℅ Heritage Quay Archive - British Music Collection
∞ link ∞ Archive of works by Alfred Nieman
℅ The British Music Archive, Heritage Quay.
The music library and administrative records of the British Music Information Centre (BMIC).
In addition to the 255 boxes of administrative records, the music library contains 40,000 scores and over 23,000 sound recordings of 20th and 21st Century British composition (defined by the BMIC as music that has been composed by an individual born or living in the UK). The majority of the collection relates to post-1960 and contemporary music…
Heritage Quay
University of Huddersfield
Queensgate
Huddersfield
HD1 3DH
Tel: +44(0)1484 473 168 Email: [email protected]
℅ The British Music Archive, Heritage Quay.
The music library and administrative records of the British Music Information Centre (BMIC).
In addition to the 255 boxes of administrative records, the music library contains 40,000 scores and over 23,000 sound recordings of 20th and 21st Century British composition (defined by the BMIC as music that has been composed by an individual born or living in the UK). The majority of the collection relates to post-1960 and contemporary music…
Heritage Quay
University of Huddersfield
Queensgate
Huddersfield
HD1 3DH
Tel: +44(0)1484 473 168 Email: [email protected]
℅ youtube
Alfred Nieman - Sonata No. 2 performed by Alberto Portugheis
∞ link ∞ 1. Fantasy
∞ link ∞ 2. Passacaglia
∞ link ∞ 3. Music of Changes
from the CRI archives (NWCRI 333)
∞ link ∞ 1. Fantasy
∞ link ∞ 2. Passacaglia
∞ link ∞ 3. Music of Changes
from the CRI archives (NWCRI 333)
Background
Professor of composition Alfred Nieman died on March 7th 1997 in Queen Mary's Hospital in Hampstead (London). Though his contributions to humanity were inspired, challenging and stubborn I felt that his public recognition was never
matched by the private accolades that filtered through, often anecdotally, from his students and colleagues at the Guildhall School of Music. Alfred also taught privately and at The Workers Education Institute.
I have encountered a number of his ex students. Some speak lovingly of him and others give accounts of how difficult he could be. Alfie did enjoy a good argument and I suspect didn't mind being wrong as long as he provoked thought. He didn't like complacency.
One purpose of this site is to invite people who knew Alfred to write about their experience of him. I reserve full editorial rights as to what of your writing goes on public display and will always want to be respectful to you and to my father.
matched by the private accolades that filtered through, often anecdotally, from his students and colleagues at the Guildhall School of Music. Alfred also taught privately and at The Workers Education Institute.
I have encountered a number of his ex students. Some speak lovingly of him and others give accounts of how difficult he could be. Alfie did enjoy a good argument and I suspect didn't mind being wrong as long as he provoked thought. He didn't like complacency.
One purpose of this site is to invite people who knew Alfred to write about their experience of him. I reserve full editorial rights as to what of your writing goes on public display and will always want to be respectful to you and to my father.
Pseudonyms: Alfred Nieman
My Father used a number of pseudonyms for composition. I don't know why so many.
He reserved his real name for compositional work as a serious and respectable composer.
However he also ghost wrote film music and wore many hats as a composer - as if each were to be kept a secret from the other. If you can throw some light on these names please drop me a note (contact).
Pseudonym / PRS ID
Jonathan Davis 007615699
Robert Legray 017695366
Robert Lindsay 018168192
Carlos Lopez 018435982
Peter Merle 020557021
Alfred Merlin 020558900
Francois More l020557021
Alfred Nieman 022356218
Walter Steeper 029507382
He reserved his real name for compositional work as a serious and respectable composer.
However he also ghost wrote film music and wore many hats as a composer - as if each were to be kept a secret from the other. If you can throw some light on these names please drop me a note (contact).
Pseudonym / PRS ID
Jonathan Davis 007615699
Robert Legray 017695366
Robert Lindsay 018168192
Carlos Lopez 018435982
Peter Merle 020557021
Alfred Merlin 020558900
Francois More l020557021
Alfred Nieman 022356218
Walter Steeper 029507382
Compositions
The two pdfs below are prs listings of his more commercial works.
On Alfred's wikipedia page you will find listed some of his more serious output.
