Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Newcater, Graham

(b Johannesburg, 3 Sept 1941). South African composer. He started formal studies with Arthur Tempest (clarinet) and Fritz Schuurman (conducting) in 1955. While at secondary school some of his compositions were shown to Arnold van Wyk; for three years Newcater continued to send him works for comment. After an apprenticeship to a vehicle firm (1957–60), he returned to Johannesburg in 1960, studying privately with Gideon Fagan. A SAMRO scholarship enabled Newcater to study with Fricker at the RCM, where he completed his Symphony no.1. After a period at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (1964–6), he returned to England on a Vaughan Williams Award to study with Searle. He has subsequently been active as a freelance composer and conductor. His mature works display a rigorous and intellectual approach to formal aspects. Although he often uses sets by Webern, his use of serial technique is highly individual, with 2nds and 3rds predominant intervallically. In Songs of the Inner Worlds (1991), which employs the set of Webern’s orchestral Variations, op.30, these intervals also become the principal elements of a rather static harmony. The best known of his ballets is Raka (1967). Variations de Timbres (1968) is an example of the concern with tone-colour evident in many of his works. Further information is given in Mary Rörich: ‘Graham Newcater’, Composers in South Africa Today, ed. P. Klatzow (Cape Town, 1987), 103–30.

WORKS

(selective list)

Orch: Sym. no.1, 1962–4; Sym. no.2, 1965; Variations de Timbres, 1968; Temple Music, 1971; Sym. no.3, 1978; Vn Conc., 1979; Cl Conc., 1982; In memoriam Anton Hartman, 1982; Songs of the Inner World, vc, orch, 1991

Ballets: Raka (N.P. van Wyk Louw), 1967; The Rain Queen, 1968–9

Chbr: Str Trio, 1962; Str Qt, 1983–4

JAMES MAY

New College Motet Fragments

(GB-Onc 362). See Sources, MS, §VI, 3.

Newcomb, Anthony (Addison)

(b New York, 6 Aug 1941). American musicologist. He took the BA at the University of California at Berkeley in 1962 and subsequently studied the harpsichord with Gustav Leonhardt on a Fulbright Scholarship to Holland. Returning to the USA, he enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton University (MFA 1965, PhD 1969), where his teachers included Oliver Strunk, Arthur Mendel and Lewis Lockwood. In 1968 he became a member of the music faculty at Harvard University, and in 1973 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley; in 1990 he became dean of arts and humanities.

Newcomb’s initial field of research was Italian music from 1540 to 1640. His dissertation and subsequent writings centre on the Italian madrigal of the late 16th century, especially the music associated with the tre dame of Ferrara in the 1580s. His transcription and translation of correspondence involving Gesualdo sheds light on musical activities and performing practice in Ferrara, Florence and Naples. His later work reflects an interest in Wagner’s music and writings. He has also undertaken research on instrumental music from 1800 to 1918 and the issue of meaning.

WRITINGS

‘Carlo Gesualdo and a Musical Correspondence of 1594’, MQ, liv (1968), 409–36

The ‘Musica secreta’ of Ferrara in the 1580’s (diss., Princeton U., 1969; Princeton, 1980, rev., enlarged, as The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–1597)

‘Editions of Willaert’s Musica Nova: New Evidence, New Speculations’, JAMS, xxvi (1973), 132–45

‘Alfonso Fontanelli and the Ancestry of the Seconda Pratica Madrigal’, Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Music in Honor of Arthur Mendel, ed. R.L. Marshall (Kassel and Hackensack, NJ, 1974), 47–70

‘The Three Anthologies for Laura Peverara, 1580–1583’, RIM, x (1975), 329–45

‘Girolamo Frescobaldi (1608–1615): a Documentary Study’, AnnM, vii (1964–77), 111–58

‘The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Drama: an Essay in Wagnerian Formal Analysis’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 38–66

‘The Anonymous Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex’, Frescobaldi Studies: Madison, WI, 1983, 97–123

