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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2011
1 Wood, Hugh, ‘Serenade in B’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 March 2008, pp. 3–5Google Scholar .
2 See the letters to the Times Literary Supplement by Richard Taruskin, 4 and 25 April 2008 (both p. 6), and the response to the former by Peter Williams, 18 April 2008, p. 6.
3 Taruskin, letter to Times Literary Supplement, 4 April 2008, p. 6.
4 Wood, letter to Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 2008, p. 6.
5 McVeagh, Diana, Elgar the Music Maker (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007)Google Scholar .
6 Wood, ‘Serenade in B’, 5.
7 Taruskin, letter to Times Literary Supplement, 4 April 2008, p. 6.
8 Griffiths, Paul, New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s (London: Faber Music, 1985), 10Google Scholar .
9 Blake, Andrew, The Land Without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 4–5Google Scholar . Elsewhere Blake notes more negatively that the 1950s to the 1970s was a period in which ‘the music of a very few was increasingly imposed on an unwilling many’ (62).
10 Griffiths, New Sounds, New Personalities, 9.
11 Fanning, David, ‘Such Distant Memories’, The Independent, 6 March 1993Google Scholar .
12 The term ‘British modernism’ – at least when applied solely to the 1930s generation of composers – is perhaps now somewhat controversial. A growing body of scholarship is dedicated to the exploration of pre-Second World War responses to the challenges posed by modernism. See, for instance, Doctor, Jennifer, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–36: Shaping a Nation's Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar , and Riley, Matthew (ed.), British Music and Modernism 1895–1960 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010)Google Scholar .
13 Unsurprisingly, the Manchester School dominates the literature. Collections about the music and writings of Alexander Goehr include Northcott, Bayan (ed.), The Music of Alexander Goehr: Interviews and Articles (London: Schott, 1980)Google Scholar ; Boynton, Neil, ‘Alexander Goehr: a Checklist of His Writings and Broadcast Talks’, Music Analysis 11/2–3 (1992), 201–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Goehr, Alexander, Finding the Key: Selected Writings, ed. Puffett, Derrick (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)Google Scholar ; Latham, and Alison (ed.), Sing, Ariel: Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr's Seventieth Birthday (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)Google Scholar . Davies's music has been explored in, among others, Pruslin, Stephen (ed.), Peter Maxwell Davies: Studies from Two Decades, Tempo Booklet no. 2 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1979)Google Scholar ; Griffiths, Paul, Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Robson, 1982)Google Scholar ; Bayliss, Colin, The Music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Highgate, 1991)Google Scholar ; and (ed.), Richard McGregor, Perspectives on Peter Maxwell Davies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)Google Scholar . Those on Birtwistle include two books by Hall, Michael, Harrison Birtwistle (London: Robson Books, 1984)Google Scholar and Harrison Birtwistle in Recent Years (London: Robson Books, 1998); Cross, Jonathan, Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music (London: Faber and Faber, 2000)Google Scholar ; and Adlington, Robert, The Music of Harrison Birtwistle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar .
14 Bowen, Meirion, ‘David Matthews at 50’, The Guardian, 10 April 1993Google Scholar .
15 Such a stance might appear to contradict my statement that ‘Wood's cosmopolitanism has always been significantly different to that of the Manchester group’; The Music of Hugh Wood (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1. Such distinctions are relative, however. As I shall argue in this review article, there are many commonalities of thinking to be found in the writings of Wood, Goehr, and Davies, even if the individual ways in which they realize such ideas musically differ widely.
16 Accounts of Goehr's education can be found in a clutch of essays in the collection Finding the Key: ‘A Letter to Boulez’ (1–26), ‘Manchester Years’ (27–41), ‘The Messiaen Class’ (42–57), and ‘Finding the Key’ (272–303).
17 The fullest biography of Davies to date is Mike Seabrook's Max: the Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Victor Gollancz, 1994). For sketches of Wood's formative experiences and his subsequent career, see Venn, The Music of Hugh Wood.
18 See also, for instance, Jones, Nicholas, ‘Peter Maxwell Davies in the 1950s: a Conversation’, Tempo 254 (2010), 11–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
19 Although this sense of being on the outside defines in part Wood's relationship with British musical institutions, one ought to be wary of making as emphatic a claim as ‘Wood prefers to remain in most ways alienated’; Whittall, ‘Cold Comfort Balm’, Musical Times 149 (Autumn 2008), 116–18 (118).
