It is with deep sadness that we share the news that Alexander Goehr, renowned composer and teacher, died on Monday 26th August at his home in Cambridgeshire, aged 92.

Goehr wrote a collaborative book with his former pupil Jack Van Zandt last year, titled Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life, published by Carcanet. The book was reviewed in The Spectator, where Fiona Sampson wrote, 'Composing a Life - Goehr's collaboration with Jack van Zandt, the American composer-musicologist and his former pupil - is a fascinating study of musical transmission... The usual musician'€™s reminiscences, little more than glorified name-dropping, are here replaced by a serious dialogue about musical influence, that mystery driving even a creative radical such as Goehr. Read this book if you care at all about how culture is transmitted and transformed.'

Alexander ('Sandy') Goehr was a British composer and Emeritus Professor of Music at Cambridge University. He was born into a Jewish musical family in Berlin in 1932. His father, Walter Goehr, was a composer and conductor, and a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. His mother, Laelia, trained as a pianist at the Kyiv Conservatory.

Goehr moved to England in 1933 when his father accepted a position as conductor there in the wake of Hitler coming to power. He was educated in Britain and spent the war in Buckinghamshire. At the Royal College of Music in Manchester, where he attended Richard Hall’s classes, he formed the "Manchester School," a group of young composers and musicians—including Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, and pianist John Ogdon—who specialized in the performance of new music.

He was introduced to Olivier Messiaen's music when his father conducted the first British performance of Turangalîla in 1953. He subsequently went to study with Messiaen in Paris, and attended the Darmstadt Festival courses where he met and made friends with many composers, including Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono.

He came to prominence in England in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a radical exponent of serial music. He composed more than one hundred major works, including operas, orchestral and chamber pieces, and music for film, television, dance, and theatre.

Goehr was one of Europe's most important music educators. He was a lecturer at Southampton University, Professor of Music at Leeds University and finally the Professor of Music at Cambridge University for more than twenty-five years. He taught many successful composers, theorists, and musicologists. Over the course of his life he wrote and lectured extensively, and his works are performed all over the world. His music was published by Schott.

His passing is a loss for both those who knew him, and the wider classical music community. A comprehensive obituary has been shared by Schott Music.