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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Alexander ('Sandy') Goehr is a leading British composer and teacher. Born into a Jewish musical family in Berlin in 1932, he arrived in England in 1933 with his father, Walter, a composer, conductor, and pupil of Arnold Schoenberg; and his mother Laelia, a trained pianist from Kyiv. Raised in Amersham, he attended Richard Hall's classes at the Royal Manchester College of Music. There he formed the 'Manchester School' – a group of young composers and performers including Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, and John Ogdon. He was introduced to Olivier Messiaen when his father conducted the first British performance of Turangalîla-Symphonie in 1953, and he later studied with Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod in Paris. In the late 1950s and early '60s Goehr became known 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. He is Emeritus Professor of Music at Cambridge University and one of Europe's most important music educators. He has written and lectured extensively and his music is performed all over the world. Jack Van Zandt (b. 1954), an American composer and Goehr's former pupil and assistant, has co-written this first comprehensive account of the life, creative foundations, and teachings of this great composer.
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3
Alexander GoehrComposing a Life: Teachers, Mentors, and Models
Edited and with Preface, Introduction, and Commentary by
Jack Van Zandt
Foreword by
Sally Groves
CARCANET LIVES AND LETTERS
Contents
Acknowledgements
No book of this nature is created in a vacuum, and there are many people who have assisted editorially, lent moral support, provided materials, and given us welcome advice.
First of all, we want to thank our dear friend Sally Groves for her thoughts and ideas on this book project from the very beginning, and her encouragement and advice throughout the process.
Amira Goehr has been essential to the process of creating the book and has given us the benefit of her advice and editorial ideas from the beginning.
Jeanne Schuster put her professional copyeditor skills to work on the several drafts of the manuscript, and helped us to make the transition of the text from taped discussions to written form.
Michael Schmidt and his staff at Carcanet Press have been a joy to work with, and we are thankful for their support and advice in creating the final text of the book.
We would like to express our appreciation and special thanks to our fabulous editor, Maren Meinhardt, for her diligence, dedication, keen eye, and many excellent suggestions. She was a delight to work with and the book is very much better because of her.
Thank you to Ian Mylett and his team at Schott Music Group in London, Sandy’s publishers, who created the works list and discography. And we very much appreciate Dan Goren and his staff at Composers Edition, Jack’s publisher, for their enthusiasm, advice and promotional efforts.
And finally, a big thank you to Southern California-based composer and music teacher, Nina Crecia, who assisted in transcribing the many hours of recorded conversations selected for this book.
List of Photographs and Credits
Sally Groves and Alexander Goehr. Sally Groves Collection
Jack Van Zandt and Alexander Goehr. Photo by Julia Crockatt
Jack Van Zandt. Photo by Elisa Ferarri
Alexander Goehr and Jack Van Zandt, 21 December 1979. Jack Van Zandt Collection
Alexander Goehr as a young man, 1940s. Photo by Laelia Goehr
Walter Goehr (L) and Alexander Goehr with his Paternal grandparents, Gertrud and Julius. Goehr Archive
Michael Tippett and Walter Goehr. Goehr Archive
Richard Hall. Courtesy of the Royal Northern College of Music
Olivier Messiaen. Photo by Laelia Goehr
Yvonne Loriod. Photo by Laelia Goehr
Alexander Goehr with Pierre Boulez, late 1950s. Goehr Archive
Hanns Eisler in Hollywood, 1943. Courtesy of Eisler-Haus Leipzig
Alan Hacker. Photo by Laelia Goehr
Arnold Schoenberg, Berlin class, with Walter Goehr over his left shoulder. Goehr Archive
Ulrich Siegele, 2022. Photo by Linda Koldau
Alexander Goehr, 1960s. Photo by Laelia Goehr
Walter Goehr conducting. Goehr Archive
Musical Examples
Example 1. Pentatonic scale with harmonic derivations
Example 2. Twelve-tone row with hexachordal harmonic derivations from Chaconne for Winds, Op. 34.
Example 3a. Cantus from Psalm 4, op. 38a
Example 3b. Psalm 4 cantus with “white note” harmony
Example 3c. Psalm 4 cantus with “black note” harmony
10
Sally Groves and Alexander Goehr. Sally Groves Collection
Foreword
By Sally Groves
This is a profound, generous, and illuminating book. Sandy has always taken a delight in sharing thoughts, observations, and curiosity with his friends, many of them former students. One never feels put down in such conversations, in which there is always a wonderful sense of exploration. So it is marvelous that Jack has managed to capture the spirit of those conversations and lead us out into such a rich landscape.