On Alfred's wikipedia page you will find listed some of his more serious output.
| alfred_merlin__works_.pdf |
| robert_legray__works_.pdf |
TERRY TROWER
It is with great affection that I always think of Alfie. I first met him at the Guildhall School of Music in 1980 when I took a part time one year course in composition and conducting. Previous to that in 1963-65 I had taken a course in percussion under Gilbert Webster (principal percussionist with the BBC symphony orchestra). A few weeks into my percussion course I was working alongside my teacher as an extra. At that time I recorded many new contemporary works with the BBC at Broadcasting House. The works were interesting and challenging. At that time I did not like or understand contemporary music as I had been predominantly a song writer and film composer.
Alfie opened my eyes to listen and understand 20th cent music and I grew to love it. I spent ages in the library listening to contemporary music and during my course not only did I compose for the contemporary music recitals but I had a chance to conduct some well known pieces when the professor taking the class would leave me to take over the rest of the class and conduct.
I particularly enjoyed Alfie's Composer's Improvisation classes. We were a group of five at the time. He was such an inspiring man and he taught me to improvise the xylophone and piano with the innocence of a child. He freed me up from playing like a professional percussionist. On each session he would record and then dissect all five members of the course, on what we had done. Sometimes I would skip my arranging class to go to Alfie's main class where I would sit at the back and hear his lectures on 20th cent composers. Somewhere I have a tape of his interesting lecture on Stravinsky.
After leaving the Guildhall I wrote to him to say that l was going to write a piece for Marimba & Orchestra for Evelyn Glennie to play. He replied on a lovely card of the Japanese print "The Wave" and said "Don't hold back, she'll play anything". I have always treasured that card. Later in 2003 the work was played at the Purcell Room with Daniella Geneva as soloist and a pianist. I included some flute pieces in the concert and Alfie would certainly have heard how great his influence on me had been as a teacher. The card of "The Wave" he sent me inspired me to write a piece called "4 Japanese Prints" for Marimba & Chamber Orchestra.
He was a great teacher, giving me confidence and direction in my life as I didn't come from a conventional academic background.
Some of my music via my YouTube channel.
Alfie opened my eyes to listen and understand 20th cent music and I grew to love it. I spent ages in the library listening to contemporary music and during my course not only did I compose for the contemporary music recitals but I had a chance to conduct some well known pieces when the professor taking the class would leave me to take over the rest of the class and conduct.
I particularly enjoyed Alfie's Composer's Improvisation classes. We were a group of five at the time. He was such an inspiring man and he taught me to improvise the xylophone and piano with the innocence of a child. He freed me up from playing like a professional percussionist. On each session he would record and then dissect all five members of the course, on what we had done. Sometimes I would skip my arranging class to go to Alfie's main class where I would sit at the back and hear his lectures on 20th cent composers. Somewhere I have a tape of his interesting lecture on Stravinsky.
After leaving the Guildhall I wrote to him to say that l was going to write a piece for Marimba & Orchestra for Evelyn Glennie to play. He replied on a lovely card of the Japanese print "The Wave" and said "Don't hold back, she'll play anything". I have always treasured that card. Later in 2003 the work was played at the Purcell Room with Daniella Geneva as soloist and a pianist. I included some flute pieces in the concert and Alfie would certainly have heard how great his influence on me had been as a teacher. The card of "The Wave" he sent me inspired me to write a piece called "4 Japanese Prints" for Marimba & Chamber Orchestra.
He was a great teacher, giving me confidence and direction in my life as I didn't come from a conventional academic background.
Some of my music via my YouTube channel.
PHILIP TRUMBLE
The Guildhall (GSMD) in the late1970's.
Alfred or Alfie as we knew him was an inspiration to me. I was studying on the under graduate course at the time at the Guildhall but had a big interest in improvisation and blagged my way into his post-graduate improvisation sessions. I joined a small group of composers each week when we improvised to a theme or stimulus that he came up with. It was enormous fun and a huge learning experience.
Alfred or Alfie as we knew him was an inspiration to me. I was studying on the under graduate course at the time at the Guildhall but had a big interest in improvisation and blagged my way into his post-graduate improvisation sessions. I joined a small group of composers each week when we improvised to a theme or stimulus that he came up with. It was enormous fun and a huge learning experience.
