Alexander Goehr: 11-15 Sept '17

[french frank]

I wouldn't chose Goehr

I hope the meaning is clearer than the syntax!

And the spelling

[Richard Barrett]

Just listened to the piano concerto op 33. It wasn't turgid in any way that I understand the word, or boring to me personally. This may be because it is music that I look forward→ to from my position. I am backward. Others whose position is musically in the present look back on it critically in comparison to works by others and how music has generally evolved.

I don't think whether one looks forward or backward at something, or what position one perceives it to have in the more general evolution of music, is really connected so strongly with whether one appreciates it. I may have given the impression that the reason I find Goehr's music turgid is the same thing as the reason I don't think it's a particularly good example of what S_A was talking about (if I interpret that accurately). (Besides which, in actual fact all of us are positioned "musically in the present", whether we like it or not!)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And the spelling

I have a slight cold.

[Serial_Apologist]

And the spelling

Ah - a woman's right to "choose"!

I am probably in line with your looking at Goehr's music as in advance of your own musical receptivity. Much of what he has composed since approximately the early 1980s has been in some ways a step backwards from the Piano Concerto, for, as he said on this morning's programme, he no longer uses the twelve-tone method of composition. But I feel in many ways that I've caught up with him as a consequence. He would probably regard that as not just personally a step forward for him, since I think he adjudges significance in the composer's place in history and stance thereto - in common with other composers in the Second Viennese School lineage such as Eisler, Skalkottas and David Blake, who have confronted the problem of the modernist composer's relationship to the public and the ideological mediators consciously and subconsciously driving that relationship.

[french frank]

(Besides which, in actual fact all of us are positioned "musically in the present", whether we like it or not!)

Chronologically, yes. But it's like age. Everyone who is 65 is 65, chronologically. But some may be 75 and others 55 from other points of view (age norms relating to state of heart, general mobility).

If I contemplate Goehr's 1972 piano concerto, I am chronologically looking back 45 years from the present. But in terms of appreciation, I haven't grown accustomed to the music of 'the present' sufficiently to appreciate it. How can the piano concerto 'bore' me when I've heard nothing like it before? I was going to witter on about you being a composer but I don't even understand how that would affect the issue well enough - from your point of view - to construct an argument.

But I think it affects the issue

[Richard Barrett]

How can the piano concerto 'bore' me when I've heard nothing like it before?

I don't see how whether you've heard anything like it before stops it from potentially being boring.

[Richard Barrett]

A composers in the Second Viennese School lineage such as Eisler, Skalkottas and David Blake, who have confronted the problem of the modernist composer's relationship to the public and the ideological mediators consciously and subconsciously driving that relationship.

Hmmm... it's not the modernist composer's relationship to the public that's the problem, it's the ideological mediators, and that isn't a problem that's going to be solved on the composer's writing desk.

[Stanfordian]

Of all living British composers of today, Goehr for me represents the closest continuity with the values of post-Enlightenment aesthetics as inscribed in the Euroclassical lineage of music. I guess that amounts to a kind of confessional on my part to the degree that, while I would defend to the death the right of free expression in the name of innovation by musicians working in any tradition or genre, I remain in many respects a traditionalist in my appreciation of music. I rather suspect that Mr Goehr thinks musically and philosophically in similar terms. I wonder what others think. Is the "Euroclassical" tradition, and all it has at various stages sought to encapsulate in terms of "expanding the permissible in the empire of sound" (as Debussy is said to have said about Stravinsky's "Le Sacre"), and a lot more than that with regards to reflecting the ever-increasing complexities of everyday living, together with the understanding of society's complexities and our reactions thereto in the sciences and humanities?

This is a big subject of course, and while nobody expects music to be the answer to all civilisation's ills, I would like to claim it has a big part to play. The question I ask is whether or not postmodernist multiculturalist relativisms now supercede the values encripted into the post-Enlightment idea of progress, which as I see it, provided the aesthetic backdrop to a postwar era that still believed in it, notwithstanding the many shortcomings that still remained to be recognised, let alone addressed, and are now being re-examined metaperspectivally, ie from multicultural viewpoints which downplay or wish even to eradicate the "Eurocentric" viewpoint as no longer of relevance in our multicultural age. It will be interesting to find out how much these questions are taken up in consideration of this week's COTW.

Hiya Serial_Apologist,

In the 1970s & 80s I attended several live concerts containing works by Alexander Goehr performed live by the BBC Phil at the now demolished BBC Studio 7 in Manchester. I fear that the music of Alexander Goehr is now very much out of fashion.

[french frank]

I don't see how whether you've heard anything like it before stops it from potentially being boring.

That might be generally the case, though having deliberately picked a piece of music by a particular composer to see what I would think (in light of your own 'turgid and boring' opinion), and having heard something of Goehr's music, I'd guess it would be less likely to bore than something which is already firmly placed, by me, in a 'boring' context - like watching football or paint dry.