Thank you, Sandy. The musical DNA is all there in this book, waiting to be explored.
12
Jack Van Zandt and Alexander Goehr, B&W. Photo by Julia Crockatt
Preface
By Jack Van Zandt
In December of 1976, I traveled from my home in warm Southern California to freezing cold Cambridge to begin studies as a private composition student of Alexander “Sandy” Goehr, who had just become the Professor of Music there. Our first meeting in his studio at Trinity Hall is etched in my memory, and I describe this in my Introduction that follows. During 1977, I spent nearly a year as his private pupil, and then returned in 1978 as an official PhD student under him at the university. I became his teaching assistant and then his personal musical assistant, which concluded in April 1985 with the premiere of his opera Behold the Sun, for which I had spent many years working on the complete score, parts, and piano reduction. From the early 1980s into the mid-1990s, I lived in Ireland and during that time, we would exchange letters and phone calls, and I would visit him in Cambridge when I could and he visited me in Ireland. I returned to the U.S. in 1996 and we continued to keep in touch, and of course I followed his work and was able to hear some of his performances and premieres whenever I was in the U.K.
In 2010, I flew to the U.K. to stay with Sandy and his wife, Amira, and attend a performance of his then new opera, Promised End, in Cambridge. During that visit, we enjoyed a few late nights discussing many things over some very good Irish single malt whiskey. I was especially interested in our conversations about the relationship between teachers and students of composition and how our art form is transferred via that relationship through the generations.
As a result of those chats, Sandy asked me to edit his essay “Learning to Compose,” which outlines his journey as a composer, student, and teacher. (I should mention that I had worked as a book editor for several years in the 1990s.) 14The process of going through the editorial process with him allowed me the pleasure of remembering the more than four decades he had been my teacher, mentor, and friend, as well as bringing my own journey as a composer into sharper focus. It also gave me the opportunity to consider and appreciate what the gift of those decades has meant to me.
Since that essay was published, we have—thanks to the advent of technology and the invention of Skype—been able to carry on discussing and elaborating on the matters Sandy wrote about in “Learning to Compose,” and we have spent a lot of time talking about how someone goes about learning to be a composer, and how we as teachers are best able to guide our pupils from our own experiences. Through those recorded conversations, we developed the idea for a book about musical “DNA” and how it evolves and is passed on from one generation to the next.
To create Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors, and Models, Sandy and I discussed his experiences as a student of individual composers and mentors—his father Walter Goehr, Richard Hall, Michael Tippett, Olivier Messiaen, Yvonne Loriod, Hanns Eisler, Pierre Boulez, Ulrich Siegele, Milton Babbitt, and others. Then we went on to talk about the ways he put those lessons to practical use as a composer to create his unique approach utilizing the compositional subjects discussed in the second part of the book—such as modeling, figured bass, modality, and text setting—and how all of this is reflected in his mentorship of his students. I wanted to understand how he filtered his life and experiences into teaching processes that benefited me as his student, and how I in turn further filtered what I learned from him to create my music and teach my students. Going through the process of creating this book with Sandy has also given me a unique insight into his life and work that has gone beyond what I already knew from my past experiences with him. 15
Something that we discussed for many years is how the tradition of music in the context of human culture, from the prehistoric past to the present, is like the Ganges in Hindu myth, a continuum, and that the practice of creating music is still handed down across the ages by successive generations of teachers to pupils, who become teachers, etc. This is the case for all music anywhere in human existence, not just Western classical music. However, the transgenerational evolution and passing on of musical DNA is rarely talked about and is not completely understood. We hope this book will change that and will inspire composers and teachers to examine their own musical experiences and heritage in this way.
In practical terms, the text of this book is drawn from recordings of dozens of conversations we had via the Internet between Cambridge and Los Angeles, beginning in 2016 and continuing into 2023. Transcripts of some of these conversations that we chose as fitting the theme of this book were made and edited by me, and then we met in Cambridge or worked remotely to shape the material into the final form presented here.