20 In ‘Staking Out the Territory’, dating from 1973, Wood writes ‘until recently I would have [said] “I’m a University Lecturer”' (9). At this point he had just left the University of Liverpool, and elsewhere in the volume (41) we hear of his musical experiences there. The 1980 article ‘Teachers and Pupils’ (14–16) relates to Wood's teaching at Cambridge University, where he was appointed Lecturer in Music and Fellow of Churchill College in 1977. Wood had earlier been Crumb Research Fellow at Glasgow University (1966–70).
21 Although Wood does not specify this in the text, the summer school in question was the first held at Bryanston in 1948 (it was relocated to Dartington five years later).
22 Hugh Wood, ‘On Music of Conviction … and an Enduring Friendship’, in Sing, Ariel, ed. Latham, 327–30 (328).
23 Goehr and Wood knew Glock from (among other places) the Dartington Summer Schools; Glock was also editor of the influential journal The Score.
24 Goehr, Alexander, ‘The Survival of the Symphony: 3. Past and Present’, The Listener, 3 December 1987, pp. 25–30 (30)Google Scholar .
25 Davies, ‘Will Serious Music Become Extinct?’ (Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture, 24 April 2005), <http://www.royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/?page=lectures/rpsLectures/> (accessed 03 February 2009).
26 Noting the wide range of composers included in programmes during Glock's regime, Goehr has stated that ‘William Glock did as much for Haydn and Schubert as he did for Stravinsky and Boulez’; ‘Guest Editorial’, Musical Times 135 (1994), 610–11 (611).
27 As I argue below, the models at first were Stravinsky and Schoenberg, coloured by particular responses to older historical traditions. Of course, such a generalization overlooks the specific ways in which composers responded to these sources, and is not intended to mask the ways in which the trajectories of individual careers radiated out from this starting point: these too are touched on later in this article.
28 Whittall, Arnold, ‘British Music in the Modern World’, in The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: the Twentieth Century, ed. Banfield, Stephen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 9–26 (18)Google Scholar .
29 I have already noted Wood and Davies's negative encounters with British musical institutions in the 1950s (which no doubt contributed to the tenor of their arguments); Goehr's reminiscences from the vantage-point of 1990 were of a gentler order, but they still reveal the inherent conservatism of that time (see Goehr, ‘Manchester Years’).
30 Davies, Peter Maxwell, ‘The Young British Composer’, The Score 16 (1956), 84–85 (85)Google Scholar . Davies has recently commented on the combative style of his early articles; the aggressiveness of the tone reflects his disgust that ‘the establishment […] was blocking so much that was interesting’ (Jones, ‘Peter Maxwell Davies in the 1950s’, 14). Retrospect also appears to have softened the stance towards national and folk music – ‘I didn't feel so antagonistic towards those writing in the “established” musical world, such as Ben Britten or Vaughan Williams’ (16) – though, of course, the composer of Orkney Wedding with Sunrise could today hardly say otherwise.
31 Davies, Peter Maxwell, ‘Problems of a British Composer Today’, The Listener, 8 October 1959, pp. 563–564 (563)Google Scholar .
32 Wood, Hugh, ‘English Contemporary Music’, in European Music in the 20th Century, ed. Hartog, Howard, 2nd edn (London: Pelican Books, 1961), 145–170 (170)Google Scholar . This essay does not appear in Staking out the Territory; comments made in certain articles included in the collection indicate that the author has distanced himself from at least some of the opinions expressed in it. Of course, the distance Davies felt to his immediate past may have been overstated at this time too: see note 30.
33 Alexander Goehr lists some of the musical reasons for this shift in taste and the emerging prominence of modernism in his ‘Guest Editorial’; the roots of this shift are located in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
34 Wood, ‘On Music of Conviction’, 328.
35 Holloway, Robin, ‘The 1960s’, in Essays and Diversions II (London: Continuum, 2007), 235–236 (235)Google Scholar .
36 Goehr, ‘Manchester Years’, 32.
37 Goehr suggests that ‘[t]he search for self-identification, for a tradition within which to work, is a recurring motif in the consciousness of the English artist’; ‘Tippett at Sixty’, Musical Times, 106 (1965), 22–4 (22). In the same year Davies suggests that such a search may well be characteristic of a number of cultures, for the young American composer ‘does not know which way to turn to define himself against his inherited tradition, owing to the subtle nature of a tradition that has it “both ways”’; Davies, ‘The Young Composer in America’, Tempo 72, 2–6 (5).
38 Whether or not this ‘prevailing aesthetic’ was an accurate reflection of Darmstadt at this time is historically but not artistically relevant: it was crucial for the self-identification of many British artists at the time; see Contemporary Music Review 26/1 (2007): ‘Other Darmstadts’, ed. Paul Attinello, Christopher Fox, and Martin Iddon, and in particular Christopher Fox's ‘Darmstadt and the Institutionalisation of Modernism’, 115–23.
