The Roberto Gerhard Companion

The Roberto Gerhard Companion. Edited by Monty Adkins and Michael Russ. Burlington, VT Ashgate, 2013. 374pp (hardcover). Musical illustrations, Index. ISBN: 978-14094-4515-9. $144.95 (available also as ebk-PDF and ebk-PUB) 'A composer,' Gerhard once wrote, 'needs grace (inspiration), guts, intellect, madness; and systems are a sine qua non, because the intellect can only work, only take grip, when confronted by a system.' Noted writer on contemporary music Malcolm MacDonald included this salient quote in his article on Gerhard for Grove Music Online. It applies to almost every aspect of Roberto Gerhard's career and life, as he developed his personal approaches to systems of musical tradition, serial composition, and cultural identity. This composer is not well-known to the general art music consuming public for many of the same reasons he did not achieve wider recognition during his lifetime. His music broke boundaries and definitions, but that was not scandalous in the way of Cage. He was a native of Catalonia, a devoted researcher and promoter of music of that region, a student of Granados, Pedrell, and Schoenberg, and, given thirty-one years of living in England (moving after Franco's 1939 victory in the Spanish Civil War), rightly claimed as a British composer. He wrote incidental music for numerous theater and radio productions, arranged Spanish-themed music for the BBC Concert Orchestra, integrated serial composition with his love of folk music traditions, and developed one of the first electronic/tape music studios in Britain in his home in Cambridge. Since his death in 1970 at age 73, his reputation and scholarly interest have grown. The first International Roberto Gerhard Conference was held at the University of Huddersfield in 2010 and the second was in Barcelona in 2012 and the third in 2013 in Madrid. This book grows from and reflects recent developments in Gerhard scholarship. It builds on substantial roots, which include MacDonalds' biographical article in Grove Music Online, Joaquim Homs' Robert Gerhard y su obra (1987, and in English translation, 2000), Gerhards' own writings in Spanish and English, and Meirion Bowen (ed.) Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings (2000). Searches in RILM and other indices indicate the bulk of publications about Gerhard's work in English, Spanish, German, French, and Russian occurring from 1995. Several thousand YouTube videos of Gerhard's works evince also this growing interest (many accompanied by art work by his friend Miro). The book is organized very well, with a clear structure that invites the reader into its content. Scholars from the UK, Spain, and the US contribute detailed yet readable examinations of the music and aspects of Gerhard's professional relationships. The first four chapters are concerned with his approach early on in dealing with the Catalan heritage and integration of that as he matured as a composer. The next six chapters discuss his work in serial composition and significant incidental music scores. The last three focus on his electronic music and last works. …