With the death of Alexander Goehr (known to all as ‘Sandy’), Professor of Music at Cambridge between 1976 and 1999, British music has lost one of its finest and most influential composers, and countless musicians have lost a dear friend and teacher.
As a man Sandy was extraordinarily cultured, wise and generous. Until recent months, when ill-health prevented him from receiving visitors, he was the kindest and most stimulating conversationalist when hosting at his home near Cambridge. As Robin Holloway put it, he was “a marvellous spinner of reminiscing yarns (he seems to have encountered everybody at some point or another, usually at their most vivid and piquant)”. Music and culture were in his DNA right from the start, and the fact that his parents had first met at a party hosted at the filmmaker Billy Wilder’s house in Berlin seems to have set the scene for a life lived at the centre of things.
Sandy was born in 1932 in Berlin to two musicians of Jewish heritage. His mother Laelia Rivlin had been a pianist, one half of a popular piano duo act called The Stone Sisters which toured cabaret, jazz, swing and ragtime in various European countries. His father, Walter Goehr, was a successful conductor who also composed for theatre and cinema and who had attended Schoenberg’s famous composition class in the 1920s alongside others such as Nikos Skalkottas and Roberto Gerhard. When Alexander was four months old, Walter Goehr was headhunted by the Gramophone Company (the forerunner of EMI) and the family moved to England. Sandy later wrote that as “there were no babysitters…I went to London with him and some of my earliest memories are of sitting in [BBC] broadcast studios”.
The encouragement of Michael Tippett was to prove crucial to Sandy’s ambitions to compose: “He was the first person who told me the rather English thing that the best reason for doing something was because you wanted to do it; whereas my father’s more German approach was that the best reason for doing something was that you were good at it. I was manifestly not good at it, so I was very pleased to be told that I should try all the same.”
Goehr went on to study composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he met and became associated with a number of slightly younger musicians including Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. With characteristic self-deprecation, Goehr later recalled that “We were just kids playing a part. I was pretending to be Schoenberg, so I criticized the others and took on a leadership role”. But seen against the prevailing conservatism and insularity of the 1950s British scene, Goehr’s European outlook and his mix of progressiveness and cosmopolitanism must have seemed unimaginably exciting. When his father gave the British premiere of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie in 1953 it proved hugely important for all three composers, and Sandy decided on the spot that he wanted to go to Paris to study with Messiaen.
Sandy’s experiences of Messiaen’s class are well documented in his wonderful book Finding the Key and Jack van Zandt’s recent collection of interviews Composing a Life, and he has also written eloquently about Darmstadt, where his work received several important early performances, and his friendship with Boulez.
In the 1960s and 1970s Sandy held posts at the Universities of Southampton and Leeds, before being appointed Professor of Music at Cambridge in 1976. Strange though it may now seem, he said that it was “just about the last thing I could have imagined happening to me”, adding later that “I was an outsider; I came from a background which was culturally of a quite different hue. Through my father I grew up in a Schoenbergian world, and it was assumed that all conventional establishments would be closed to me. The idea that I could get into any academic institution seemed unlikely.”
And this sense of not quite belonging, of not being able to take things for granted, seems to me to be an important key to understanding not only the man, but also his music. Often, composition did not come easily to Sandy and he was always aware not only of its complex relationship with tradition, but also of its political dimensions. The struggles of the compositional process, negotiating with material and technique in the pursuit of musical meaning, resulted in extraordinary empathy and insight when discussing composition with others. He was able to share his own reflections on the creative process with humility and unflinching candour and for all his experience and skill, one never felt talked down to. Rather, he approached those who came to speak with him as fellow travellers. Although I myself was never one of his students, these qualities were in evidence whenever I met him and I believe they were part of what made him such a great teacher.
What remains now is his music, which is amply infused with the humanity and intelligence of the man. It is a hugely rich and varied body of work encompassing opera, orchestral music, choral work and chamber music which deserves to be widely performed, explored and enjoyed. For all its heterogeneity, one of the elements common to all Sandy’s music is that it is always exhorting us to ask (often difficult) questions, conversely avoiding easy answers.
This was clearly evident on Sandy’s last visit to the Cambridge Music Faculty in November 2022 for a concert held to celebrate his 90th Birthday. The University New Music Ensemble performed his Idées Fixes for 13 instruments alongside a magnificent rendition by the Villiers Quartet of his Vision of the Soldier Er (his String Quartet No. 5, based on a passage from Plato’s Republic reinterpreted by the poet Gabriel Levin). A hallmark of Sandy’s music is that it eschews overblown rhetoric and the certainty of grand conclusions; and in this case the soldier-protagonist of the title, having glimpsed the eternal image, finally returns to the battlefield at the end of the piece. His music exhorts us to keep persevering, and to keep asking the difficult questions.
Professor Richard Causton