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Composing with Sets: Roberto Gerhard’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra

This is the first detailed study of Roberto Gerhard’s twelve-tone concerto, which dates from 1951. Performed at the Aldeburgh Festival in that year, it was one of the first major works by Gerhard to be performed since his exile to Britain in 1939; it followed a decade in which he had scraped a living largely as a composer of incidental music. This is the first substantial work in which Gerhard employs his technique of ‘hexachordal permutation’. As might be expected this essay explores this technique, but also relates Gerhard’s study of the properties of hexachords to his less-known interest in what subsequently became known as pitch-class set theory which some of his theoretical explorations documented in his unpublished papers, anticipate. Typically, Gerhard includes a number of sometimes enigmatic Spanish references, not least to the music of the Spanish Renaissance. This essay forms a chapter in a volume also of which I am also co-editor. Except for Meirion Bowen’s collection and translation of essays by Gerhard himself, the new book is the first substantial scholarly work on Gerhard, who is the most significant Spanish / Catalan composer of his generation and a major figure in British music in the 1950s and 60s. A version of this essay was given at the Second International Roberto Gerhard Conference in Barcelona in 2012. 9000 words.