Malcolm MacDonald (music critic)
Encyclopedia
Malcolm MacDonald is a British author, mainly writing about music. He was born in Nairn
, Scotland
in 1948 and educated at the Royal High School
, Edinburgh
and Downing College, Cambridge
; he has lived in England
since 1971, first in London
and since 1992 in Gloucestershire
.
He has written several books, notably volumes on Brahms
, Schoenberg
, John Foulds
, Edgard Varèse
, the Scottish composer-pianist Ronald Stevenson
and a three-volume study of the 32 symphonies
of Havergal Brian
. Other books include a tourist guidebook to the city of Edinburgh and an ongoing multi-volume edition of the musical journalism of Havergal Brian. He has contributed chapters to symposia on Brahms, Alan Bush
, Erik Bergman
, Shostakovich
, Bernard Stevens
, Ronald Stevenson, Varèse, an essay on Czesław Marek to a symposium on Swiss Composers and another on Scottish composers to a symposium on Musical Nationalism in Great Britain and Finland
. He has also compiled catalogues of the works of John Foulds, Shostakovich, Luigi Dallapiccola
and Antal Doráti
and contributed articles to many musical encyclopedias such as the New Grove
. He is editor of the modern-music journal Tempo
, which he joined in 1972 as assistant to the then editor David Drew
, and has been a copious contributor to other English-language music-journals and magazines. For these and other journalistic purposes he has used the nom-de-plume Calum MacDonald: this is believed to be because at the outset of his writing career, which began with record reviewing for the journal Records & Recording, confusion arose between him and the composer Malcolm MacDonald
, who was a long-established record reviewer for The Gramophone. As Calum MacDonald he also reviews regularly for BBC Music Magazine
.
MacDonald has been a prime mover in the revival of interest in the music of John Foulds.
Nairn
Nairn is a town and former burgh in the Highland council area of Scotland. It is an ancient fishing port and market town around east of Inverness...
, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
in 1948 and educated at the Royal High School
Royal High School (Edinburgh)
The Royal High School of Edinburgh is a co-educational state school administered by the City of Edinburgh Council. The school was founded in 1128 and is one of the oldest schools in Scotland, and has, throughout its history, been high achieving, consistently attaining well above average exam results...
, Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
and Downing College, Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
; he has lived in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
since 1971, first in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and since 1992 in Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean....
.
He has written several books, notably volumes on Brahms
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...
, Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
, John Foulds
John Foulds
John Herbert Foulds was a British composer of classical music. Largely self-taught as a composer, he was one of the most remarkable and unjustly forgotten figures of the "British Musical Renaissance"....
, Edgard Varèse
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
, the Scottish composer-pianist Ronald Stevenson
Ronald Stevenson
Ronald Stevenson is a British composer, pianist, and writer about music.-Biography:The son of a Scottish father and English mother, Stevenson studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music , studying composition with Richard Hall and piano with Iso Elinson, graduating with distinction...
and a three-volume study of the 32 symphonies
Symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...
of Havergal Brian
Havergal Brian
Havergal Brian , was a British classical composer.Brian acquired a legendary status at the time of his rediscovery in the 1950s and 1960s for the many symphonies he had managed to write. By the end of his life he had completed 32, an unusually large number for any composer since Haydn or Mozart...
. Other books include a tourist guidebook to the city of Edinburgh and an ongoing multi-volume edition of the musical journalism of Havergal Brian. He has contributed chapters to symposia on Brahms, Alan Bush
Alan Bush
Alan Dudley Bush was a British composer and pianist. He was a committed socialist, and politics sometimes provided central themes in his music.-Personal life:...
, Erik Bergman
Erik Bergman
Erik Valdemar Bergman was an influential composer of classical music from Finland.Bergman's style ranged widely, from Romanticism in his early works to modernism and primitivism, among other genres...
, Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet Russian composer and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century....
, Bernard Stevens
Bernard Stevens
Bernard Stevens was a British composer.Born in London, Stevens studied English and Music at the University of Cambridge with E. J. Dent, then at the Royal College of Music with R.O. Morris and Gordon Jacob from 1937 to 1940...
, Ronald Stevenson, Varèse, an essay on Czesław Marek to a symposium on Swiss Composers and another on Scottish composers to a symposium on Musical Nationalism in Great Britain and Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
. He has also compiled catalogues of the works of John Foulds, Shostakovich, Luigi Dallapiccola
Luigi Dallapiccola
Luigi Dallapiccola was an Italian composer known for his lyrical twelve-tone compositions.-Biography:Dallapiccola was born at Pisino d'Istria , to Italian parents....
and Antal Doráti
Antal Doráti
Antal Doráti, KBE was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer who became a naturalized American citizen in 1947.-Biography:...
and contributed articles to many musical encyclopedias such as the New Grove
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, it is the largest single reference work on Western music. The dictionary has gone through several editions since the 19th century...
. He is editor of the modern-music journal Tempo
Tempo (journal)
Tempo is a quarterly music journal published in the UK and specialising in music of the 20th century and contemporary music. Originally founded in 1939 as the 'house magazine' of the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, Tempo was the brain-child of Schoenberg's pupil Erwin Stein, who worked for Boosey...
