The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

The death yesterday at the age of 92 of Alexander (‘Sandy’) Goehr marks the loss of the last of the triumvirate of composers (the others were Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle) who, together with pianist John Ogdon and trumpeter-conductor Elgar Howarth, formed the backbone of the New Music Manchester Group in the 1950s. Born in Berlin in 10 August 1932, Goehr was the son of the conductor and Schoenberg pupil Walter Goehr. While just a few months old, Goehr moved with his family to Britain, where the vibrant musical activity of the family home and his father’s subsequent pioneering efforts to introduce British audiences to the music of Schoenberg, Hindemith and Messiaen had a lasting effect. Initially taking up a Classics scholarship at Oxford, Sandy soon decamped to Manchester to study composition with Richard Hall.

Of the three ‘Manchester’ composers, Max was the brilliant maverick, Harry the ponderous slow developer who would become the most uncompromisingly individual of the trio, while Sandy was the ‘intellectual’ as well as the most cosmopolitan – a fact underlined by his attendance in 1955–56 at Messiaen’s masterclass at the Paris Conservatoire, as well as his encounter with the young Pierre Boulez. While Max and Harry were still grappling with such fundamentals as medieval isorhythm, Sandy was already steeped in postwar serialism, and he soon became an exponent of his own brand of serial modality. A string of successes in the 1960s, including his first opera Arden muss sterben in Hamburg, and teaching posts in Boston, Mass., and at Yale, led to a glittering academic career, first at Southampton, then professor at Leeds, and ultimately professor at Cambridge (1976–99, thereafter professor emeritus).

1976 was also the year of his ‘white-note’ modal setting of Psalm 4, which for many of Goehr’s more modernistically inclined admirers was something of a backwards step, and a clear dividing line in his compositional output. In retrospect, however, it can be seen as a pioneering attempt to reconcile modernism with deep-rooted musical tradition, a departure from the ‘progress-at-all-costs’ idealism which had  been the watchword for composers of the immediate postwar years, and an anticipation of 21st-century eclecticism. At the same time, Goehr’s fundamental musical lyricism remained a constant, distinct from PMD’s trademark brilliance and Birtwistle’s slow-burning yet edgy melancholy.

Goehr’s many composition students included such luminaries as Robin Holloway, Roger Smalley, George Benjamin and Thomas Adès, and his music was championed by the likes of Boulez, Knussen, Rattle, Du Pré, Barenboim and, more recently, Colin Currie and the Pavel Haas Quartet. His daughter Lydia (b.1960) made waves with her probingly critical book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992).

As one chapter closes, another begins. The appointment, announced this weekend, of Errollyn Wallen as the new Master of the King’s Music – and Charles III’s first nomination to the post – marks the first time this venerable position has been taken by a black woman, following on from the tenure of Dame Judith Weir, the first woman to hold the title. Yet Wallen’s recognition amounts to much more than an exercise in box-ticking. Since moving to Britain at a young age in the early 1960s, this Belize-born composer has – since early training as a dancer (which took her to New York’s Dance Theatre of Harlem) – steadily been building a reputation as one of the most engaging and vibrant composers of her generation, as much at home writing for television or film as for Elizabeth II’s golden and diamond jubilees or her own Ensemble X.

The spirit of the dance – from the popular to the more arty – pervades much of Wallen’s music, but it’s founded on a secure compositional technique (she studied with LeFanu and Lumsdaine at King’s College, London) and a healthy but not overshadowing respect for tradition. When she appeared recently on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Britten rubbed shoulders with Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder and Alvin Lucier, while for her luxury item she chose… the Wigmore Hall! Now based in a lighthouse on the north coast of Scotland, Wallen is visiting professor of composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow.

Equally assured in jazz-infused idioms like her violin and piano piece Woogie Boogie (sic), the minimalist-neoclassical mash-up of Concerto Grosso, and the demanding solo writing of her 20-minute single-movement Cello Concerto, Wallen’s music reflects the stylistic diversity and genre-straddling idioms of the 21st century, accessibly sonorous even at its most experimental. In a post which, before the ten-year term limits set with the appointment of Peter Maxwell Davies in 2004, too often proved an establishment-approved terminal sentence for composers fast approaching the end of their careers, Wallen will provide a breath of fresh air. And it will also present her with the opportunity – indeed, the expectation – to speak up apolitically for a musical world that often feels under threat like never before. We wish her every success!

Recommended recordings:
Goehr - Since Brass, nor Stone  NMCD187
Goehr - Marching to Carcassonne, When Adam Fell, Pastorals  8573052
Goehr - Colossos or Panic, The Deluge, Little Symphony  NMCD165
Wallen - Photography: Orchestral Works  NMCD221
Wallen - Errollyn  AV0049
Wallen - The Girl in my Alphabet  AV0006