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Donald Macleod discusses with Goehr working at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and his formation of the Music Theatre Ensemble

All this week, Donald Macleod is in conversation with Alexander Goehr at the composer's cottage in a village outside Cambridge. Sandy (as he's universally known) was born in Berlin in 1932, the son of the conductor Walter Goehr and pianist and photographer Laelia Goehr. The family moved to England in 1933. In his early twenties, Sandy became a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers. By the early sixties he was considered a leader of the avant-garde in the UK, but he never committed himself to any movement or school in particular and throughout his life, Sandy has continued to look over his shoulder at the past as much as he has sought new musical horizons of his own. In 1975 he was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he remains Emeritus Professor.

This programme is about the middle years of Sandy's life when he was finding his own unique musical path. He describes the dialogue he had with Pierre Boulez as to whether music at this point in history needed to draw a line under the past and start anew, or should regard itself as part of an ongoing continuum. In the early 1960s he worked for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and then taught at Boston, Yale and Leeds. He formed the Music Theatre Ensemble, the first ensemble devoted to what has become an established musical form.

Das Gesetz der Quadrille (The Law of the Quadrille) - Songs after Kafka, Op 41 (1979)
Susan Kessler (mezzo-soprano), Roger Vignoles (piano)

Paraphrase on the dramatic madrigal Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Monteverdi, Op 28 (1969)
Alan Hacker (clarinet)

Behold the Sun (1985)
London Sinfonietta, Oliver Knussen (conductor)

... a musical offering (JSB 1985)
London Sinfonietta, Oliver Knussen (conductor)

I Squeezed up the Stair - from 'Sing, Ariel', Op 51 (1990)
Lucy Shelton (soprano), Instrumental Ensemble, Oliver Knussen (conductor).