- Alexander Goehr and Jack Van Zandt, Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors, and Models (Carcanet)
- Erica Siegel: The Life and Music of Elizabeth Maconchy (Boydell & Brewer)
- James Whipple Miller Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades (Chestnut Hill Press)
“As I have said on many occasions,” the composer Alexander Goehr begins the fourth chapter of his book with Jack Van Zandt, “I believe that, for the most part, the period of time when a teacher or mentor has an influential relationship with a young composer is short and typically compressed into a time span of a few months.” Goehr, 91, is describing (and echoing) Pierre Boulez, a mentor with whom he spent a lot of time arguing. “I always felt that I was wrong and he was right, in spite of disagreeing with him, which is the indication of a complicated relationship,” Goehr writes. They argued about Schoenberg and Stravinsky, about the merits of Schoenberg’s follower (and Boulez’s teacher) René Leibowitz, and on Boulez’s outright dismissal of whole tranches of music from the past. And yet, reflecting back, the arguments and their raison d’être—to be constantly questioning, rather than believing—fundamentally shaped Goehr’s musical life. “Even today,” Goehr writes later on, “I often think when I am composing: ‘What would Pierre say about that?’”