Alexander Goehr (born 10 August 1932 in Berlin) is an English composer and academic. August 10 is the 222nd day of the year (223rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1932 (MCMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link will take you to a full 1932 calendar). ... Location of Berlin within Germany / EU Coordinates Time zone CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2) Administration Country NUTS Region DE3 City subdivisions 12 boroughs Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD) Governing parties SPD / Left. ... Motto (French) God and my right Anthem God Save the King (Queen) England() – on the European continent() – in the United Kingdom() Capital (and largest city) London (de facto) Official languages English (de facto) Government Constitutional monarchy  -  Queen Queen Elizabeth II  -  Prime Minister Tony Blair MP Unification  -  by Athelstan 967  Area... A composer is a person who writes music. ...

He was born in Berlin, the son of Walter Goehr. 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. 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. Whilst resident in Paris in 1956-7, Goehr also had private consultations with Pierre Boulez. Location of Berlin within Germany / EU Coordinates Time zone CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2) Administration Country NUTS Region DE3 City subdivisions 12 boroughs Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD) Governing parties SPD / Left. ... Walter Goehr was a German composer, born 1903 in Berlin, died 1960 in Sheffield. ... Royal Northern College of Music The Royal Northern College of Music or RNCM is a conservatoire in Manchester, England. ... This article is about the City of Manchester in England. ... 1952 (MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1955 (MCMLV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE (b. ... Sir Harrison Paul Birtwistle, CH (born July 15, 1934) is a British composer, widely seen as one of the most significant modern composers from that country. ... John Andrew Howard Ogdon (January 27, 1937–August 1, 1989) was an English pianist and composer. ... Elgar Howarth is an English conductor and composer. ... 1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) Paris Eiffel tower as seen from the esplanade du Trocadéro. ... Olivier Messiaen It has been suggested that List of students of Olivier Messiaen be merged into this article or section. ... Conservatoire de Paris, or Paris Conservatoire, has been central to the evolution of music in France and Western Europe. ... Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland (federal state) of Hessen in Germany. ... Pierre Boulez Pierre Boulez (IPA: /pjɛʁ.buˈlÉ›z/) (born March 26, 1925) is a conductor and composer of classical music. ...

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. 1971 (MCMLXXI) was a common year starting on Friday. ... The University of Leeds is a major teaching and research university, one of the largest in the United Kingdom with over 32,000 full-time students. ... 1976 (MCMLXXVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday. ... The University of Cambridge (often Cambridge University), located in Cambridge, England, is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and has a reputation as one of the worlds most prestigious universities. ... 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ...

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). Goehr's works from the middle fifties tend to be more austere and closely adhere to traditional Schoenbergian 12-tone technique. 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. 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). 1953 (MCMLIII) was a common year starting on Thursday. ... Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (Russian: , Sergej Sergejevič Prokofijev; April 27 (April 151 O.S.), 1891–March 5, 1953) was a Russian and Soviet composer who mastered numerous musical genres and came to be admired as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. ... Schoenberg redirects here. ... Twelve-tone technique (also dodecaphony) is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg. ... Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн, Latvian: Sergejs Eizenšteins) (January 23, 1898 – February 11, 1948) was a revolutionary Soviet film director and film theorist noted in particular for his silent films Strike, Battleship Potemkin and Oktober. ... Year 1958 (MCMLVIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1961 calendar). ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 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. 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. A Promenade concert in the Royal Albert Hall, 2004. ... 1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1961 calendar). ... The Times is a national newspaper published daily in the United Kingdom since 1785, and under its current name since 1788. ...

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. 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. 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar). ...

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 1940) is an English journalist, writer and composer. ...

The first large scale application of Goehr's new modal serialism came in his Little Symphony of 1962. 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). 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. 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar). ... Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Russian: , Modest Petrovič Musorgskij, French: ) (March 9/21, 1839 – March 16/28, 1881), one of the Russian composers known as the Five, was an innovator of Russian music. ... Mussorgsky in 1874 Pictures at an Exhibition (Russian: , Kartínki s výstavki – Vospominániye o Víktore Gártmane, Pictures from an Exhibition – a Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann) is a famous suite of ten piano pieces composed by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874. ...

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. 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. 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. For the Stargate SG-1 episode, see 1969 (Stargate SG-1). ... Jacqueline Mary du Pré OBE (January 26, 1945 – October 19, 1987) was an English cellist. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... The Brighton Festival, based in the South coast city of Brighton, claims to be the biggest multi-art-form arts festival in England. ... The Philharmonia Orchestra is an orchestra based in London. ...

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. Location Coordinates Time zone CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2) Administration Country NUTS Region DE6 First Mayor Ole von Beust (CDU) Governing party CDU Votes in Bundesrat 3 (from 69) Basic statistics Area  755 km² (292 sq mi) Population 1,754,317 (11/2006)[1]  - Density 2,324 /km² (6,018...

Goehr's chamber music output has included a Piano Trio commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin. 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. Yehudi Menuhin album cover Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE (April 22, 1916 – March 12, 1999) was a Jewish-born, American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom and eventually became a British citizen. ... 1967 (MCMLXVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ... 1976 (MCMLXXVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday. ...

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. The Reith Lectures are a series of annual radio lectures given by leading figures of the day, and broadcast by the BBC. They were begun in 1948, in honour of the first Director-General of the BBC, John Reith. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Notable students

• George Benjamin
• Ye Xiaogang
• Silvina Milstein

George Benjamin (born January 31, 1960) is a British composer of classical music, and also a conductor, pianist and teacher. ... Ye Xiaogang (叶小钢; surname Ye, b. ... Silvina Milstein (born in Buenos Aires, 12 February 1956) is a female Argentinian composer, living in Britain and teaching at Kings College London. ...

External links

• Alexander Goehr page on Schott music publishers' website