Gregorian calendar) Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE (b 8 September 1934 is an English Composer and conductor. Sir Harrison Paul Birtwistle CH (born 15 July, 1934) is a British contemporary Composer. John Andrew Howard Ogdon ( January 27 1937 &ndash August 1 1989) was an English Pianist and Composer. Elgar Howarth (born November 4, 1935, Cannock, Staffordshire, England) is an English conductor and Composer. Together they formed New Music Manchester, a group dedicated to performances of contemporary music. In 1956 he went to Paris to study with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire, and the same year he went to Darmstadt where his 'Fantasia' for orchestra received its first performance. Year 1956 ( MCMLVI) was a Leap year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Paris (ˈpærɨs in English; in French) is the Capital of France and the country's largest city Olivier Messiaen ( December 10 1908 &ndash April 27 1992 was a French Composer, organist and ornithologist. The Conservatoire de Paris is an institution of higher education that has played an important role in the development of Music in France and Western Europe Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland Whilst resident in Paris in 1956-7, Goehr also had private consultations with Pierre Boulez. WikipediaWikiProject Classical music#Biographical_infoboxes --> Pierre Boulez (pjɛʁ buˈlɛz (b
In 1971 he was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Leeds, moving in 1976 to a similar position at the University of Cambridge, which he held until 1999. Year 1971 ( MCMLXXI) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar of the 1971 Gregorian calendar. The University of Leeds is a major teaching and research University in Leeds, West Yorkshire; one of the largest in the United Kingdom with Year 1976 ( MCMLXXVI) was a Leap year starting on Thursday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. The University of Cambridge (often Cambridge University) located in Cambridge, England, is the second-oldest university in the Year 1999 ( MCMXCIX) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1999 Gregorian calendar)
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Early works
Goehr's earliest published work is the Piano Sonata from 1953, a fluent and idiomatic work which bridges the gap between Prokofiev and serialism (Prokofiev had died in March of that year, and the sonata commemorates this fact with a brief quote from his Seventh Piano Sonata). Year 1953 ( MCMLIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (Серге́й Серге́евич Проко́фьев Sergéj Sergéjevič Prokófjev) ( - 5 March 1953 was a Russian composer who Goehr's works from the middle fifties tend to be more austere and closely adhere to traditional Schoenbergian 12-tone technique. Arnold Schoenberg ( pronounced ˈʃøːnbɛrk (13 September 1874 &ndash 13 July 1951 was an Austrian and later American Composer, associated with Twelve-tone technique (also dodecaphony, especially in British usage twelve-note composition) is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Goehr's first international success was with his Eisenstein cantata The Deluge (1958), which created a considerable stir at its first performance, conducted by his father. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн January 23, 1898 &ndash February 11, 1948) was Year 1958 ( MCMLVIII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. It is a tautly constructed yet lyrical work, with more harmonic coherence and considerably more dramatic impact than most serial music of the period. Its impact upon Goehr's colleagues from Manchester seems also to have been considerable: echoes of it, both in terms of vocal writing and instrumental writing, may be discerned in Maxwell Davies's Leopardi Fragments (1961) and Birtwistle's Monody for Corpus Christi (1960). Year 1961 ( MCMLXI) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Year 1960 ( MCMLX) was a Leap year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar.
As a result of the success of The Deluge, Goehr was commissioned to compose an orchestral piece for the BBC Promenade Concerts (Hecuba's Lament) and a larger Eisenstein cantata Sutter's Gold (1961) for chorus, baritone and large orchestra. The Proms, more formally known as The BBC Proms, or The Henry Wood Promenade Concerts presented by the BBC, is an eight-week summer season of daily Orchestral Year 1961 ( MCMLXI) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. However the premiere at the Leeds Festival was not successful, provoking an editorial in The Times newspaper claiming that it signalled the end of the British choral tradition. The Times is a daily national Newspaper published in the United Kingdom since 1785 when it was known as The Daily Universal Register.
Despite this, 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 characteristic modally inflected harmonic serialism which was to remain his main technical resource for the next 14 years. John Alldis (born 10 August 1929) is an English chorus-master and conductor Year 1962 ( MCMLXII) was a Common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Briefly explained, parts of a row are laid over other segments of the original row to produce a limited intervallic vocabulary in which certain pitch classes and harmonic aggregates tend to predominate. The result is euphonious, harmonically consistent and a complete departure from the consistently dense chromaticism of Schoenberg's classical 12-tone pieces.
Both as a technical procedure and in its harmonic results, Goehr's rotation technique has much in common with Boulez's idea of the 'bloc sonore' derived from segmenting rows into smaller units which are multiplied with each other. But, unlike Boulez, Goehr retains a strong and lasting link with the precepts of Schoenberg as expressed in the latter's writings (as found in the anthology 'Style and Idea', for instance). Like Schoenberg, Goehr is committed to the revivification of traditional Western forms such as sonata, symphony and fugue. This makes his music difficult to pigeonhole as it is not purely traditional in outlook, but neither does it spurn certain features of post-War avant-garde aesthetics. This has led to views like that of composer and critic Bayan Northcott, who has termed Goehr a "radical conservative". Bayan Northcott (born 24 April 1940) is an English Composer and music critic.
