Alexander Goehr

Alexander Goehr is a composer for whom the conventional labels of new music seem increasingly inadequate. A latent nonconformism is already suggested by the essential biographical facts. He was born in Berlin in 1932, son of the conductor and Schoenberg pupil Walter Goehr. Still in his early twenties, he emerged as a key figure in the celebrated 'Manchester School' of post-war British composers. In 1955-56 he joined Oliver Messiaen's masterclass in Paris. Thereafter, he worked as a BBC producer and broadcaster, and was a director of the Music Theatre Ensemble. In 1971 he was appointed Professor of Music at Leeds University, and was subsequently appointed to the chair at Cambridge in 1976. Background apart, however, the source of Goehr's heterogeneous yet single-minded development lies in a questing musical intelligence and a special gift for elaboration, transformation and synthesis. The artistic imperative is for a step-by-step progression, wherever it might lead, from what is familiar to what is genuinely new.

Although in the early sixties Goehr was considered a leader of the avant-garde, his oblique attitude to modernism - to any 'a priori 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 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 urges a return to more humane and traditional ways of composing , using familiar materials as objects of musical speculation, in contrast to the technological and materialistic priorities of much present-day musical research.

An important strand in this evolution has been a review of polyphonic techniques for their formal and expressive power in a late-twentieth century context. Combined with Goehr's own figured bass technique derived from C.P.E. Bach, it made possible not only the epic scale of his second opera, Behold the Sun (1981-4), but also the intimate personal homage of ... a musical offering (J.S.B. 1985) ... the experimental Deux Etudes (1981) 'composes out' visually inspired ideas into orchestral terms. Several major orchestral statements, the Little Symphony (1963), the Symphony in One Movement (1970) the Sinfonia (1979) and the Symphony with Chaconne (1987) are concerned with a long-standing creative preoccupation the synthesis of sonata and variation forms.

In his most recent works, Goehr has been drawn towards working out in various ways the relationship between text and music. Eve dreams in Paradise (1988) for the CBSO and Simon Rattle, sets a passage of Milton's Paradise Lost' for soprano and tenor. In Sing Ariel for the 1990 Aldeburgh Festival, where Goehr was Composer-in-Residence, he collaborated with Sir Frank Kermode to create a sequence of texts ranging from Spenser to Larkin. The Death of Moses, a large-scale choral work to texts of John Hollander, was given its first performance by the Monteverdi Choir and an ensemble conducted by John Eliot Gardiner in the Seville Expo 92 on 31 July 1992. The BBC presented the UK Première with the same performers in the 1992 Prom season, when it was also televised on BBC 2.

Alexander Goehr's third opera, Arianna, to the original text of the lost opera by Monteverdi, was presented by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in September 1995. Commissioned by the BC, Arianna was directed by Francesca Zambello, designed by Alison Chitty and conducted by Ivor Bolton. It subsequently received its German Première and was recorded for NMC after a new production in Cambridge.

Alexander Goehr is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1987 he gave the BBC Reith Lectures, 'The survival of the Symphony'.