KATHLEEN MOSSI
Alfred Nieman was a 'one off' - as a tutor he completely engaged ones attention -and as you say - was always pushing for a debate - for reasons - answers - challenging us to think - sideways! It is so long ago now.
I still love to sing his song 'Men from the Fields' (padraic Colum) to myself as I'm going about things - it is haunting and comes back to me from years and years ago - almost 50 in fact!!! Although i have done some research - I cannot find any mention of Alfred Nieman with the setting of the poem. Would you be kind enough to email me please when convenient - if there is a publlisher who might dig up an old copy ! -or was / is there a recording of the set of songs in which it was included ?
Nice to see this! I hope you are getting a good response - I'm probably your oldest contributor!
I still love to sing his song 'Men from the Fields' (padraic Colum) to myself as I'm going about things - it is haunting and comes back to me from years and years ago - almost 50 in fact!!! Although i have done some research - I cannot find any mention of Alfred Nieman with the setting of the poem. Would you be kind enough to email me please when convenient - if there is a publlisher who might dig up an old copy ! -or was / is there a recording of the set of songs in which it was included ?
Nice to see this! I hope you are getting a good response - I'm probably your oldest contributor!
SAM RICHARDS
He was my mentor. He had a huge effect on me and I still talk about him all these years later. I even use some of his improvisation exercises with my own students. Alfie Nieman was a formative influence on me and, in an unsentimental sense of the word, I loved him. This meant I could profoundly disagree with him over individual matters, yet this would not affect the pivotal position he held in my life.
I first encountered this tall, dignified, fair-haired musician – and the word “musician” describes him better than anything – at the improvisation evening classes he did at Chiswick Polytechnic in the days when there were still polytechnics. It was in the late 1960s. For me it was as if he’d been sent from Heaven. I was deeply engrossed in many kinds of open form music from graphic scores to free jazz. Cornelius Cardew and John Cage, Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp, were heroes of mine. I lacked two things: firstly, a regular platform that stretched my playing; secondly, informed encouragement. I got both in spades from Alfie.
The regular platform was his classes, not only in Chiswick but as I got to know him better I’d go over London to his Hampstead class too. He actually had graded exercises which took you through a ten week course. He began by writing impressionistic titles up on a board: clouds, traffic, circus, clowns, stormy sea – and so on. Each member of the class had to choose a title and, with that in mind, improvise a short piece at the piano. He was uninterested in whether or not you were a pianist. People who protested that they couldn’t play the piano were shown how to use to flat of their hand, their forearms, the strings inside the piano and even their fingers on the keys!
He recorded everything and played back each improvisation immediately and asked for comments. He banned two words: “like” and “dislike”. We were asked to describe each piece and to evaluate it. Whether we liked it or not was beside the point.
Gradually, over the ten weekly sessions, the tasks got more complex. We might be asked to improvise a piece with two very different ideas in it, and after week 1 this would be done in groups of two or three. Eventually he set us some very formal classical ideas for improvisations: rondo, sonata, theme and variations. He even got us improvising serial pieces – no mean feat!
Part of me rebelled against this classical formalism. I was also fascinated by the work of Cardew and AMM, exploring sounds or, as John Tilbury once put it, “tracking” sounds. I was also in a trance called John Cage. Alfie distrusted both of these experimentalists. He was ambiguous about Cage. He loved Cage’s “Music of Changes” and was incredibly proud when Fred Turner, one of his students at the Guildhall, played the whole very challenging piece. But the more experimental gestures of Cage left him unimpressed. As for Cardew, Alfie could be quite rude about him. Therefore for many years I lived with an extraordinarily fertile contradiction embedded in my own psyche as a musician – the more formalist intensely musical world of Alfie versus the exploratory sonic art of Cardew. Of course, they overlapped and interchanged. Alfie had a real streak of expressionism in him, and Cardew could be very formal when he wanted to be.