The book is divided into two main parts with an Interlude between Parts I and II and final Coda. Part I is autobiographical and its focus is on influential experiences as well as on the individuals who were the major teachers and mentors in Goehr’s development toward becoming a composer, and who have affected his work right up to the present. We structured the text of the chapters in Part I by my introducing the subject and then getting out of the way so the reader can get an uninterrupted picture of Goehr’s learning experiences, with my questions or ideas for elaboration or clarification integrated into the flow of his text.
For the Interlude and the chapters in Part II, we produced an edited version of our conversations to show how they transpired, and to give the reader an idea of our continuing 16teacher-student relationship. We both felt that these subjects were important to his work and evolution as a composer.
The Interlude, about Goehr’s experiences in America, details the time he spent teaching (New England Conservatory and Yale) and traveling in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, and the composers who influenced him and became his friends. The young Goehr’s time in America mirrors my experiences as an American student and young composer in the U.K., especially since all my composition teachers and mentors were British (Goehr, Peter Fricker, Thea Musgrave, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, and Peter Zinovieff).
The chapter about Goehr’s father, Walter—the conductor, the composer, and the pupil of Schoenberg—we decided to save for last, for the Coda. Readers will easily understand the reason for this when they get there. The material for this concluding essay was drawn from several of our conversations which we edited into the present text, with Sandy putting on the finishing touches.
My essay that begins the book proper aims to introduce what follows, as well as to paint a picture of what it was like to be pupil and friend for most of my life and what it’s meant to me personally and as a composer and teacher. I hope it serves to offer a deeper understanding of the subject of the transfer of musical DNA from teacher to student and how this relationship can work if the circumstances are right.
Jack Van Zandt. Photo by Elisa Ferarri
ALEXANDER GOEHR COMPOSING A LIFE
18
Alexander Goehr and Jack Van Zandt, 21 December 1979. Jack Van Zandt Collection
Introduction
Notes From My Apprenticeship: Zen in the Art of Composing By Jack Van Zandt
The Japanese pupil brings with him three things: good education, passionate love for his chosen art, and uncritical veneration of his teacher. The teacher-pupil relationship has belonged since ancient times to the basic commitments of life and therefore presupposes, on the part of the teacher, a high responsibility which goes far beyond the scope of his professional duties.
Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
The greatest teachers are the rare ones who profoundly change you as a human being and whose lessons affect you throughout a lifetime. For me, Alexander “Sandy” Goehr has been that teacher. Since the day I became his pupil in Cambridge in December 1976, he has been the most important influence on my musical and intellectual life as my teacher, mentor, colleague, and close friend.
Conducting our special recorded conversations over the past several years has provided me with an opportunity to consider the intersection between my journey in life and his. As I have gone on to become both composer and teacher—and always a student of our art—I know that learning music or any skill or art requires more than the study of some form of mathematical or set theory analysis. There is an intellectual intimacy between venerated teachers and passionate students, and when they click, the result is a two-way street that affects both. I find this happening with the young musicians I mentor, and, with many of them, that contact means as much to me as it does to them. That is something that I learned from Sandy. If you treat the students who look up to you with the utmost 20respect, you get the same in return, sometimes tenfold, and your effect as a teacher is very much greater.
So, how did a young music student from Southern California get all the way to Sandy Goehr in Cambridge in 1976?
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut was once asked by an interviewer to describe his life in one sentence. He thought briefly, and then said: “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.” I have always felt this simple statement to be profound, and find that it describes my life and anyone else’s I know just as well.
