ABSTRACT

The very nature of Alexander Goehr’s ensemble, with its two clarinets and percussion, suggests a folk band, perhaps the one in the nineteenth-century photograph that inspired the Concerto for Eleven. There is a further complicating factor in the case of the Goehr which raises the structure to an even more rarified level of abstraction. Commenting on his modelling technique, Goehr speaks of his concern with ‘the projection of material and structural device in time. As Julian Rushton has written, ‘Goehr, like the later Schoenberg, conceives his work to be a diversification of an original idea, or, as he prefers it, “subject”; hence it is monothematic and its development is more akin to fugue than sonata.’ What begins as a ‘contrast’ ends as a progression: the final sentence of Goehr’s Reith lectures – ‘Music is the pursuit of harmony’ – could act as a metaphor for the process involved.