Alexander Goehr awarded The Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collection

The Ivors Academy said “From his time at the Royal Manchester College of Music where he co-formed the hugely influential New Music Manchester Group. To his time at Cambridge University; Goehr has been a consistent force for innovation and discourse in contemporary classical music.”

The Academy continued saying “his decades of consistently high-quality compositions define a master of the art in classical music in all settings large and chamber, operatic and symphonic”.

The Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collection recognises an exceptional body of classical works. In presenting the award to Alexander Goehr the Academy said his remarkable music has defined its own significance for the past 70 years.

Alexander Goehr, composer and teacher, was born in Berlin in 1932. He studied in Manchester at the Royal Manchester College of Music with Richard Hall – where together with Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies and John Ogdon he formed the New Music Manchester Group – and in Paris with Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod.

Goehr worked for the BBC in the early ’60s during which time he formed the Music Theatre Ensemble, the first devoted to what has become an established musical form.

Goehr has written a substantial body of works including five operas. Through chamber music, Goehr gains an unprecedented rhythmic and harmonic immediacy, while his music remains ever permeable by the music and imagery of other times and places. He is one of NMC's most-released composers.

Other NMC composers were also recognised at the Awards, with Alex Paxton's piece Sometimes Voices winning the Small Chamber Composition prize, Martin Suckling's This Departing Landscape being nominated as best Large Scale Composition, and Tansy Davies' Nightingales: Ultra-Deep Field being nominated in the Small Chamber Composition Category. 

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