My own youthful journey from my native California to mid-1970s Cambridge to study with Sandy was itself an accident. Graduating midterm in the final year of my BA degree program at the University of California at Santa Barbara left me with some time to fill before my planned graduate study. I was feeling a little bit at loose ends and approached my teacher at the time, Peter Racine Fricker, a wonderful man, composer, and excellent teacher himself, for advice as to what I should do in the meantime. Fricker, noticing that I was carrying around a few scores of Goehr’s music (the Little Symphony, Pastorals for orchestra, the Second String Quartet, and the Piano Trio), asked what I thought of them. I said that I liked them very much and that I thought they were “original, unusual, and idiosyncratic.” Fricker said that he was an old friend of Goehr’s and suggested that I go to England and study privately with him, which I found incredibly exciting. To cut a long story short, parents were consulted, letters were exchanged (my other teacher at the time, Thea Musgrave, who had inspired my investigations into contemporary British music that led me to discover Goehr, also sent a letter of recommendation to Sandy), my student scores were airmailed to Sandy in Leeds at his request, and I soon found myself in cold, frozen Cambridge in December of 1976, the first year of Sandy’s long reign there as Professor of Music. 21
It seemed at first as if it might have been a case of oil and water. Sandy, the highly intelligent, extremely well-read teacher and composer with the European pedigree steeped in tradition, and me, the California hippie with my ordinary but good educational career, and musical background of alto saxophonist in school bands and rock guitarist. I was a Johnny-come-lately to serious music composition due to a chance encounter with Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto at the age of eighteen. What I know now that I didn’t know then was that Sandy, like me, had come to music composition relatively late in a way that mirrored my own short journey at that time. Like Sandy in his youth, I had found ways to compensate for what I lacked to get to where I wanted to go. What I didn’t know filled a much bigger bag than what I did know, but I was determined to figure it all out and do it in my own way. I think because Sandy had essentially done it in a similar fashion, he understood what I was up to much more than I did myself, and he was uniquely prepared and able to help me. Many a lesser teacher at Sandy’s level of expertise surely would have sent me home to California to sharpen my skills or give up!
I still vividly remember that first lesson in his rooms at Trinity Hall in early January 1977, and how nervous I was. I immediately got down to business inquiring as to how much I would be paying for the lessons. He asked, “Are you a rich man or a poor man?” “Well, definitely not rich,” I said. “I usually get fifteen pounds for a weekly lesson,” he ventured. I gulped; I came from a working class family, and although we weren’t poor, money was tight. “That will be fine,” I said, “but I will only be able to afford to come every other week.” Without missing a beat, Sandy smiled and said, “Don’t worry; how about we say eight pounds a week then.” That was a huge relief to me as I had around 1,500 pounds to live on for the entire year. (After three months or so, Sandy stopped taking payment from me saying I had paid enough!) 22
I then naively asked what he had thought of the scores that I had sent to him. He replied (in a very cordial manner), “Well, you could be better than you are, but if you were, you probably wouldn’t need me.” It wasn’t the last stupid question I asked in my life, but it was, however, a very good lesson in humility for the pampered kid far away from home and doting parents for the first time.
In retrospect, at twenty-two I was a pretty green young composer, but eager and willing to learn how to get better. Thanks to Sandy’s guidance, I managed to learn and improve, and I am still doing it. Looking back over five decades, with the advantage of knowing what I have learned in the meantime and with the experience of being a teacher myself, I have a very personal perspective on Sandy the teacher; and, of course, I have the extra added benefit of having discussed the experience with many other Goehr pupils over the years. It should be remembered that Sandy has taught many hundreds of composers from all over the world in his life, and he is certainly one of the most important composition teachers of the past sixty years or so. Some of my fellow Goehr pupils are Anthony Gilbert, David Ward, Edward Cowie, George Benjamin, Geoff Poole, Julian Anderson, Thomas Adès, Robin Holloway, Silvina Milstein, Nicholas Cook, Bayan Northcott, Nicholas Sackman, Roger Smalley, and Emma-Ruth Richards; Australians Ann Carr-Boyd and Colin Burnby; Israeli Michael Wolpe, and Americans Zhou Long, Chen Yi, David Froom, Daria Semegen, Harold Meltzer, David Babcock, and Joan Huang.
Going back to Vonnegut, if you are a student of Goehr’s, you know that the concept of an “accident” is seminal to his teaching method and a distinctive feature of his compositional process. One of the first things he taught me was to embrace the “happy accident” and make something of it; even make your whole piece about it, or several more pieces if it is justified. It is often the accident and resulting unforeseen consequences 23that will propel pieces above and beyond the mechanics of their creation, transcending the preoccupation with “getting from one note to the next” as Sandy puts it, and becoming something original.
One of the unique qualities that make Sandy an excellent teacher is that he is able to abstract practical methods from his own experiences and struggles as a composer to help those who are going through similar struggles of their own. He believes that failure is a necessary learning experience and an opportunity to improve. His great strength comes from recognizing exactly what an individual student composer is having difficulties with, then giving them the intellectual tools to surmount those problems, and guiding them to finding their way. He never, ever, imposes his own way of working as a composer on a student as a solution. He nearly always sees and understands the way each of his students is working. By putting himself in their place, he can make them see things according to their own methods.
