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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 13.59BST

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.
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 so-called 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
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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".
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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: 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
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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
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