The first large scale application of Goehr's new modal serialism came in his Little Symphony of 1962. Year 1962 ( MCMLXII) was a Common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar of the Gregorian calendar. It is a memorial to Goehr's conductor/composer father, who had unexpectedly died, and in consequence it is based upon a chord-sequence subtly modelled upon (but not quoting) the Catacombs movement from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (Goehr senior had made a close harmonic analysis of this unusual movement; he had also published his own orchestration of 'Pictures' - although he excluded 'Catacombs' from it). Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Моде́ст Петро́вич Му́соргский Modest Petrovič Musorgskij) ( March 21 March 9 1839 &ndash March Pictures at an Exhibition (Картинки с выставки &ndash Воспоминание о Викторе Гартмане Kartinki s vystavki &ndash Vospominaniye Alexander Goehr's own choral sequence is richer than Mussorgsky's original, with strongly predominant thirds and sixths, and prominent false relations between adjacent chords. It comprises the entire first movement of the Little Symphony for strings. What follows is in effect a gigantic sequence of variations upon this chord sequence, though in fact only the following, second movement is actually designated 'variations' as such. The scherzo third movement offers a sharp contrast with its skirling woodwind writing, but close echoes of the basic chord sequence return in the slow trio. The finale alternates two contrasted types of music, both based upon the chorale - a slow lament, and much faster music featuring dotted-rhythm cadences which have remained a typical feature of Goehr's mature style. The coda clinches the argument in a final variant of the opening of the whole symphony.
Later works
Goehr's subsequent output from the sixties included one further symphony (in 1969) which fuses sonata, fantasia and variation principles in a half-hour discourse. Year 1969 ( MCMLXIX) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. The harmony is some of Goehr's most lush and articulate, with richly detailed orchestration to match. The strikingly discursive coda to the work deliberately leaves the harmonic threads hanging unresolved on a luminous brass chord. During this period, Goehr also composed the Romanza for cello and orchestra, premiered by Jacqueline du Pré, under the direction of her husband Daniel Barenboim at the 1968 Brighton Festival with the New Philharmonia Orchestra. Jacqueline Mary du Pré, OBE ( January 26, 1945 &ndash October 19, 1987) was an English cellist, today acknowledged Daniel Barenboim (born November 15, 1942) is a pianist and conductor. The Brighton Festival is an annual Arts festival which takes place in the city of Brighton and Hove in England each May The Philharmonia is an Orchestra based in London. Since 1995 it has been based in the Royal Festival Hall. She said it "suited her down to the ground" and it remained the only contemporary music she ever played (and has since appeared unofficially on CD). Though highly melodic, the work also has its darker, more ominous overtones, and it proved further the expressive viability and flexibility of Goehr's modal serialism.
Goehr's first opera, Arden Must Die, was also composed during this period and proved to be a powerful setting of a Jacobean morality play which had uncomfortably contemporary political and social resonances. Though very successful at its Hamburg premiere, and revived more than once in the years that immediately followed, it has not been performed in Britain since. Hamburg (English, German: ˈhambʊɐk local pronunciation Low German / Low Saxon: Hamborg) is the second-largest city in Germany
Goehr's chamber music output has included a Piano Trio commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin. Yehudi Menuhin Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE (April 22 1916 – March 12 1999 was an American -born Violinist and conductor who spent It is a two-part work whose dance-based theme-and-variations first movement is counterbalanced by an intense slow movement which opens with a germinal cello melody and proceeds through haunting passages of near-stasis to a poised conclusion. The second and third string quartets (1967) and (1976) respectively, are no less successfully executed as regards combining harmonic innovations with traditionally anchored large-scale form. Year 1967 ( MCMLXVII) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar of the 1967 Gregorian calendar. Year 1976 ( MCMLXXVI) was a Leap year starting on Thursday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar.
The third quartet (1976) was the last Goehr composed using his personal form of serialism. With Psalm 4 he abandoned serialism for a purely modal harmonic world (the work has long passages almost entirely using the white notes of the keyboard), but this was no 'spiritual modalism' such as would become fashionable some years later. The counterpoint is austere, yet sonorous and not lacking in tension.
He delivered the Reith Lectures in 1987 entitled The Survival of the Symphony. A Reith Lecture is a Lecture in a series of annual Radio lectures given by leading figures of the day commissioned by the BBC and broadcast on BBC Year 1987 ( MCMLXXXVII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link displays 1987 Gregorian calendar)
Notable students
References
- Latham, Alison (ed. George Benjamin (born 31 January 1960 London, England is a British Composer of classical music. Ye Xiaogang ( (b China, September 23, 1955) is a Chinese composer of Contemporary classical music. Silvina Milstein (born in Buenos Aires, 12 February 1956 is a female Argentinian Composer, living in Britain and teaching at King's College Robin Greville Holloway (born 19 October, 1943 in Leamington Spa) is an English Composer. ). 2003. Sing, Ariel: Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr's Seventieth Birthday. With compact disc. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ISBN 0754634973
- Williams, Nicholas. 2001. "Goehr (2): (Peter) Alexander Goehr". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
External links
- Alexander Goehr page on Schott music publishers' website
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