One of Sandy’s early suggestions to me was to always set a specific task for myself as the first step to writing a new piece. At the time, I was coming up with schemes and structural inventions for organizing music without having a clue as to how I would use them. He made me think about what sort of sound I wanted to create first and to come up with an ensemble for which I could complete such a sonic design. Once I set my sights on a specific group of instruments and the particular sound I wanted, then, he said, I could let my propensity to create structural coherence loose on making that noise with those instruments. It was a new way of thinking for me then (even though it now seems obvious as the way I should work) that has served me well ever since.
I can give some examples that I remember from my own early period of study with Sandy. I had been studying the string quartets of Bartók and was experimenting with adapting some 24of his structural techniques on a wider scale in a new piece, but was having trouble making it yield anything that went on for very long before fizzling out. Sandy led me through several examples from Bartók and we sketched out some possible ways of proceeding using the material I had invented for my piece. Within an hour I had worked out a methodology with Sandy’s guidance and the piece became my Opus One, a string trio. That lesson became one of my tools and is still relevant to my work today.
I was (and still am today) fascinated with canonic writing and was attempting all sorts of different combinations in a post-tonal language, which weren’t entirely successful. Sandy advised me to study the Five Canons, op. 16, of Webern, and he explained to me in minute detail how Webern created them in such a way that I was able to begin to do it myself after several practice runs. He suggested that I try and write a set of canonic studies for two like instruments, and I composed such a set for two violins. Following on with this study, Sandy also suggested we study Gregorian chant and explained how chants were employed as a cantus firmus by mediaeval and Renaissance composers in creating elaborate polyphonic compositions around the existing material. Of course I was familiar with this period of early music from concerts and recordings, as well as my studies in music history and theory, but this was the first time I actually considered how they were composed. Thus began a lifelong love and study of early choral music that has also been hugely influential in my own way of composing.
Another of his lessons that was important to me that I have passed on to my students was his method to get over a serious block and back to composing. (I am not sure what source he adapted it from, but it may have been Zen in the Art of Archery.) It has worked for me even in the worst of times when I thought I would never be able to compose again. 25
Sandy told me, first of all, to create a ritual to follow each and every day that leads up to composing. At that time for me it was to lay out my manuscript paper, sharpen a stack of pencils, have my erasers, straight edges, etc., all lined up nearby and everything ready to go. Then, you take up a newly sharpened pencil and you start writing whatever notes come to you in whatever fashion on the manuscript, improvising onto paper stream-of-consciousness style, and keep going no matter what. At any point if the notes you are writing come together structurally and start to make some sort of sense to you, immediately crumple up the paper and throw it away. Then, take up a new sharp pencil and a fresh sheet of paper and do the same thing again. After half a dozen attempts or so, you will find that your facility has returned and that you can continue with whatever piece it is that you are working on. I have thought about how it is that this method usually works, and I think it is because, under pressure, your unconscious mind takes over and starts to involve and permutate processes that you have already been employing in your work, and suddenly a solution jumps out and appears on the paper (or, these days, on the computer screen). At least, that’s the way it seems to go for me.
I have never found a composer that Sandy did not have a personal perspective on, whether he had an artistic interest in them or not. When I was first studying with him my favored earlier composers were Schoenberg (first and foremost), Ives, Stravinsky, Webern, Varèse, Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin, and the recent and living composers I most admired (other than Goehr) were Dallapiccola, Carter, Ligeti, Messiaen, Boulez, Berio, Nono, Krenek, and Xenakis. He discussed all these composers with me in some detail, helping me to develop my critical facilities and analytical skills in order to apply what I learned from them to my own way of thinking and composing. At the time, Sandy was very interested in figured bass and he 26helped me appreciate a group of composers that I was only vaguely familiar with at the time: Scarlatti, Rameau, C.P.E. Bach, Couperin, and, more than anyone else, Handel. We also delved into the early English choral composers (in the wake of our studies of chant), and I have a special love for this music—from Dunstable to Byrd—to this day because of those lessons.