As to informed encouragement, Alfie was the only person I knew who was highly accomplished as a musician/composer/improviser, and who could evaluate my own performance in helpful, incisive terms that made sense to me. He chose me to play solos in the public concerts given by the improvisation class. He told me (frequently) how talented I was – which even became a little embarrassing. His evaluation of me became a hard act to live up to. If I played below capacity he’d tell me he knew I could do much better and not to be lazy. He invited me to his home in Well Walk, Hampstead, where I had piano lessons followed by his wife Aileen’s wonderful cooking. Eventually I decided to study with him at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
His lectures on the history of music and analysis and composition were good, solid stuff. But it was still his improvisation classes that had me captivated. He did a weekly class for music therapists and had me along as his right-hand man. One week I had an LP of John Coltrane’s “Ascension” with me. I told him it was brilliant. He insisted on playing some of it in class. I thought he’d hate it, but how wrong I was. He gave an instant analysis of how the use of dissonance and screeching was beautifully woven over simple modal chords. I still hear “Ascension” like that.
But going to the Guildhall was a fraught decision on my part. The Guildhall back then did not accept composition as a first or second subject. You had to play two musical instruments and this was non-negotiable. Although I had skills at the piano they were not in the classical direction, and I knew in my heart that three years at the Guildhall would be a form of agony only relieved by my piano and composition lessons with Alfie. After one year I moved on to Dartington College of Arts in Devon. I know that this hurt Alfie, and I lost touch with him and regretted doing so. London suddenly became a long way away, and my life took other directions. I saw him once in the mid 1970s and told him I was now specialising in folk music. He thought that was a complete waste of my time.
I did see him once more. I called on him at his home in the early 1990s, not many years before he died. He hadn’t changed. Not in essence. He was more frail – I knew he’d had serious health issues. But the bond I used to feel between us was still there, and his passion and seriousness about music and its disciplines were still infectious. I gave him a lift somewhere – I forget where. All I remember is him getting out of my car somewhere on the edge of Hampstead Heath and watching him as he walked off, tall and imposing.
Years later I found myself playing in a free improvisation group, “Half Moon Assemblage”. Our pianist/cellist, Elie Fruchter-Murray, is a trained music therapist. When I casually mentioned that Alfred Nieman had been one of my teachers he was mightily impressed. Alfie was, indeed, a pioneer of improvisation n music therapy. He was also a composer, pianist, teacher, and friend.
www.samrichards.org.uk
I first encountered this tall, dignified, fair-haired musician – and the word “musician” describes him better than anything – at the improvisation evening classes he did at Chiswick Polytechnic in the days when there were still polytechnics. It was in the late 1960s. For me it was as if he’d been sent from Heaven. I was deeply engrossed in many kinds of open form music from graphic scores to free jazz. Cornelius Cardew and John Cage, Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp, were heroes of mine. I lacked two things: firstly, a regular platform that stretched my playing; secondly, informed encouragement. I got both in spades from Alfie.
The regular platform was his classes, not only in Chiswick but as I got to know him better I’d go over London to his Hampstead class too. He actually had graded exercises which took you through a ten week course. He began by writing impressionistic titles up on a board: clouds, traffic, circus, clowns, stormy sea – and so on. Each member of the class had to choose a title and, with that in mind, improvise a short piece at the piano. He was uninterested in whether or not you were a pianist. People who protested that they couldn’t play the piano were shown how to use to flat of their hand, their forearms, the strings inside the piano and even their fingers on the keys!
He recorded everything and played back each improvisation immediately and asked for comments. He banned two words: “like” and “dislike”. We were asked to describe each piece and to evaluate it. Whether we liked it or not was beside the point.
Gradually, over the ten weekly sessions, the tasks got more complex. We might be asked to improvise a piece with two very different ideas in it, and after week 1 this would be done in groups of two or three. Eventually he set us some very formal classical ideas for improvisations: rondo, sonata, theme and variations. He even got us improvising serial pieces – no mean feat!