, which he joined in 1972 as assistant to the then editor David Drew
David Drew (writer)
David Drew was a British journalist on music, particularly known for his work on Kurt Weill. He published the authoritative catalogue of Weill's music, Kurt Weill: A Handbook and, in German, edited and annotated a collection of Weill's writings, Kurt Weill: Ausgewählte Schriften, and a symposium...
, and has been a copious contributor to other English-language music-journals and magazines. For these and other journalistic purposes he has used the nom-de-plume Calum MacDonald: this is believed to be because at the outset of his writing career, which began with record reviewing for the journal Records & Recording, confusion arose between him and the composer Malcolm MacDonald
Malcolm MacDonald (composer)
Malcolm MacDonald was a British composer. Probably his best-known work is the Cuban Rondo for clarinet and orchestra written in 1960.He contributed to The Gramophone journal.-References:...
, who was a long-established record reviewer for The Gramophone. As Calum MacDonald he also reviews regularly for BBC Music Magazine
BBC music magazine
BBC Music Magazine is a magazine published monthly in the United Kingdom by BBC Worldwide, the commercial subsidiary of the BBC. Reflecting the broadcast output of BBC Radio 3, the magazine is devoted primarily to classical music, though with sections on jazz and world music. Each edition comes...
.
MacDonald has been a prime mover in the revival of interest in the music of John Foulds.
Books
(limited edition ) No ISBN. 'Reprinted from Tempo 143 ' Revised edition of the 1976 Master Musicians volume.Articles in Symposia
- 'David Blake'; 'Postlude - a note on Christopher Shaw' in Lewis Foreman (ed), British Music Now: A Guide to the Work of Younger Composers (London,1975)
- 'Three Works by Erik Bergman' in J. Parsons (ed), Erik Bergman, A Seventieth Birthday Tribute (Helsinki, 1981)
- 'Words and Music in Late Shostakovich' in C. Norris (ed), Shostakovich: the Man and his Music (London, 1982)
- 'Aspects of Scottish Musical Nationalism in the 20th Century, with special reference to the Music of F.G. Scott, Ronald Center and Ronald Stevenson' in T. Mäkelä (ed), Music and Nationalism in 20th-century Great Britain and Finland (Hamburg, 1997)
- '"Dear Crusoe ... Always your Freitag": the Brian letters at McMaster University'; 'Havergal Brian's Letter to Herbert Thompson: some implications'; ' The Gothic: music and meaning'; 'Brian as Faust'; 'Psalm 23 - early Brian or late?'; 'Let the Roar of the Tigers be heard in the Land', all in J. Schaarwächter (ed), HB: Aspects of Havergal Brian (Aldershot, 1997)
- 'A Plaited Music: Ronald Stevenson at 70' in 'Meeting Ronald Stevenson', symposium in Chapman 89-90 ed. Joy Hendry (Edinburgh, 1998) ISBN 0-906772-85-0
- 'Czesław Marek and his Sinfonia in Walton & Baldassare (eds), Musik im exil: Die Schweiz und das Ausland 1918-1945 (Berne, 2005)
- 'The Orchestral Music' in Colin Scott-Sutherland (ed), Ronald Stevenson: The Man and his Music, A Symposium (London, Toccata Press, 2005) ISBN 0-907689-40-X
- ' "I took a simple little theme and developed it": Shostakovich's string concertos and sonatas' in Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008) ISBN 978-0-521-84220-4
Articles
- Many articles in the Newsletter of The Havergal BrianHavergal BrianHavergal Brian , was a British classical composer.Brian acquired a legendary status at the time of his rediscovery in the 1950s and 1960s for the many symphonies he had managed to write. By the end of his life he had completed 32, an unusually large number for any composer since Haydn or Mozart...
Society (see Articles in Symposia for those republished in 1997) - 'Havergal Brian' (The Listener, 15 July 1971)
- 'Sense and Sound: Gerhard's Fourth Symphony' (Tempo No.100, 1972)
- 'Ronald Stevenson' (Musical Events, 1972)
- 'Visionary and Craftsman: Scriabin and Enescu' (The Listener, 8 September 1983)
- 'Visionary Ecstasy: Szymanowski's Third Symphony' (The Listener, 15 September 1983)
- 'Unreconciled Spirit: Franz Liszt 100 Years On' (The Listener, 24 July 1986)
- 'Sombre Tragedy: Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Symphonies' (The Listener, 4 September 1986)
- 'Spinner's Violin Sonata - Why Op.1?' (Tempo No.161/162, 1987)
- 'Key Changes: Henze's Third Period?' (The Listener, 1 September 1988)
- 'John Foulds (1880-1939). The Cello Sonata and its Context' (British Music Vol.20, 1998)
- 'Statements and Connotations: Copland the Symphonist' (Tempo No.213, 2000)
- 'Thoughts on Siegfried Wagner's Music' (International Record Review Volume 8 issue 10, July/August 2008)
- 'Où l'on retrouve les ailes ...' (Tempo Vol. 64 No. 252, April 2010)