Another important aspect of this period of my study with Sandy was reading the ongoing list of his book suggestions and the subsequent discussions we had about them. Lucky for me that I was a voracious reader because it was all I could do to keep up with his “suggestions.” Something that seemed odd to me at the time but I later came to understand is that I was not encouraged to read any analytical or theoretical books on contemporary music. When I asked about this, Sandy said I should learn to compose by listening and doing and that no after-the-fact theory of music was going to help me do either. What I did do, according to his prompting, was read books on art, aesthetics, ethnomusicology, history, philosophy, theater and cinema, literature, and poetry. He also had me reading across the board geographically—American (Sandy has a great appreciation for and knowledge of American culture), European, and Asian—something that was rare at the time. What he was getting me to do was to understand what we were doing as composers in the context of world culture and helping me find ways to reflect these discoveries back into my own musical work. This set up a crucially important habitual pattern in me that is still a very big part of my daily activity.
For example, I remember early on we started discussing Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, followed by his notebooks The Nature of Nature and The Thinking Eye. At one lesson we discussed Klee’s concept of “taking a line for a walk” and how it could be applied to composing. We discussed many artists at the time that seemed particularly appropriate to musicians, including Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Henry Moore, the Italian 27and Russian futurists, and Kandinsky, especially his Concerning the Spiritual in Art and the Blaue Reiter writings.
After attending a performance of Sandy’s Sonata about Jerusalem in London, I expressed an interest in composing political music theater and was sent off to read Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre, Eisenstein’s collected writings on the theory of cinema, and a book on Noh and Kabuki whose title I have forgotten, all works that had been important to Sandy’s development of his music theater triptych (Naboth’s Vineyard, Sonata about Jerusalem, and Shadowplay) and numerous other theatrical works and operas (including Arden Must Die, Behold the Sun, Arianna, and Promised End). We have had many discussions over the years on this subject and it made me an avid student of film and theater theory, which I still am today.
In my undergraduate years in Santa Barbara, I had been a devotee of the works of Orwell, Huxley, Hesse, the aforementioned Vonnegut, and a long list of science fiction authors. Sandy got me reading Joyce and Beckett (two authors that would assume a special significance for me later when I took up citizenship and residence in Ireland), and Kafka and Mann. I also began to become familiar with the linguistic works of Noam Chomsky at this time, as well as the philosophical works of Wittgenstein and others. Our discussions stimulated my great interest in the parallels and differences between music and language as well as the origins and history of the development of both.
More directly to the point of my musical studies, I was reading a lot of poetry at the time and we often discussed poetry and music and their close relationship. I was setting some poems by the surrealist Rafael Alberti in the original Spanish to music, for soprano and chamber orchestra, and Sandy guided me through discovering the best way of doing so. I was “noodling about” too much in his opinion, and so we started by my reading the poems out loud, and then writing 28down the words with the rhythm I used while reading. The result was a revelation to me. I was trying too hard to cover far too much territory with the words in a way that was not intended by the poet. Sandy taught me to respect the nature of the original and preserve the integrity of the poet’s creation by “reading” it into my musical setting.
After several months, Sandy suggested that I should get “a different perspective from another composer” while I was visiting England. He arranged for me to attend Peter Maxwell “Max” Davies’s class at the Dartington Summer School that year (1977). Everyone knows that once upon a time in the 1950s, Sandy, Max, and Harry Birtwistle were the primary members of what was called the “Manchester School” of composers, and for a period of time they were all very close friends and colleagues, along with the pianist John Ogdon and trumpeter/conductor Elgar Howarth. By 1977, however, that was all in the past. Sandy and Max had taken separate paths and their friendship was no longer as close as it had once been (though they became closer again in Max’s later years). Considering the situation, it was all the more amazing to me that Sandy would write to Max on my behalf and that Max would take me in the class that was restricted to eight students, of which I was the last admitted. (I was already very much a fan of Max’s music—especially Eight Songs for a Mad King and the Second Taverner Fantasia—and of his ensemble, The Fires of London.)
Apart from being a big boost to my self-confidence, attending Max’s intense and very long daily classes was an eye-opening experience for me and a perfect place for me to get “perspective” on my time with Sandy so far. I learned a hell of a lot, and applying what I had learned from Sandy to the work we were required to do at Dartington paid dividends with Max, who knew very well where I had picked the stuff up. In retrospect, I would say that Max was 29very careful with me and I think he paid close attention to me, making sure I got something out of the summer that I could take back to Cambridge. It was a wonderful experience, one of the most important in my life, and I met a lot of new people and made many friends there. But the important thing to remember in this context is that I only went to Max in the first place because it was part of Sandy’s plan for me as his student to get the most out of my time in England. He wanted me to go home to California having learned a great deal and having had some life-changing experiences. (I think it was also a signal of professional and personal respect for Max and vice versa.)
