Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life

Alexander ('Sandy') Goehr is a British composer and Emeritus Professor of Music at Cambridge University. He was born into a Jewish musical family in Berlin in 1932. His father, Walter Goehr, was a composer and conductor, and a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. His mother, Laelia, trained as a pianist at the Kyiv Conservatory. Goehr moved to England in 1933 when his father accepted a position as conductor there in the wake of Hitler coming to power. He was educated in Britain and spent the war in Buckinghamshire. At the Royal College of Music in Manchester, where he attended Richard Hall’s classes, he formed the "Manchester School," a group of young composers and musicians—including Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, and pianist John Ogdon—who specialized in the performance of new music. He was introduced to Olivier Messiaen's music when his father conducted the first British performance of Turangalîla in 1953. He subsequently went to study with Messiaen in Paris, and attended the Darmstadt Festival courses where he met and made friends with many composers, including Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono. He came to prominence in England in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a radical exponent of serial music. Since then, he has composed more than one hundred major works, including operas, orchestral and chamber pieces, and music for film, television, dance, and theatre. Goehr is one of Europe's most important music educators. He was a lecturer at Southampton University, Professor of Music at Leeds University and finally the Professor of Music at Cambridge University for more than twenty-five years. He has taught many successful composers, theorists, and musicologists. Over the course of his life he has written and lectured extensively, and his works are performed all over the world. His music is published by Schott.; Jack Van Zandt (b. 1954) is a Grammy-winning composer of music for concerts, film and TV, and a music educator, based in Los Angeles and Ireland. He is a former pupil, as well as musical and teaching assistant to Alexander Goehr, having studied and worked with him in Cambridge between 1976 and 1985. He was recently a music faculty member at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and California Institute for the Arts (CalArts). He is a new music concert producer in Los Angeles, and a founder and co-director of the Beyond Opera Collective. Van Zandt also worked as a U.S. and Irish trade book publisher in the 1990s, and is a published professional music, arts and political op-ed writer, and journalist. His music is published by Composers Edition in Oxford, U.K.; Sally Groves worked in music publishing from 1970 to 2014, mainly with Schott Music, where she was Creative Director in London for many years. She has always served on musical boards and trusts. She currently chairs Opera Ventures, the Vaughan Williams Foundation, and the Music Libraries Trust, is a governor of the Royal Society of Musicians, and a trustee of the Michael Tippett Musical Foundation and the Peter Maxwell Davies Trust, as well as of various ensembles. She was awarded an MBE for services in music in 2016.