27 APRIL 1991, Page 35

Music

The golden age of Glock

Robin Holloway

Areaction to his newly published memoir (Notes in Advance, OUP, £20) shows, the name William Glock still sets off alarms in some quarters, 18 years after his retirement from Controllership of Music at the BBC, the hot seat for his most contro- versial ventures. Why? For following an epoch of provincial mediocrity he effected a transformation in organisation, in profes- sional and artistic standards and in public taste long overdue and so successful that one looks back to 'the Glock years' as a golden age, a worthy continuation of the best aspects of the Third Programme whose spirit inspired it. Nor was this achievement isolated. The self-effacement and brusque manner of his book cannot conceal the fact that virtually everything Sir William touched turned out rich both in intrinsic value and as prognos- tic of fruitful things to come. The one-time organ scholar of Caius College Cambridge, aspiring piano pupil of Schnabel in Berlin, reviewer for the Observer, then Time and Tide and the New Statesman, had from these somewhat peripheral posts built up a sophisticated acquaintance with the leading performers and composers of the day. When the chances came, he was able to ful- fil his wide new opportunities with unique flair.

In 1949 he founded and edited for 12 years The Score, a journal of modern music which rapidly became an indispensable source of information and opinion (some- times violent). Taking over in 1948 the summer school at Bryanston and running its successor at Dartington from 1953 to the late Seventies, he could invite artists of the calibre of Enescu, Boulanger, Elizabeth Schumann, Britten and Pears and the Amadeus quartet (among many others) to perform and give classes in interpretation, and for the composition course composers as eminent as Hindemith, Copland, Carter, Nono, Roberto Gerhard, Stefan Wolpe. True the greatest of all came only 'for the visit'; I remember the aura, on my first week at Dartington as a teenager in 1958, lingering still from Stravinsky's presence the year before. (It was said that the lavato- ry seat from the Master's quarters had been subsequently pinched by an infatuatee whose shamelessness stuck at nothing!) The beauty of the place, the quality and concentration of the concerts, above all the sense of contact with significant currents of new music, make my late-teens recollec- tions of Dartington an intoxication both physical and spiritual. I'm sure it must have been the same for dozens of others, and on the national scale for thousands. For these years, the early Sixties, were the time of Sir William's most renovative work at the BBC, with its month-by-month revelation of music that had been largely overlooked (in every sense) — Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, the neo-classic and recent Stravinsky; above all what Pierre Boulez did with Debussy, Webern, Bartok and his own music before his conducting became routine, clarity yielding to coldness and pre- cision to fuss, adventure to predictability.

Perhaps this time remains Sir William's high point, but his energetic usefulness continued unabated after the BBC post, `The killing has begun. Audrey's mysteriously vanished.' then Dartington, came to an end. There was a distinguished decade from 1975 in command of the Bath Festival, the editor- ship of a small but select series of books on music, much teaching, coaching and adjudi- cating ( his account of chairing the jury at two contentious sessions of the Leeds piano competition makes piquant reading) and an active and efficacious involvement in planning contemporary music in London well into the 1980s.

And Haydn into the 1990s! In spite of his reputation it is the classical masters whose names ring most often through these mem- oirs. As well as his beloved Haydn (`after 60 years of playing and listening . . . hardly any of his mature works grows stale or loses its capacity to astonish and delight') there is the Beethoven and Schubert of his revered master Schnabel, Enescu's Bach- playing at Bryanston and the complete Bach Cantatas broadcast on the music pro- gramme (a letter from Edinburgh urged that this series, like painting the Forth Bridge, should recycle in perpetuity; but a music-loving cab driver in London ditched his fare in mid-journey on discovering that its goal was to conduct two more of these hated bores). A whole chapter is devoted to Mozart. Nor should one forget the pre- scient pioneering of 'old music' (as it used to be called) whenever he had the opportu- nity.

Sir William's love of these touchstones — from Byrd to Debussy — shines forth from behind his functional prose. The question remains: did he love the moderns with which his name, for praise or execra- tion, is still mainly associated? Perhaps it was simply an alertness for the coming thing and an aptitude for catching it and serving it up well-dressed. Here again one must record the success rate: Messiaen, Carter, Boulez, Gerhard, Birtwistle (not to mention sterling work on behalf of Britten and Tippett from an earlier time before either was a household name). Whatever reservations might be held about aspects of some of these figures, there is no doubt that they are all winners. A note of person- al enthusiasm informs the portraits of Gerhard and Carter, and the main part of the book ends, before the peroration, with a kind of testimonial for Harrison Birtwistle. Elsewhere warmth is scant; the impression is of duty accomplished rather than pleasure gratified. Which recalls the negative aspect of the aesthetic, what it missed or heard and abjured in very differ- ent kinds of good music old and new that didn't fit its stylistic prescriptions. The pos- itive and negative tastes soon hardened into established mental positions which are still very much with us.

But no complaints. Only those with chips on their shoulder and grudges to grind can fail to see in William Glock a devoted ser- vant of music who made a marvellous thing of the possibilities entrusted to him, to the incalculable enrichment of the musical cul- ture of his time.