Alexander Goehr

Summary

‘Listening to music is a leisure activity, so I don't see any moral imperative to it.’

I wasn't exactly nervous about meeting Alexander Goehr but I was prepared to be intimidated by his reputation. The son of the conductor and Schoenberg pupil Walter Goehr (1903–1960), he became a central figure in New Music Manchester, the group of avant-garde composers and performers who, while studying at the Royal Manchester College of Music (now part of the Royal Northern College of Music) in the 1950s, sought to radicalise the post-war renewal of British music. And from the late 1960s until his retirement thirty years later he taught composition at the universities of Boston, Yale, Southampton, Leeds and Cambridge (his list of students includes Julian Anderson, George Benjamin and Robin Holloway). A senior figure in the musical establishment, then; and, to someone largely outside it, not the most obviously approachable.

On the other hand, his music had suggested to me an element of moderation, as if his desire for progressiveness is tempered by an acknowledgement of the need for intelligibility. I certainly didn't feel that it could be described as ‘uncompromising’ in the same way that the works of his fellow ‘Manchester School’ composers Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies could. And this is confirmed by some of his public statements, for example the open letter to Pierre Boulez in which he argued, ‘If one wishes, one can just say that music has to be autonomous and self-sufficient; but how to sustain such a view when people who sing for pleasure are deprived of true satisfaction in the performance of new work?’ When I discovered that he’d told the journalist and broadcaster Tom Service that his academic reputation was ‘all bullshit’, I was optimistic about my encounter with him.

Sure enough, when we met at his home – a seventeenth-century cottage in a village near the Cambridgeshire/Suffolk border – in February 2013 he was welcoming, patient, unstuffy and jocular. Over coffee in the living room he asked me to tell him all about myself and then explained that, as with all interviews, he would answer my questions as directly as possible. He added that he is prone to indiscretion (a number of his subsequent comments were indeed prefaced by ‘This is not for your book, but …’) and that he would therefore like to approve his edited contribution.