Alexander Goehr

Alexander Goehr
Alexander Goehr – Jerusalem, 2007
Born	(1932-08-10) 10 August 1932 (age 91) Berlin, Germany
Children	Lydia Goehr, Julia Goehr, Clare Goehr
Parent(s)	Walter Goehr Laelia Goehr
Academic background
Alma mater	Royal Northern College of Music
Academic work
Institutions	University of Cambridge

Peter Alexander Goehr (German: [ɡøːɐ̯]; born 10 August 1932) is an English composer and academic.

Goehr was born in Berlin in 1932, the son of the conductor and composer Walter Goehr, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. In his early twenties he emerged as a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers. In 1955–56 he joined Olivier Messiaen's masterclass in Paris. Although in the early sixties Goehr was considered a leader of the avant-garde, his oblique attitude to modernism—and to any movement or school whatsoever—soon became evident. In a sequence of works including the Piano Trio (1966), the opera Arden Must Die (1966), the music-theatre piece Triptych (1968–70), the orchestral Metamorphosis/Dance (1974), and the String Quartet No. 3 (1975–76), Goehr's personal voice was revealed, arising from a highly individual use of the serial method and a fusion of elements from his double heritage of Schoenberg and Messiaen. Since the luminous 'white-note' Psalm IV setting of 1976, Goehr has urged a return to more traditional ways of composing, using familiar materials as objects of musical speculation, in contrast to the technological priorities of much present-day musical research.^[1]