Part of me rebelled against this classical formalism. I was also fascinated by the work of Cardew and AMM, exploring sounds or, as John Tilbury once put it, “tracking” sounds. I was also in a trance called John Cage. Alfie distrusted both of these experimentalists. He was ambiguous about Cage. He loved Cage’s “Music of Changes” and was incredibly proud when Fred Turner, one of his students at the Guildhall, played the whole very challenging piece. But the more experimental gestures of Cage left him unimpressed. As for Cardew, Alfie could be quite rude about him. Therefore for many years I lived with an extraordinarily fertile contradiction embedded in my own psyche as a musician – the more formalist intensely musical world of Alfie versus the exploratory sonic art of Cardew. Of course, they overlapped and interchanged. Alfie had a real streak of expressionism in him, and Cardew could be very formal when he wanted to be.
As to informed encouragement, Alfie was the only person I knew who was highly accomplished as a musician/composer/improviser, and who could evaluate my own performance in helpful, incisive terms that made sense to me. He chose me to play solos in the public concerts given by the improvisation class. He told me (frequently) how talented I was – which even became a little embarrassing. His evaluation of me became a hard act to live up to. If I played below capacity he’d tell me he knew I could do much better and not to be lazy. He invited me to his home in Well Walk, Hampstead, where I had piano lessons followed by his wife Aileen’s wonderful cooking. Eventually I decided to study with him at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
His lectures on the history of music and analysis and composition were good, solid stuff. But it was still his improvisation classes that had me captivated. He did a weekly class for music therapists and had me along as his right-hand man. One week I had an LP of John Coltrane’s “Ascension” with me. I told him it was brilliant. He insisted on playing some of it in class. I thought he’d hate it, but how wrong I was. He gave an instant analysis of how the use of dissonance and screeching was beautifully woven over simple modal chords. I still hear “Ascension” like that.
But going to the Guildhall was a fraught decision on my part. The Guildhall back then did not accept composition as a first or second subject. You had to play two musical instruments and this was non-negotiable. Although I had skills at the piano they were not in the classical direction, and I knew in my heart that three years at the Guildhall would be a form of agony only relieved by my piano and composition lessons with Alfie. After one year I moved on to Dartington College of Arts in Devon. I know that this hurt Alfie, and I lost touch with him and regretted doing so. London suddenly became a long way away, and my life took other directions. I saw him once in the mid 1970s and told him I was now specialising in folk music. He thought that was a complete waste of my time.
I did see him once more. I called on him at his home in the early 1990s, not many years before he died. He hadn’t changed. Not in essence. He was more frail – I knew he’d had serious health issues. But the bond I used to feel between us was still there, and his passion and seriousness about music and its disciplines were still infectious. I gave him a lift somewhere – I forget where. All I remember is him getting out of my car somewhere on the edge of Hampstead Heath and watching him as he walked off, tall and imposing.
Years later I found myself playing in a free improvisation group, “Half Moon Assemblage”. Our pianist/cellist, Elie Fruchter-Murray, is a trained music therapist. When I casually mentioned that Alfred Nieman had been one of my teachers he was mightily impressed. Alfie was, indeed, a pioneer of improvisation n music therapy. He was also a composer, pianist, teacher, and friend.
www.samrichards.org.uk
VIVIANE HOWARTH
Music therapy student: Guildhall School of Music 1969 / 70
I was a music therapy student in 1969- 1970. It was only the second year that the course had been up and running full-time and I remember Alfred as being extremely enthusiastic about developing music therapy. He encouraged us to begin to think in different ways about music and his improvisation sessions were always exciting. Sometimes sparks would fly when people's views on music were challenged.
I was a music therapy student in 1969- 1970. It was only the second year that the course had been up and running full-time and I remember Alfred as being extremely enthusiastic about developing music therapy. He encouraged us to begin to think in different ways about music and his improvisation sessions were always exciting. Sometimes sparks would fly when people's views on music were challenged.
ERIK LINDGREN
Composition student: Guildhall School of Music 1974 / 75I studied with Alfred in 1974-'75
When I was an exchange student from Tufts University in Boston. While my 40 peers were equally divided between English literature and theatre majors, I was the sole musician in the lot and we all resided at a hotel on Gloucester Road in South Kensington. All of their teachers came to the hotel but I mostly traveled around London studying privately with Birgette Wild (piano) and Alfred (composition). My weekly lessons were held in his private studio at his home in Hampstead and I'd usually try to get there early and walk around the idyllic Heath. In addition, I took his enlightening improvisation class at the Guildhall which really opened me up.