After my first ten-month period in Cambridge, I returned to California only briefly—long enough to make some money and apply through official channels to become a foreign PhD student at Cambridge under Goehr. I had found my place for the next stage of life quite by accident.
I returned in late 1978 to Cambridge and to Sandy as an official grad student, though from day one, my unofficial position was something altogether different. I was almost immediately conscripted (most willingly) by him into service as a teaching, music and personal assistant. Thus began what I call my “apprenticeship” in an old-fashioned sense, something that is rare in this day and age.
So, what was this apprenticeship exactly? I began to fill the role of teaching assistant, helping to plan and organize a few undergraduate courses, a weekly student composer seminar and events with visiting lecturers, composers, and players. I remember one course that was a music perception lab where we played Webern’s Symphony, Boulez’s Structures and Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, among other pieces, and the students would discuss and analyze the music only from what they heard, not from any printed score. 30My fellow PhD student, music theorist Nicholas Cook, was also involved in running this course.
At the weekly composer meeting, undergraduate students would come to Sandy’s Trinity Hall rooms, play their pieces and discuss them, or some other topic chosen by Sandy. Mostly the pieces would be what you would expect from student composers anywhere in the world, but one student clearly stood out from the rest. George Benjamin had come to Cambridge to study with Sandy after a time in Paris with Messiaen. Even then, as a teenager, his music was already at a very high level sonically, as you would expect from a Messiaen pupil, but he needed the kind of structured thinking that Sandy is so good at teaching to give his pieces some depth.
These were very important learning experiences for me in terms of becoming a teacher in the future, but other duties were more important to my growth as a composer. I was drafted in as a musical assistant to Sandy the composer, a role that took on increasing significance over the coming years. At this time, in early 1979, Sandy was composing Babylon the Great Is Fallen, four large-scale pieces for chorus and orchestra, to fulfill a commission from the BBC Symphony and Chorus. These pieces would become the musical/dramatic pillars on which he would hang his next opera, Behold the Sun. My first job was to prepare the orchestral score (as it progressed from week to week) and, later, the parts for the performance. It was fascinating for me to get an inside look on how Sandy worked from sketches to a short score, giving me the indications for the final orchestral score, followed by a series of revisions.
I moved into his house during the summer of 1979, to facilitate the work on Babylon the Great Is Fallen (which was premiered by the BBC Symphony under Michael Gielen at the Royal Festival Hall on December 12, 1979). Sandy took a sabbatical around this time and went on an extended trip to China that was financed by the British Council, becoming the 31first Western composer to make an official visit there in many years. I remember helping him prepare some lectures for the visit. There were trips to Europe and Israel during this time, and it was during an extended residence in Jerusalem that he met his wife, the Israeli sinologist Amira Katz.
Back in his home, Sandy composed several new pieces while I was living in his house. After Babylon the Great Is Fallen there were other sections of the upcoming opera, including the stunningly beautiful aria Behold the Sun, op. 44a, which was one of the first times Sandy’s experiments with figured bass and adaptations of quasi-tonal harmony yielded the fresh, original sound world that his works have inhabited ever since. Also during my time there, he composed Sinfonia, op. 42, Deux Etudes, op. 43 for orchestra, and the Kafka songs for voice and piano, Das Gesetz der Quadrille, op. 41. I attended the premieres of all these works.
I was amazed at how Sandy could fulfill the enormous responsibilities of being the Cambridge Professor of Music and at the same time compose one work after another without much space for rest in between. He used to get up very early in the morning and I would hear him in his study playing bits over and over on the piano with slight variations while singing/humming in an “unearthly” harmony. This would begin at 5 a.m. most mornings and continue until breakfast, after which he would be off to the day job during term weekdays, leaving me behind most days to get on with the work in his studio.
I was lucky enough to watch and hear these works come into being from conception to the premiere performances. I learned much by observing and asking questions about how Sandy was working. He would show me his sketches and how they progressed. I understood his idiosyncratic “modal serialism” system of composing that he had developed from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, but since he had undergone a kind of compositional overhaul in 1976 with 32his three Psalm 4 works—which led him in a completely new direction—he was composing music so different from mine or anyone else’s that I was mystified and intrigued by it at the same time. It gave me a new appreciation of music traditions and history and also made me realize that music did not have to be ultra-complicated and anti-tonal to be something revolutionary, fresh and new.
