MUSIC

See Also: OPERA; PERIOD MUSIC; POP & ROCK; MENU

Boosey & Hawkes

Boosey & Hawkes is a music publishing company. The Boosey business was founded in the 1790s and the Hawkes one in the 1860s. Both firms developed into being publishers of Classical music and manufacturers of musical instruments. In 1930 the two businesses merged with one another. The new entity suffered from internal faction fighting. The Booseys outlasted the Hawkeses but in their turn were sidelined by their own prot g Ernest Roth, who had developed close friendships with Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky. The situation was complicated by the influence over the business that the composer Sir Benjamin Britten came to exercise. He was championed by the Booseys but, for his part, was capable of turning on them. It was at the knight's prompting that the publishing and manufacturing aspects of the firm were separated from one another. During the 1970s the instruments side of Boosey & Hawkes started to become increasingly marginal. In 2001 the company sold its factory in Edgware. Two years later Boosey & Hawkes Musical Instruments was hived off.

Boosey & Hawkes's museum ended up in the Horniman.

Location: 295 Regent Street, W1B 2HJ. Boosey's offices from 1874 onwards. Boosey & Hawkes vacated the premises in 2005. (blue, grey)

71-91 Aldwych, WC2A 2AQ

Website: www.boosey.com

Electronic Music

Electronic Music Studios

Tristram Cary (1925-2008) was a son of the novelist Joyce Cary. As a boy at Westminster School his friends included Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. It was Swann who introduced him to modern music. In his teens he became a radio enthusiast. This led to an interest in electronics.

During the Second World War he served as a naval radar engineer. He spent time experimenting with sound and tape manipulation. In the 1950s he set up his own electronic music studio. He worked on a number of movie scores, including The Ladykillers (1955) - he secured the job because both he and the film's director, Alexander Mackendrick, used to drink in The Fringes pub on the Fulham Road - and Quatermass and The Pit (1967), as well as providing sound effects. He provided incidental music for the television drama Doctor Who. In 1967 Cary set up the Royal College of Music's electronic music studio.

With David Cockerell and Peter Zinovieff (1933-2021) he set up Electronic Music Studios in 1969 to manufacture synthesisers. The machines were named after parts of London. The Putney synthesiser was played with a Cricklewood keyboard. Pink Floyd used a VCS3 (Putney) portable synthesiser on Dark Side of The Moon (1973). (The Synthi A was a derivative machine.) In 1974 Cary moved to Australia, where he lectured at the University of Adelaide.

The Stylophone

The Stylophone was an electronic pocket organ . It made by Dubreq and launched in 1968. It was heavily advertised on children's television. The following year one was used on David Bowie's song Space Oddity.

Stylophones were manufactured in north-west London.

Location: 138 Cricklewood Lane, NW2 2DP

Film Music

Hammer Films

Philip Martell (1907-1993) was the music director of Hammer Films. He used his position to commission work from leading Modernist composers. Those who wrote scores for him included Richard Rodney Bennett, Elizabeth Luytens,¹ and Malcolm Williamson. Hammer s management appreciated that their dissonant output serviced the drama of the films.

Location: Hammer House, 113-117 Wardour Street, W1F 0UN (orange, purple)

¹. A.k.a. Twelve-tone Lizzie because of her interest in Serialism. She was professionally detached about her film scoring, being of the opinion that it was her task to make the movie what it was with knobs on .

Handel

Location: St George's , St George Street, Hanover Square, W1S 1FX. Handel was the organist at St George s. (purple, orange)

See Also: OPERA Handel's Operas

Website: www.stgeorgeshanoversquare.org

Handel House Museum

The composer George Frederic Handel moved into a house in Brook Street in 1723 and lived there until his death.

Location: 25 Brook Street, W1K 4HB (purple, red)

Website: www.handelhendrix.org

Tweedledee & Tweedledum

The characters Tweedeledee and Tweedledum in Lewis Carroll's book Through The Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) derive their names from the nicknames that were given by John Byrom to Handel and his rival Giovanni Bononcini. To tweedle was to play a light-pitched fiddle , which was itself imitative in origin.

See Also: WOMBATS

Impresario

Victor Hochhauser

Victor Hochhauser's (1923-2019) family left Czechoslovakia in 1938. He studied at a Jewish religious college and then went to work for Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, who was an eminent member of British Jewry. In 1944, at Dr Schonfeld's request, he organised a charity event that featured a pianist. The evening was a success. Following the re-establishment of peace, he established himself as a concert promoter.

Lilian Shields had been born into a Russian Jewish family in the East End. She went to work for Dr Schonfeld as a secretary. In 1949 Hochhauser visited the rabbi's offices and met her. They married a few months later. Although the business's strap line always read Victor Hochhauser Presents she became his equal partner in it. They always financed their business from their own financial resources. They never used state subsidies. They developed a reputation for being extremely thrifty and inclined to avoid anything that was insufficiently mainstream for their audience.

As a result of the Cold War, Russian performers did not work in the West. In 1953 Stalin died. The same year a delegation from the Soviet Society of Cultural Relations visited Britain. The group included the young violinist Igor Oistrakh. The Hochhausers arranged for him to play at one of the Sunday evening concerts that they regularly staged at the Royal Albert Hall. His appearance was a success. Subsequently, the couple opened up a dialogue with the Soviet authorities. The following year they brought the youth's far more famous violinist father David Oistrakh to perform in the West.

The authorities in Moscow appreciated that having Russian musicians perform in the West might not act as a means of projecting soft power, it would also furnish an income stream of hard currency. Therefore, the Anglo-Soviet Cultural Agreement was signed in 1956. By then the Hochhausers had developed a singular closeness to the Soviet culture ministry's Gosconcert. This was to remain the case for almost two decades. The performers would always have K.G.B. agents travelling with them in some guise or other. The Hochhausers took to referring to these functionaries sputniks .