Alfred was a powerhouse of intellectual stimulation and I recall picking up a copy of his enlightened essay on Anton Webern which I still have to this day. He taught me to appreciate and respect pointillism in music. He also instilled the belief of linear equality in musical counterpoint. Taking the traditional concept of "bass" out of music was a radical thought for an impressionable 20 year old composition student, but one that I quickly became aligned with.
I know Alfie was intrigued by his young American student and likewise I was immediately taken with his youthful and playful elf-like character. During that time I wrote some highly complex and dissonant student works that included a Trio, Quartet, plus some ferociously jagged ragtime solo piano sketches.
Alfred always had a sparkle in his eye which seemed like he was up to something deviously fun but harmless. I continued to correspond with Alfred up until his death and could see that his music was not receiving the attention and accolades that other British composers of his generation were getting. Alfred sent me cassettes of his works in hopes that I might be able to find an audience in the US. Unfortunately his music was far too complex to be readily accepted by the masses. Paradoxically, I was aware that he wrote some beautiful pop songs in the Tin Pan Alley tradition which he would periodically pull out during one of my composition lessons. I would love to know if any of these were professionally recorded or performed.
Upon receiving my Masters in composition/piano from the University of Iowa in 1977, I started the short-lived Boston-based art punk band Moving Parts. At that time, my musical mission for this ensemble was to mix the disparate worlds of Webern and the Stooges (Iggy, not the Three...). The group disbanded after an explosive year but out of the ashes came two more substantial groups, Mission of Burma and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic.
Alfred was directly influential in creating much of my musical aesthetic and I am forever indebted to him for the important lessons that he taught me. He wanted to bring out the child in everyone, and there is no better goal in life than to see life in that light.
Erik Lindgren www.arfarfrecords.com / www.birdsongsofthemesozoic.org
When I was an exchange student from Tufts University in Boston. While my 40 peers were equally divided between English literature and theatre majors, I was the sole musician in the lot and we all resided at a hotel on Gloucester Road in South Kensington. All of their teachers came to the hotel but I mostly traveled around London studying privately with Birgette Wild (piano) and Alfred (composition). My weekly lessons were held in his private studio at his home in Hampstead and I'd usually try to get there early and walk around the idyllic Heath. In addition, I took his enlightening improvisation class at the Guildhall which really opened me up.
Alfred was a powerhouse of intellectual stimulation and I recall picking up a copy of his enlightened essay on Anton Webern which I still have to this day. He taught me to appreciate and respect pointillism in music. He also instilled the belief of linear equality in musical counterpoint. Taking the traditional concept of "bass" out of music was a radical thought for an impressionable 20 year old composition student, but one that I quickly became aligned with.
I know Alfie was intrigued by his young American student and likewise I was immediately taken with his youthful and playful elf-like character. During that time I wrote some highly complex and dissonant student works that included a Trio, Quartet, plus some ferociously jagged ragtime solo piano sketches.
Alfred always had a sparkle in his eye which seemed like he was up to something deviously fun but harmless. I continued to correspond with Alfred up until his death and could see that his music was not receiving the attention and accolades that other British composers of his generation were getting. Alfred sent me cassettes of his works in hopes that I might be able to find an audience in the US. Unfortunately his music was far too complex to be readily accepted by the masses. Paradoxically, I was aware that he wrote some beautiful pop songs in the Tin Pan Alley tradition which he would periodically pull out during one of my composition lessons. I would love to know if any of these were professionally recorded or performed.
Upon receiving my Masters in composition/piano from the University of Iowa in 1977, I started the short-lived Boston-based art punk band Moving Parts. At that time, my musical mission for this ensemble was to mix the disparate worlds of Webern and the Stooges (Iggy, not the Three...). The group disbanded after an explosive year but out of the ashes came two more substantial groups, Mission of Burma and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic.
Alfred was directly influential in creating much of my musical aesthetic and I am forever indebted to him for the important lessons that he taught me. He wanted to bring out the child in everyone, and there is no better goal in life than to see life in that light.