Another part of my continuing education took place around the kitchen dining table. Much of this was one on one: we talked about books we’d read, music we’d heard, art exhibitions and films we’d seen, etc. Sandy would often challenge a statement or interpretation I made and urge me to explain or defend it. These conversations really developed my critical skills and I learned to think before I spoke up and ventured an opinion.
Also at that dining table was a succession of dinner parties. Some of the many guests who regularly gathered around that table over the years and whom I came to know included composers Harry Birtwistle, Hugh Wood, and Robin Holloway; composer/conductor Ryan Wigglesworth; the head of new music at Schott and Co., Sally Groves; Cambridge philosopher Bernard Williams; Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir James Mirrlees; electronic and computer music pioneer Peter Zinovieff; Boosey and Hawkes managing director David Drew and his wife, Judy; BBC executive Jimmy Burnett and his wife, Janet; Cambridge music lecturer Iain Fenlon; and ethnomusicologist Simha Arom and his wife, Sonia. Many of those conversations have stuck with me and I often think of how much I learned from them about music, art, philosophy, literature, and other things.
I attended countless concerts and premieres with Sandy over the years and was introduced by him to many interesting people before and after them. I remember meeting a young (thirty-seven) Maurizio Pollini after the premiere of Babylon33the Great Is Fallen at the Royal Festival Hall. Pollini had played in the performance of Beethoven’s choral fantasy in the same concert. I also received introductions to composers and conductors—including Oliver Knussen, Pierre Boulez, David Atherton, and Michael Gielen—and many leading performers. My head spins when I think of it now, but in retrospect it seems it was all part of my education. I learned that well-known figures are just people like everybody else, and you can talk to them as easily as someone in your own family (sometimes more easily!). Because of those experiences, I developed the ability to talk to anyone about anything at any time without feeling nervous, something that has served me well throughout my life.
Even after I left Cambridge and moved to London and then Ireland, I continued to assist Sandy until 1985. I spent more than two years (1982–5) preparing the orchestral score and parts for the premiere performance of his massive three-act opera Behold the Sun, op. 44, in Germany in April 1985. I thought I knew quite a bit about orchestration, but working on that huge project was like going to orchestration graduate school. As Sandy finished portions of the score, we would get together in his studio and spend a couple of days going over the orchestral design. We would make rough sketches for me to work from. Sometimes Sandy would give me a list of instruments and let me decide the exact deployment of the orchestration for a short section, which was much appreciated and very encouraging. I would complete a full pencil draft on manuscript paper at my cottage in Ireland, and then return to Cambridge to show it to Sandy who would make the final changes and adjustments (sometimes they were extensive). Then I would return to Ireland to make the final copy on vellum in ink. This would get looked at one more time by Sandy and then I would make any last corrections in Cambridge before taking them to the production office at Schott and Co. on 34Great Marlborough Street in London on my way back home to Ireland.
The premiere of Behold the Sun by Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Duisburg, Germany, on April 19, 1985, which I attended, marked the end of my nearly nine years as Sandy’s pupil and assistant. By then, I had moved to Ireland and had become a music teacher myself. All of my students have benefited from the teaching methods I learned from Sandy, and a few of them have gone on to become professional music teachers, performers, and composers and are continuing the “tradition.” It always cheers me up to think about this fact. It is an honor to pass on Sandy’s teachings to the next generations and to know that they will continue long after our time on planet Earth.
My position as Sandy’s pupil did not end in 1985, and it never will. Over the years it has continued, albeit at a slightly different pace and level of discussion, given that I now live in Los Angeles. Thanks to modern technology, we are in fairly regular contact through the magic of the Internet, and I go to Cambridge for a visit of a few days whenever I can.
I thought about making a list of items that I learned from Sandy over the years, but I realized that would be impossible, because, in a sense, everything I have learned since the first day we met in 1976 has been influenced by him in some way. There hasn’t been a day that has gone by in the years since that I have not used something I learned from Sandy in my life, either as composer, teacher, and writer, as I am today, or as a book editor and publisher, as I made my living in the 1990s. The development of project management skills and powers of self-initiative that I learned working with Sandy have proven crucial for what I have accomplished in life so far. Reflecting back over the years to try and put it in a nutshell, I see that the great lesson I learned from him is that it isn’t the destination in life that is important but the journey: Music is
