Philip Brett 1937–2002

It is rare for a Musical Times article to provoke anything approaching a minor scandal, even among a group as constitutionally timid as the musicological community, yet in 1977, such an event did indeed occur. The article, published in the September MT, was simply – somewhat innocuously – entitled ‘Britten and Grimes’, and it explored some of the ways in which the composer’s sexual identity might have been encoded in his most celebrated opera. It was the first time that such matters had been considered in print, for until then, his homosexuality, like that of many a distinguished figure of his generation, was off-limits, an ‘open secret’ recognised but not publicly acknowledged.

The author was Philip Brett, a forty-year-old US-based British musicologist well-known in early music circles for his devotion to another great outsider of English music, the Catholic composer William Byrd. His article, far from being a prurient peep under the Aldeburgh bedsheets, was an honest and scholarly attempt to probe the secrets of Britten’s creativity and increase the general understanding of a searing piece of music theatre. Yet the article (and the paper, given a year earlier, on which it was based) enraged as much as it excited, dividing opinion between those who were prepared to concede that Brett may have had a point, and those who regarded such airing of the Red House linen irrelevant to a proper appreciation of the composer’s greatness.

Six years later, however, it assumed seminal status through its incorporation into Brett’s Cambridge Opera Handbook to Peter Grimes. By this stage, therefore, and despite the initial mixed reception, the indifference of his academic colleagues, and the distancing manoeuvres of Britten’s trustees keen to stress the universal nature of the composer’s art, there could be no retreat into the musicological closet. Brett bravely continued to explore the interface between Britten’s sexuality and his operas. These he came to view as ‘powerful critiques of the family, heterosexual relations, organized religion, patriarchal authority and militarism’ – insights on which stage directors now routinely draw.

But it was to be at least another decade after the Grimes affair, and the establishment of the Gay and Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological Society, co-founded in 1989 by Brett, before his controversial approach finally entered the faculty world, alongside the new wave of feminist perspectives which had been asserting themselves on campuses throughout America during the 1980s. As he himself wryly observed: ‘Although heavily populated by gays and lesbians, the various branches of music have been slow to exhibit any overt opposition to the heteronormative order of things’.

Brett’s skills, in a field not yet noted for academic rigour, were perhaps unique; for although he generously encouraged some of the more impressionistic approaches to the discipline, he himself applied the same high methodological standards, formed under the benevolent though severe tutelage of Philip Radcliffe, Boris Ord and Thurston Dart, that were a sine qua non of his work on Byrd. These skills had been honed during the late 1950s and early 60s at Cambridge, which he entered from the choir school at Southwell Minster in his home county of Nottinghamshire, where he was born the son of a collier and a teacher.

At Cambridge, where his musicological contemporaries included Peter Williams and Arnold Whittall, he also fell under the spell of the EM Forster, Britten’s librettist for the homoerotically charged Billy Budd. The elderly novelist, now retired to King’s, imbued in him a set of ethical values from which he never wavered; and though Brett’s later preoccupations were yet to surface, it is not difficult to imagine that even at that time he was beginning to sense parallels between the repression of Catholics in the sixteenth century and of homosexuals in the twentieth.

Meanwhile, Byrd and Elizabethan music beckoned and were to remain constant companions throughout a forty-year careeer. Brett’s PhD, completed at Cambrige in 1965 after a year at Berkeley under Joseph Kerman, focused on Byrd’s songs. He collaborated with Dart on a revision of Edmund Fellowes’s mammoth edition of English madrigals. And at the senior scholar’s recommendation, he was chosen as General Editor of the seventeen-volume Byrd Edition, another big Fellowes project, which, after some forty years of valuable service, was more in need of replacement than revision.

For The Byrd Edition, Brett himself produced six scrupulously edited volumes: the songs, naturally, but also the three Masses and two books of Gradualia, the vast collection of propers for the main feasts of the liturgical calendar whose purpose had previously eluded scholars. In preparing his editions, he exploded many – often Anglican – myths about the function of this intrinsically Catholic music. When Stainer & Bell issue the final two instalments of the series next year, it will be the first modern multi-volume, critical edition dedicated to a major English composer to reach completion.

Yet for all his involvement with two very English composers, Brett’s base for the greater part of his professional life was the University of California, at the campuses of Berkeley, Riverside and, for the last year of his life, Los Angeles. At the high-powered Berkeley music department, which he joined in 1966, he was able to develop his gifts as a harpsichordist and choir trainer in addition to exercising his teaching and scholarly skills. In 1980, two years after he achieved a full professorship, and a year after his naturalisation as an American citizen, his direction of two classics of early Italian opera, Peri’s Euridice and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, won him the American Musicological Society’s coveted Noah Greenberg Award.

After twenty-four years at Berkeley, in a widely publicised move which served to affirm his continuing commitment to the Forsterian ethos, Brett left to join his partner, the English professor George E. Haggarty, at the smaller, less prestigious Riverside campus. There he served as chairman of a lively music department and as Associate Dean of Humantities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and consolidated his reputation as a charismatic choral conductor through a notable recording of Morton Feldman’s haunting masterpiece Rothko Chapel and a Grammy-nominated contribution to Nicholas McGegan’s harmonia mundi recording of Handel’s Susannah.

It was at Riverside, too, that his work in gendered musicology and on Britten came to fruition in a number of significant ways: an influential collection of essays, Queering the pitch, which he co-edited and contributed to; a pioneering, co-authored entry on ‘Gay and lesbian music’ and an unusually long and detailed one on Britten in the New Grove; and the American Musicological Society’s establishment of an annual Philip Brett Award, through which his name will be perpetuated.

Philip Brett: born Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire, 17 October 1937; died Los Angeles, 16 October 2002.