‘Once More between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann's Second Symphony’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 233–50

‘Sound and Feeling’, Critical Enquiry, x (1983–4), 614–43

‘Frescobaldi's Toccatas and their Stylistic Ancestry’, PRMA, cxi (1984–5), 28–44

‘Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Women Making Music: the Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. J. Bowers and J. Tick (Urbana, IL, 1986), 90–115

‘Schumann and the Marketplace: from Butterflies to Hausmusik’, Nineteenth-Century Piano Music, ed. R.L. Todd (New York, 1990), 258–315

‘Narrative Archetypes and Mahler's Ninth Symphony’, Music and Text: Critical Enquiries, ed. S.P. Sher (Cambridge, 1995), 61–88

‘New Light(s) on Weber's Wolf's Glen Scene’, Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. T. Bauman and M.P. McClymonds (Cambridge, 1995), 61–88

‘Unnotated Accidentals in the Music of the Post-Josquin Generation’, Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. J.A. Owens and A. Cummings (Warren, MI, 1996), 215–25

‘Action and Agency in Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Second Movement’, Music & Meaning, ed. J. Robinson (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 131–53

EDITIONS

The Ricercars of the Bourdeney Codex, RRMR, lxxxix (1991)

PAULA MORGAN

New Complexity.

A term that became current during the 1980s as a means of categorizing the music of Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy and a number of younger composers, the majority of them British, all of whose music was held to share certain aesthetic and formal characteristics. In particular they sought to achieve in their work a complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material. Since composers within the New Complexity usually chose to realize their music through acoustic instrumental resources, their scores necessarily pushed the prescriptive capacity of traditional staff notation to its limits, with a hitherto unprecedented detailing of articulation. Microtonal pitch differentiations, ametric rhythmic divisions and the minutiae of timbral and dynamic inflection were all painstakingly notated; the technical and intellectual difficulties which such notations present for performers were regarded as a significant aesthetic feature of the music.

Although many of the composers involved were British, initial support for the New Complexity came principally from performers and promoters of new music in continental Europe. Both Ferneyhough and Finnissy became internationally prominent in the early 1970s through performances of their work at the Gaudeamus Music Week; later developments of the New Complexity were particularly closely associated with the Darmstadt summer courses where, between 1982 and 1996, Ferneyhough was coordinator of the composition programme. During that period avowedly ‘Complex’ younger composers such as Chris Dench, James Dillon, Richard Barrett, Klaus K. Hübler and Roger Redgate were all awarded Darmstadt's Kranichsteinpreis for composition. The presentation of their work within the Darmstadt courses was often accompanied by polemical debates whose trenchant modernism echoed that of the postwar serialist composers of the Darmstadt School, and in 1997 Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf went so far as to propose that the composers of the New Complexity be designated the ‘Second Darmstadt School’. By then, however, the composers who had been allied to the New Complexity were a geographically disjunct group spread across North America, Europe and Australia, few of them were any longer involved in the Darmstadt courses, and the expressive and technical differences between their various musics outweighed any remaining aesthetic common ground.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Toop: ‘Four Facets of “The New Complexity”’, Contact, no.32 (1988), 4–50

J. Bons, ed.: Complexity (Amsterdam, 1990)

J. Boros and others: ‘Complexity Forum’, PNM, xxxi (1993), 6–85

‘Aspects of Complexity in Recent British Music’, CMR, xiii/1 (1995)

J. Boros and R. Toop, eds.: Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings (Amsterdam, 1995)

J. Stadelman: ‘Brian Ferneyhough, 1976–1994’, Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart, 1946–1996: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse für neue Musik, ed. R. Stephan and others (Stuttgart, 1996), 468–75

H. Brougham, C. Fox and I. Pace, eds.: Uncommon Ground: the Music of Michael Finnissy (Aldershot, 1997)

C.-S. Mahnkopf: Kritik der neuen Musik (Kassel, 1998)

CHRISTOPHER FOX