Professor Alexander (Sandy) Goehr: 1932–2024

“It is just about the last thing I could have imagined.”  Anyone who knew or studied with composer Alexander Goehr – known to all as ‘Sandy’ – will have heard him repeat this phrase, or variants of it, many times.   He was referring to becoming the Professor of Music at Cambridge University.  He never entirely got used to the idea of himself as an academic.  “I didn’t get any degree, ever” he explained.  He studied, if you can call it that, at the Manchester College of Music – now the Royal Northern College – which offered no degrees or diplomas to its composers in the 1950s.  He and his close friend Harrison Birtwistle once went to a single token exam (on theory of some sort).  They both left after a few minutes.  And that was that.   The truth seems to be that Sandy taught at the Manchester College – at least, that is how his fellow students remembered it.

To others, however, Sandy seemed totally at home in Cambridge.  The eminent Hungarian composer György Ligeti, who was friends with Sandy for many years, beamed when I mentioned I was going to study with him in a couple of months.  “Oh, he is such a cultivated man and oh those beautiful rooms in his college.  So civilized. You will have a good time.”  I did.  Pierre Boulez said something similar to a friend of mine at the mention of Sandy’s name.  The warmth of their reactions is not entirely explained by that fact that both Boulez and Ligeti were awarded Honorary Doctorates in Sandy’s time at Cambridge.  “That was just commonsense,” Sandy remarked, “they’re two leading cultural figures in music, so of course you give them an award.  They’re high achievers.” The plain fact is that Sandy was regarded very affectionately and held in high esteem by the international musical community, and for 25 years leading composers, performers, musicologists and cultural commentators beat a path to his rooms either at the Faculty of Music or in Trinity Hall to absorb his wise counsel.

In the late 1980s, when I was a student, the two most popular teachers for a young UK composer were John Lambert at the RCM, and Sandy Goehr in Cambridge.  I had studied very happily with Lambert but after 5 years was keen for a change of view so in May 1990 I went up to Trinity Hall for interview with Sandy, handing in my scores in advance.  When I entered his main room in the College, the first impression was of light flooding through the two huge windows behind his chair.   It was mid May and the room was radiant.  Sandy was examining my scores as I entered.  He looked up, smiled at me and said “Yes, well you’ve an excellent technique – unsurprisingly for a Lambert pupil, John’s always been a fine teacher.”  Sandy invited me to sit down, told me I had a place if I wanted one, and we talked as colleagues over a huge range of music and culture for around 2 hours nonstop.  “Will you come here?” he enquired.  I said I would.  It was one of the best decisions I made.

Sandy opened so many doors – not just musical ones – that it would be fruitless to paraphrase.  His lessons were generous in duration and wonderfully enlightening.  If he did not look too often at the music I was writing, no matter: Lambert had scrutinised every note, so I had some technical know-how.  What I lacked was any cultural perspective on what I or anyone else was composing, and that Sandy provided in abundance.  Often as not one was pointed towards the philosophy of Husserl, to D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form or to the paintings of Francis Bacon as to the music of this or that composer.  Sandy had a natural tendency to link up people from disparate backgrounds, and this typified his entire handling of the Cambridge professorship.

Having decided to ‘compose anew’ Monteverdi’s lost opera Arianna, he promptly engaged the collaboration of the Cambridge Professor of Italian Literature Pat Boyde and a US Monteverdi expert Daniel Jaffe.  After intensive work with both, Arianna à la Goehr was premiered to full houses at Covent Garden, immediately followed by what one has to call a gala performance in the resonant halls of the Cambridge University Senate House.  This grand occasion was carefully publicised to create maximum impact.  In these somewhat jaded times, it is worth recalling that the audience for this Senate House performance of Arianna was star-studded: one saw around 30 leading composers and musicologists, every major UK music critic, and a galaxy of what we then referred to as ‘the Great and the Good’ – notably their leader-in-chief, Sir Isaiah Berlin (it must have been one of his final public appearances, as he died not long afterwards).  Rarely, if ever, did Cambridge University witness such a gathering at a performance by its Professor of Music.  Sandy may have felt a bit out of place in Cambridge, but he knew very well how to make the most of a great opportunity, and did so with panache.  By the time he left, the Music Faculty at Cambridge was firmly on the international musical map to an unprecedented degree.

Sandy’s future as Professor in Cambridge seemed inevitable to fellow students back in his early Manchester days.  As is well known, Sandy was at the centre of what became known as ‘the Manchester School’ – a group of student composers and performers advocating modern music, most of whom went on to be world famous.  That they came together at all was, by all accounts, wholly Sandy’s doing.  Having done some sort of prosletysing and/or recruiting activities for a young Socialist Zionist organisation (who had sent him to Manchester in the first place), Sandy was well versed in activism. So when that political organisation threatened to send him to work as a farmer in Israel, Sandy demurred and stayed in Manchester to study music, transferring his activism to this area instead.  He was remarkably effective.  According to the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, whom Sandy recruited to the Manchester New Music Group, Sandy was the only real teacher he ever had in the UK.  “Encountering his mind was absolutely devastating.  Nothing was ever the same for me.  He turned all my pre-conceptions of music inside out and gave me the depth of musical knowledge I’d been lacking.  I could never have got this anywhere else.  I would have been nowhere without that.  It has stayed with me all my life.”  Amongst the other future musical stars discovered by Sandy in Manchester were composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, virtuoso pianist John Ogdon and conductor Elgar Howarth.  In short, musical life in the UK was productively, positively dominated by the Manchester School for the next 70 years.

It is to Trinity Hall’s great credit that it housed, fed and cherished this great composer and key cultural figure from 1976 on.  Unlikely though he always found it, he did fit in.  He was hard working, altruistic and never the least complacent.  In this he was also greatly aided by his very happy marriage to Amira Katz-Goehr, whose innovative scholarship in Chinese literature influenced not a few of Sandy’s later works.  Their cozy home in Swaffham Prior was always open to visitors, often generously lubricated (the Goehr table was never frugal).  In recent years, when so much in the external world has felt unstable, visiting Sandy in Swaffham one felt almost as if one were going to consult the Delphic Oracle.  “The Sage of Swaffham” was his publisher Sally Groves’s affectionate and not inaccurate epithet for him.

It seemed to most of us lucky enough to know Sandy that he would always be there, always be on the end of a phone for advice or a chat, still producing his beautiful music.  Alas those days are over now.   But we should never lose sight of the high cultural standards upheld by Sandy Goehr, nor forget his honesty, his remarkable achievements both as composer and as uniquely active Professor of Music in Cambridge.