Malcolm (Calum) MacDonald dies

[Alan Howe]

One of the finest modern-day writers on music and a great supporter of unsung music in particular, Malcolm MacDonald, also known by the nom de plume Calum, died on 27th May aged only 66. He will be greatly missed.

[Mark Thomas]

This is very sad. Malcolm was not only an engaging and authoritative writer but, as Alan says, his encyclopaedic knowledge was matched by a complete lack of prejudice and by genuine curiosity when it came to the unsung. He is a great loss.

[eschiss1]

I found his writing inspiring (though I think some - not all, of course! - that I liked the best - it turns out were things he may have resurrected, or independently re-invented, from the sort of fine writing one could discover in reviews in music periodicals of the 19th century, which also combined close descriptive analysis with copious use of music examples, to take one into pieces that one didn't always know for sure that one might ever hear...) - and to my mind often rather insightful on many topics (I think his comparison of certain (aspects of) late symphonies by a modern British composer (that'd be Brian, yes) to updated Tudor-era fantasies, so to speak, in certain respects, flexibility/structurally/contrapuntally, though of course not harmonically speaking - was very thought-worthy, for want of better words...)

and enjoyed reading, and re-reading, very many of his writings that I came across. I'll have to seek those I've missed- on Foulds, among others. Indeed the only thing I'm glad about at all here is that he's left a fairly large legacy of books, articles, etc., and such good ones...

(Oddly, two of my favorite books by him, quite possibly, weren't about unsung composers at all, but about Brahms and Schoenberg. Well-documented, interesting, thorough, insightful - and MacDonald spent maybe more time than usual re Brahms discussing the odd cases of the Brahms A major piano trio, and the 2 versions of the B major piano trio - and then, near as I could tell, got misquoted in Fanfare besides.)

[Alan Howe]

Martin Anderson (of Toccata) writes:

Malcolm MacDonald 1948-2014

Malcolm MacDonald who, as Calum MacDonald, reviewed for this magazine from its earliest days, died in Leckhampton Hospice, Gloucestershire, on May 27th after a four-year battle with cancer; he was 66. In recent years his principal output was of essays for CD booklets, and record labels lined up commissions on his desk. You knew a MacDonald note as soon as you started to read it: the combination of clarity, insight, scholarly authority and the ability to catch the spirit of a piece of music in exactly the right words meant that you hardly had to read the attribution at the end of the text. The British Isles have produced a number of outstanding writers on music, Shaw, Newman and Tovey chief among them. With hindsight, if publishers manage to produce the overview of MacDonald's writings the way they did for Tovey and Shaw, he will be seen to be of similar standing.

He could have been an academic – no one knew more about the music of Havergal Brian and John Foulds than he did, and few knew more about Brahms – but chance steered him towards writing and editing, and he excelled in both. His books attest to the breadth of his sympathies. He wrote a three-volume study of Brian's symphonies, a life-and-works of Foulds, introductions to the music of Ronald Stevenson (a personal friend) and of Schoenberg (a book endorsed and recommended by the Schoenberg family), a survey of Varèse's output and a guide-book to Edinburgh; he also produced catalogues of the music of Dallapiccola, Doráti and Shostakovich. For four years in the mid-1970s he compiled the Gramophone Classical Catalogue, a job 'to be wished on neither man nor beast', as he commented in his contribution to 'Too many records' in the June 2002 issue. And his four decades as editor of Tempo, the modern-music periodical first published by Boosey & Hawkes (and now by Cambridge University Press), may constitute something of a record in academic publishing.

MacDonald was born in Nairn on February 26th, 1948 and spent his first five years there before his family moved to Edinburgh, to rejoin his father, who was head of geography at the Royal High School (and also a capable jazz pianist). His first encounter with classical music came about courtesy of the family pianola, and his horizons were expanded by the school record club, which soon taught him that there were interesting composers outside the classical mainstream, kindling a lifetime of musical curiosity.

A three-year English degree at Downing College, Cambridge, was followed by a further year there studying music, whereafter he moved to London, beginning his career in music in 1971 as tape librarian of Saga Records – whose eccentric owner, Marcel Rodd, threw him out when he incautiously enquired if there might be any holiday pay. A temporary job in a record shop brought him into contact with the editor of Records and Recording who invited him to review for the magazine. That was when he adopted the pen name of Calum MacDonald: there was a Malcolm MacDonald long established as a reviewer for Gramophone and so Malcolm became Calum, maintaining the guise even after the death of his homonym. One wonders how many thousands of reviews followed over the next four decades.

His interest in the music of Havergal Brian had brought him into the orbit of Robert Simpson, who as a BBC producer was Brian's principal protagonist (a mantle MacDonald was to wear himself in due course). Simpson now put MacDonald in touch with the editor of The Listener, Karl Miller, a fellow old boy of the Royal High and Downing College, and thus began his career in musical journalism. His Listener comments on 'Last Week's Music' were as wide-ranging in their sympathies as they were perceptive in their judgements.

Another early contact with long-standing consequences was with David Drew, musicologist, publishing director at the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes and editor of Tempo. MacDonald became Drew's assistant at Tempo in 1972, gradually assuming his editorial duties. He retired from the position only at the end of 2013, to devote more time to writing and composing.

Having spent two decades in London, in 1992 he and his long-standing partner, the artist Libby Valdez (they married in 2011), moved to Stanley Down, in Gloucester, to a house whose garden is bordered by the River Frome. There he maintained the prolific output of articles, reviews and booklet notes that made him a household name in English-speaking musical circles and an authority of international standing on 'his' composers, Brahms, Brian and Foulds especially; but he could write on virtually any subject requested of him, and would deliver – on time, whatever his workload – a text that read authoritatively and elegantly, somehow putting its finger on the pulse of the music he was writing about.

He was proud of his work editing Robert Gerhard's unfinished ballet Soirées de Barcelone and his orchestration of the final act, but boastfulness was not in his nature. So you had to press him to learn anything of his own compositions – largely piano music and songs – and before long he would change the subject. One work that did reach performance and (private) recording was a piano prelude evoking the Hebrides, A Waste of Seas, and at the time of his death he was working on a large-scale orchestra piece. He ignored a request to send a list of his compositions, just as he did another to assemble his most important essays in an anthology, instead devoting his time to other people's music. His own standing as a composer will become clear only now that his modesty is not standing in the way. And the world is already a poorer place without his prose.

http://recordreview.co.uk/obituaries.php

[Mark Thomas]

A typically accurate, perceptive and generous valediction from Martin.