39 Whittall, ‘British Music’, 11.
40 Whittall, ‘British Music’, 19. Whittall's comments make most sense when viewed from the vantage-point of the present. During the 1960s a composer like Davies would have seemed to offer far less ‘resistance to radicalised modernity’ than his synthesis of traditional and progressive trends from the 1970s onwards would now have us believe. See also Robin Holloway's description of the ‘continuing or reconstructed mainstream, remarkably wide and various, but all of it cognizant of, and taking […] some consequences from the radicalism that precedes it, and by no means necessarily averse to that with which it is simultaneous’; ‘An Overview: Twentieth-Century (Lite) Blues’, in Essays and Diversions II (London: Continuum, 2007), 239–53 (243).
41 Whittall, ‘British Music’, 19.
42 Whittall, ‘British Music’, 11.
43 For instance, not so long before, when composers of the 1930s generation were in their infancy, it is likely that Britten had been prevented from studying with Berg on the grounds that the latter was ‘not a good influence’; see Britten, , Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, vol. 1: 1923–39, ed. Mitchell, Donald and Reed, Philip (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 395Google Scholar .
44 Robin Holloway, whilst acknowledging Keller's important role in British musical life in the post-war years, offers a far less hagiographic portrait; ‘Keller's Causes’, in Essays and Diversions: 1963–2003 (London: Continuum, 2003), 404–13.
45 See, for instance, Stradling, Robert and Hughes, Meirion, The English Musical Renaissance 1860–1940: Construction and Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar .
46 Compare this with Dai Griffiths's somewhat more caustic reading of ‘grammar schoolboy music’, which ‘finds its legitimation in music history, continuing a deep obsession in British musical thinking, crucially mediated through post-war America, with the music of middle Europe’; Griffiths, , ‘On Grammar Schoolboy Music’, in Music, Culture, and Society: a Reader, ed. Scott, Derek B. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 143–145 (144)Google Scholar .
47 William Glock's recognition that ‘we are beginning to see that it is Schoenberg and Stravinsky, above all, who have defined the crisis of contemporary music and of the contemporary spirit without fear or compromise’ (‘Comment’, The Score 6 (1952), 3) has been described by Whittall (‘British Music’, 18) as ‘the seeds of a modernist manifesto’; the echoes of this statement resound in Wood's comments.
48 Gloag, Kenneth, Nicholas Maw: Odyssey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)Google Scholar . Writing of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gloag suggests that ‘the avant-garde, and its own historicization through the ageing process, also became something the young composer could intentionally and constructively react against. As Maw later recalled: “The particular style that prevailed when I was beginning in the 1950s – the Darmstadt version of the post-Viennese school – was one that rejected too much of the past for my temperament”’ (6).
49 Davies, ‘Problems of a British Composer Today’, 564.
50 Alexander Goehr, ‘Modern Music and Its Society’, in Finding the Key, 77–101 (95).
51 Gloag, Maw: Odyssey, 2.
52 Davies, Peter Maxwell, ‘Sets or Series’, The Listener, 22 February 1968, p. 250Google Scholar .
53 See the essays ‘Thoughts on a Modern Quartet’ (17–20) and ‘May I Quote You?’ (21–3).
54 Goehr, ‘The Survival of the Symphony: 3. Past and Present’, 25.
55 Goehr, ‘The Survival of the Symphony: 3. Past and Present’, 26.
56 Davies, ‘Will Serious Music Become Extinct?’. In this lecture he returns to a topic that he first raised, in strikingly similar terms, in ‘The Young British Composer’, 84–5.
57 Whittall, ‘British Music’, 21.
58 Griffiths, New Sounds, New Personalities, 10.
59 See, for instance, the almost contemporaneous articles by Northcott, Bayan, ‘Alexander Goehr: The Recent Music (II)’, Tempo 125 (1978), 12–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and Davies, Peter Maxwell, ‘Symphony’, Tempo 124 (1978), 2–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
60 See the essay ‘Frank Bridge and the Land Without Music’ (34–9).
61 Davies, Peter Maxwell, ‘Pax Orcadiensis’, Tempo 119 (1976), 20–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
62 Davies, ‘The Young British Composer’, 84. We encounter again here the complaints about conservative institutions and the lack of structural or technical knowledge promoted in such institutions.
63 Davies, ‘Will Serious Music Become Extinct?’.
64 Nevertheless Goehr has suggested, in a similar vein to Davies, that ‘[i]n the education of young children there need not be any division between performing and composing’; Goehr, ‘The Survival of the Symphony: 3. Past and Present’, 26.