I am at least paying you (and ferney, btw) the compliment of assuming that your opinion is more musically informed than mine. But my criteria are different from yours, probably for that very reason!

[Serial_Apologist]

Hiya Serial_Apologist,

In the 1970s & 80s I attended several live concerts containing works by Alexander Goehr performed live at the now demolished BBC Studio 7 in Manchester. I fear that the music of Alexander Goehr is now very much out of fashion.

Frequently when I listen to new pieces on "Hear and Now" for me it's as if those inner qualities of integrity I perceive in Goehr and other representatives of the lineage he represents in broad terms as a person and a composer has flaked off a lot of the stuff I hear. There's a perceptible gap between those who take ownership of the best of that lineage and advance it further, and those who have jettisoned what C20 modernism represented and achieved. Aesthetic allegiance-wise, I guess I'm somewhere in that gap, along with people whose music we don't hear so much of nowadays like (going through my index cards!) Gilbert Amy, Carmelo Bernaola, David Blake, John Casken, Duncan Druce, David Ellis and Anthony Gilbert - that's enough for now! There sems somehow a lightweightness in many of their successors, pleasant though their music always is - of density of information, a term I've heard Goehr use. I find that gap to be replenished in a lot of the jazz I find coming from a number of the younger generation of jazz people in for example the F-Ire and Loop collectives, who have taken on board the best of what earlier modernists offered and adapt it integratively along with contemporary grooves from fringe and post-rock musics.

[Serial_Apologist]

That might be generally the case, though having deliberately picked a piece of music by a particular composer to see what I would think (in light of your own 'turgid and boring' opinion), and having heard something of Goehr's music, I'd guess it would be less likely to bore than something which is already firmly placed, by me, in a 'boring' context - like watching football or paint dry.

I am at least paying you (and ferney, btw) the compliment of assuming that your opinion is more musically informed than mine. But my criteria are different from yours, probably for that very reason!

From my own vantage point there's always a sort of cut-off which says "thus far and no further, for now", which I'm forever endeavouring to surpass, however, in order to prove to myself that there are still realisable possibilities for expansion in the tradition of concert music I've embraced and from which I've derived so much inner enrichment, ever since being introduced by my musical mother to the Schumann piano concerto at the age of six. Under the challenges I give myself, the comfort zone has slowly shifted into more advanced musical terrains, but I do feel increasing nostalgia for that earlier period of my musical formation when the breadth of options within which composers found means of further advance seemed wider than they appear to be today. I guess I'm no differernt, really, than the person who manages to follow, say, Schoenberg's development up to the first Chamber Symphony, seeing that work as representing a creative peak or watershed, and then advances further with trepidation, proud of having got this far while leaving others even further back along the same path!

Thinking further about all this, it occurs to me that my disillusionment with what I perceive in the state of contemporary music is just a projection of a more general feeling of dispiritedness with the state of politics and culture as a whole today!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... there are pieces by Goehr that I like to hear ... the Little Symphony,

Oh dear! The piece I "remembered" was a much better work than that played at the end of today's programme.

[Richard Barrett]

I do feel increasing nostalgia for that earlier period of my musical formation when the breadth of options within which composers found means of further advance seemed wider than they appear to be today.

Actually I think the possibilities for radicalising the most important innovations of 20th century music are no less wide than they've ever been. (That sentence could be a very brief précis of the book I'm currently writing, which I think I might have alluded to before.)

[Serial_Apologist]

Actually I think the possibilities for radicalising the most important innovations of 20th century music are no less wide than they've ever been. (That sentence could be a very brief précis of the book I'm currently writing, which I think I might have alluded to before.)

That's something to look forward to coming out, Richard!

[Richard Barrett]

That's something to look forward to coming out, Richard!

I will let you know. A preliminary version of it has just been submitted as a PhD thesis at Leeds University. Once that's out of the way I'm going to add various things to it and give it a more conversational tone of voice. (Also it won't have an academic price tag!)

Anyway, I do agree that, as you say, "those inner qualities of integrity (...) have flaked off a lot of the stuff I hear". That's partly I think because the stuff it hasn't flaked off is somewhat marginalised and doesn't even make it to "Hear and Now" that often. The BBC is failing to put out a representative overview of what's happening in contemporary music, and this circumstance is part of a culture that generally promotes the flaky stuff over anything with more substance or integrity, as evidenced by certainly all of the new Proms pieces I heard this year, and by the lack of attention given to people such as the ones you list (and it's perhaps relevant to mention that I haven't received a commission from the UK in 5 years or one from the BBC for 13), largely in favour of ephemera which fulfil the needs of some "curated" event or other (let's remember almost all uses of the word "curated" these days could easily be replaced by "chosen" even if that sounds less creative, but that's one for the teeth-on-edge thread).

On a positive note, not long ago I came across the 2nd Piano Sonata by Stuart Macrae (b 1976), whose early work I found derivative and unpromising, and it seems to me there's something really interesting and individual going on here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOHpYa6o_o