Musical chairs

Musical Times, Summer 1999

In the modern world, as is witnessed in the prolonged creative vitality of Messiaen and Tippett - and Elliott Carter, still composing at ninety plus - the status of late works as an artistic category is more prominent than ever...

THE WORLD'S first music degrees are recorded as having been conferred at Cambridge in 1463-64, and among those academic posts prized by musicians in the United Kingdom, that of the Cambridge Professorship is perhaps the most highly regarded and historically most august. By tradition an appointment often reserved for composers, it has been held this century by Charles Villiers Stanford (1887-1924), Charles Wood (1924-26), Patrick Hadley (1946-63) and Robin Orr (1965-76). Though remembered in different ways for a variety of talents, the lustre they each have added to the post is fit continuation of the line of distinguished predecessors that includes Sterndale Bennett (1856-75) and Maurice Greene (1730-53), not to mention the unfortunate (and unsalaried) first Professor, Nicholas Stiggins (1684-1705), Master of the King's Band of Musick.

The recent appointment of Roger Parker to the Chair to succeed its previous incumbent, Alexander Goehr, is therefore a suitable opportunity both for celebration of the retiring Professor's achievement and for pause for reflection to consider past and future. The occasion of Goehr's leaving was itself marked from January to March by a notable festival of nine concerts devoted to his music, that of his eminent colleagues Robin Holloway and Hugh Wood, and works of composers of a younger generation. This was entirely appropriate, for Goehr's record not only as a creative figure himself, but also as a teacher and inspirer of younger composers is unique. Since becoming Cambridge Professor of Music in 1976, he has written two major operas, Behold the sun (1981-84) and Arianna (1994-95), the orchestral Deux etudes (1981), Symphony with chaconne (1986), Colossos or panic (1992), Schlussgesang (1996), the cantata Sing, Ariel (1990), and many instrumental pieces. As a teacher, he has numbered among his Cambridge students Thomas Ades, Julian Anderson and George Benjamin, names that are now familiar to the public, and to which can be added a roster of former pupils that includes - in a by-no-means comprehensive list - Anthony Gilbert, Robin Holloway and Roger Smalley.

Indeed, in his role as mentor and guide, Goehr has taken up something of a family vocation. His father's teacher was none other than Arnold Schoenberg; and Walter Goehr himself, through his pioneering performances of new repertoire both contemporary and pre-classical, did much to instill an awareness of the broader boundaries of the art in the minds of a postwar audience hungry for discovery. It is a task that his son has continued through his radio talks, lectures and writings, a contribution to thinking about music which, for the last four decades, has proved no less inspirational to composers and specialists as to many seriously-minded music lovers whose paths have never taken them inside the walls of university departments.

The subject of education - how and what an aspiring composer should be taught, and the wider context in which the values of our complex musical culture are transmitted and preserved - not unnaturally forms an important strand in his corpus of essays and lectures. Its presence is keenly felt in his selected writings, published last year as Finding the key, and containing the essence of his own experience as composer and teacher, and as student of Olivier Messiaen. Today, when education has never been more topical, and when fashion turns a critical gaze on time-honoured institutions, Cambridge, with its colleges and organ scholars, might appear an apple in the eye of our (ostensible) reformers. It is not the least of the university's many advantages that Goehr's prescient reforms of its music syllabus, conducted in the 1970s and SOs, must surely have defused the bulk of any censure directed towards this target in terms of ivory-towered outmodedness.

WITH no less foresight, he has been among the most perceptive commentators on our recent musical culture, asking questions that cut to the very root of prevailing aesthetic dilemmas. In its 150th anniversary year, The Musical Times was pleased to publish his editorial on the politics of contemporary musical taste, at a time when they were obscured by even more than the usual journalistic smog. In the present issue, we now publish Alexander Goehrs last lecture as Cambridge Professor of Music, in which he takes as his subject the nature of lateness applied to a musical canon and its creator. In a purely actuarial sense, this is not a new subject, as the lives of Byrd, Haydn and Schutz remind us. But in the modern world, as is witnessed in the prolonged creative vitality of Messiaen and Tippett - and Elliott Carter, still composing at ninety plus - the status of late works as an artistic category is more prominent than ever, longevity nicely balancing, as it were, the prestige that once belonged exclusively to infant genius.