In 1961 the Hochhausers had arranged for the Kirov Ballet to perform in London. During the company's run in Paris the dancer Rudolf Nureyev had become the toast of the city. The Soviet authorities arranged for him to be returned to the U.S.S.R.. At Le Bourget Airport Nureyev defected.

In 1968 the Red Army Choir was due to perform at a concert that the Hochhausers had arranged at the Royal Albert Hall. The Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia. The British government cancelled the concert. A photograph was taken of Victor holding up a poster onto which had been printed RED ARMY CHOIR. A graffito had been added to this declared NOW APPEARING ON THE STREETS OF PRAGUE.

In 1971 the Foreign expelled from Britain 105 Soviet diplomats whom it stated were in fact spies. A series of concerts that David Oistrakh had been due to perform were cancelled.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an open critic of the Soviet system. The cellist Msitislav Rostropovich refused to distance himself from the writer whom he regarded as being a friend. As a result, the authorities banned the musician from performing in Moscow and Leningrad. He and his wife the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya asked that they might be allowed to travel outside of the Soviet Union. Their request was granted. They went to stay with the Hochhausers. While they were doing so, Moscow declared the cellist's passport to be invalid. Thereby, he was rendered stateless. It was indicated that the Soviet authorities were no longer prepared to work with the Hochhausers. Their response was to contact Nureyev. For the next fourteen he performed in ballet seasons that they organised at the London Coliseum.

In 1991, in the wake Glasnost, the Hochhausers resumed their business dealings with Russian performers. The first musician whom they presented was the pianist Sviatoslav Richter. The first concert that he had played for them had been three decades previously.

In 1994 a C.B.E. was conferred upon Victor. His renowned parsimony prompted one way to comment that the honour's letters must stand for CAN T BE EXPENSIVE.

Location: 4 Oak Hill Way, NW3 7LR

Website: www.victorhauser.co.uk

Nigel Kennedy

Nigel Kennedy studied violin at the Royal Academy of Music. In 1986 it took nine hours for him to record most of Antonio Vivaldi's (1678-1741) Four Seasons (1723) with the English Chamber Orchestra in nine hours in the church hall of the Church of St John-at-Hackey. The album was released in 1989. In its first year of release the record sold two million copies in the U.K.. Subsequently, he listened to a lot of Baroque music and appreciated that he should have improvised more during the slow portions.

Location: Lower Clapton Road, E5 0PD

Website: https://saint.church/hackney

Musical Instruments

Pianos

In 1761 pianos started to be made in London.

In 1768 Johann Christian Bach performed the first piano recital in London.

In 1770 John Broadwood (1732-1812) and Burkhardt Tschudi, a Swiss harpsichord-maker, founded the Broadwood Piano Company.

Paris and London developed similar styles of manufacturing pianos. Vienna developed an alternative one. It was crisp and light. In the 30 years following Mozart's death, the blowsy, less specific English sound came to dominate.

Haydn taught Beethoven on a British piano. The latter opted for the Anglo-French style. Broadwood sent piano/s.

The instrument grew larger. In the 1820s the wooden frame began to give way to the metal one. In the 1830s and 1840s the instrument became louder which meant that pianists could perform before large audiences. Its sound became closer to the human voice. Music was written for this new form. This was informed by Romanticism. Touring virtuosos emerged.

Camden Town and Primrose Hill were a hub of piano making.

During the early 20^thC Horace de Vere Cole was Britain's most renowned practical joker. A friend antagonised him. As a result, he commissioned every piano manufacturer in London to deliver a piano to the man's home on the same day. Pandemonium ensued.

See Also: HORACE DE VERE COLE

Website: www.broadwood.co.uk

The Schott Music Shop

Schott Music is a German-based music publishing business that was founded in 1770. In 1835 the firm opened a London office. Eighteen years later the British operation started publishing on its own stead. In 1879 the firm was granted a royal warrant. In 1908 it moved into its Great Marlborough Street premises. The Schott Music Shop occupies the ground-floor.

Location: 48 Great Marlborough Street, W1F 7BB (blue, purple)

Website: https://schottmusiclondon.com

The Tuning Fork

In 1752 John Shore invented the tuning fork to help musicians tune up.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

(Marian) Kitty Lux (1957-2017) was a Camberwell native who studied fine art at Leeds University. Following her graduation, she became involved in the city's post-punk music scene. She came to know George Hinchcliffe. They moved to London, where he bought her a ukulele and taught her how to play it. They took to performing contemporary pop music on the instrument. In 1985 they formed the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. It went on to perform across the country and internationally under the slogan A world tour with only hand luggage.

Location: 5 Chancery Lane, WC2A 1LG

Website: www.ukuleleorchestra.com

The Wrong Order

Andr Previn (n Andreas Priwin) (1929-2019) grew up in Los Angeles. There he became a composer of film scores. He also developed a career as a jazz pianist. In 1968 he was appointed to be the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. To mark his conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the first time he invited a number of his Hollywood friends to London. The performance went extremely well. One of the Americans remarked to another That was wonderful. It's a pity he had to f*** up his career to get here.

Previn made a memorable appearance on The Morecambe & Wise Show. In it, there was a sketch in which Eric Morecambe played a grand piano. The noise he produced was a cacophony. The conductor declared You re playing all the wrong notes! I m playing all the right notes just in the wrong order! came the reply.

Website: www.morecambeandwise.com

David Backhouse 2024