65 Goehr, Alexander, ‘The Study of Music at University – 5’, Musical Times 114 (1973), 588–590CrossRefGoogle Scholar (589–90). The invocation of ‘listening well’ resonates with Wood's concept of the ‘honest listener’, discussed below.
66 Davies, ‘Will Serious Music Become Extinct?’.
67 Richard Wigmore, ‘Hugh Wood’, Cambridge Alumni Magazine (Lent Term 1999), 40–41 (41).
68 Goehr, ‘Tippett at Sixty’, 22.
69 Alexander Goehr, ‘The Problem of Renewal’, The Listener, 10 September 1981, p. 263.
70 Holloway, ‘The 1960s’, 235. See also note 9.
71 Both composers had in fact written on the subject before: Davies offered a somewhat pessimistic contribution to a symposium on the future of the symphony orchestra, published as ‘The Orchestra is Becoming a Museum’, in ‘The Symphony Orchestra – Has it a Future?’, Composer 37 (1970), 2–5, and Goehr had advocated the ‘[r]efinding [of] the values of the old’ in his ‘Modern Music and Society’ of 1979, reprinted in Finding the Key, 77–101. Equally indicative is the use of traditional formal and generic models in the music of these composers, effecting what Kenneth Gloag has described as a ‘generic contract between past and present’ (Gloag, Maw: Odyssey, 12).
72 In a similar vein, Wood found the quotation of the Eroica Symphony in Strauss's Metamorphosen to be ‘a lament not for a regime but for a whole culture, for a way of life and, in particular, a musical world that Strauss saw passing away in front of his very eyes and ears. It's a tribute to the Past’ (21).
73 Arnold Whittall has drawn a distinction between Wood's modernism, which he claims ‘is ultimately more indebted in ethos to composers like Franz Schmidt, Hans Pfitzner, and his mentor Mátyás Seiber than to his own more radical contemporaries’ such as Goehr, Davies, and Birtwistle; ‘English Orthodoxies’, Musical Times 149 (Winter 2008), 97–102 (100). The difference, Whittall contends, is that ‘Wood's way of dealing musically with the authentic feelings that arose when the loss of “idealism and optimism” was accepted was surely to counter modernism with classicism, rather than to use modernism as a stick with which to beat the unreal expectations and over-optimistic integration of classicism’ (100).
74 Wood, whom Christopher Wintle has described as being ‘gifted with special powers of analytic insight’, directs his analytical powers primarily towards structural and motivic features, though without recourse to the extended Formenlehre terminology used by Schoenberg and his followers over the last century; Alexander Goehr with Christopher Wintle, ‘The Composer and His Idea of Theory: a Dialogue’, in Finding the Key, 236–71 (268).
75 As so often in Wood's writings, categorical statements such as these are immediately called into question; here Wood notices that Berg's music actively resists such listening strategies by virtue of its formal ambiguity. This in itself tells us much about the character of the String Quartet Op. 3, albeit in negative terms. Ultimately, however, Wood still offers a series of ‘landmarks’, even if they do not always correspond to traditional formal markers; alternative approaches to listening are not considered.
76 See also Venn, The Music of Hugh Wood, 16–19.
77 For other ways of thinking about the listening experience without necessarily falling back on ‘traditional’ values see Cook, Nicholas, Music, Imagination and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar ; Fineberg, Joshua, Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Music Through a Composer's Ears (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar ; Ross, Alex, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2007)Google Scholar ; and Kramer, Lawrence, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Johnson, Julian, in Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , comes close to Wood's concept of the ‘honest’ listener by suggesting that the ethical value of ‘classical music’ resides in the modes of thinking it embodies, though he locates such values in the music rather than in the choices made by the listener.
78 Eight of William Scott's paintings are reproduced on colour plates in Staking Out the Territory.
79 On the technique underpinning Wood's music see Venn, The Music of Hugh Wood. One might speculate on other reasons for his reticence – whether motivated by a desire to keep such things private or to help promote the humanist aspects of his music – but it should be noted that Wood rarely denies the importance of technique: his early essay, ‘Viewpoint, 1954’ (3–4), ends with a paean to it. Rather, one suspects, he thinks it should be self-explanatory by virtue of its expressive impact, and thus unnecessary to discuss outside of the ‘workshop’.
80 Boretz, Benjamin and Cone, Edward T. (eds.), Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968)Google Scholar . The review originally appeared as Wood, ‘Antipodes’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 October 1969.
81 For striking examples of provocation mixed with lamentation see the essays ‘Beethoven’ (24–33, esp. 31–2) and ‘A Photograph of Brahms’ (44–63, esp. 51).
82 Venn, The Music of Hugh Wood, 225–7.