The death of Alexander Goehr at the age of 92 brings to a close what was perhaps the most important chapter in British music in the second half of the 20th century. If Goehr’s own music has come to seem less significant than his importance as a teacher of some of the leading British composers of subsequent generations, then his role in creating what became a genuinely new force in British music after the second world war cannot be overestimated.
Together with his fellow students at Manchester University and the Royal Manchester College of Music, composers Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, trumpeter and later conductor Elgar Howarth and pianist and composer John Ogdon, Goehr was a founder of the New Music Manchester group, which rapidly became a distinctive, progressive force in what was the generally parochial and conservative world of British music in the early 1950s.