Erik Lindgren www.arfarfrecords.com / www.birdsongsofthemesozoic.org
MICHAEL WHALLEY
Compostion student: Guildhall School of Music 1957
From about 1957 I was enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music, and had the great priviledge of attending Alfred Nieman’s classes in history and in musical form. Right from the start, I knew that here at last was a teacher open to the exciting new directions in music that had arisen during the twentieth century. His fascination with new music gave Nieman’s assessment of the great historical figures a freshness not to be found in many a plodding, conventional approach.
On one occasion he gave the history class an assignment to write a short essay on Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, offering a small prize for the best essay. I remember that mine concentrated mainly on structural matters and the striking originality of its form; but the prize went to a quite different essay that stressed Beethoven’s state of mind as he struggled musically to overcome deafness, illness, and isolation. It was so typical of Nieman that he should choose an essay that got to the heart of the composer’s creative process rather than (like mine) dealing more academically with formal matters.
Nieman’s teaching was always iconoclastic. You never knew what to expect. What, he asked in one of the early classes in form, is a cadence? We remained silent, perhaps having grasped by then that the conventional ‘a dominant or subdominant chord followed by the tonic’ would bring upon us nothing but scorn. Sure enough, Nieman’s derisive answer was ‘any chord followed by any chord!’—thus bringing home to us the simple truth that a cadence is whatever, in the context, results in a satisfying close.
At a later stage I was thrilled when Nieman agreed to give me composition lessons. I remember taking along my first short sketch, and his immediate recognition that my main influence was Bartok. Eventually, a few of us who were Nieman’s keen disciples formed the basis of his improvisation class, given one evening a week, I think to begin with at his house in Hampstead. On one of those occasions, no doubt after much urging from us, he played the haunting Sarabande from his Suite for Piano. This marvellous piece still has the power to transport me back to the atmosphere of those days.
My overall memory of Alfred Nieman is of the help, encouragement, and inspiration that flowed out of him at all times, directed to all students who came in contact with him. After I left the Guildhall and London I tried to keep in touch with him - I wish now I had done so more often. In spite of an overwhelmingly busy life, he never failed to answer a letter or postcard. I still keep and treasure several of these letters, together with some scores and LP records of his music.
Michael Whalley
From about 1957 I was enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music, and had the great priviledge of attending Alfred Nieman’s classes in history and in musical form. Right from the start, I knew that here at last was a teacher open to the exciting new directions in music that had arisen during the twentieth century. His fascination with new music gave Nieman’s assessment of the great historical figures a freshness not to be found in many a plodding, conventional approach.
On one occasion he gave the history class an assignment to write a short essay on Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, offering a small prize for the best essay. I remember that mine concentrated mainly on structural matters and the striking originality of its form; but the prize went to a quite different essay that stressed Beethoven’s state of mind as he struggled musically to overcome deafness, illness, and isolation. It was so typical of Nieman that he should choose an essay that got to the heart of the composer’s creative process rather than (like mine) dealing more academically with formal matters.
Nieman’s teaching was always iconoclastic. You never knew what to expect. What, he asked in one of the early classes in form, is a cadence? We remained silent, perhaps having grasped by then that the conventional ‘a dominant or subdominant chord followed by the tonic’ would bring upon us nothing but scorn. Sure enough, Nieman’s derisive answer was ‘any chord followed by any chord!’—thus bringing home to us the simple truth that a cadence is whatever, in the context, results in a satisfying close.
At a later stage I was thrilled when Nieman agreed to give me composition lessons. I remember taking along my first short sketch, and his immediate recognition that my main influence was Bartok. Eventually, a few of us who were Nieman’s keen disciples formed the basis of his improvisation class, given one evening a week, I think to begin with at his house in Hampstead. On one of those occasions, no doubt after much urging from us, he played the haunting Sarabande from his Suite for Piano. This marvellous piece still has the power to transport me back to the atmosphere of those days.
My overall memory of Alfred Nieman is of the help, encouragement, and inspiration that flowed out of him at all times, directed to all students who came in contact with him. After I left the Guildhall and London I tried to keep in touch with him - I wish now I had done so more often. In spite of an overwhelmingly busy life, he never failed to answer a letter or postcard. I still keep and treasure several of these letters, together with some scores and LP records of his music.
Michael Whalley