New from Plumbago! (02-03-2025)

Christopher Wintle, A Paddle of Ducks (with: Ana Maria Pacheco The Misfortunes of a Sardine [eight drypoints]), Plumbago Books (London), 2025, x + 158 pp. with 14 colour photographs, ISBN 978-1-7392945-3-3, p/back only, £12. Also available from the publisher (with no p&p): plumbago@btinternet.com 

Each generation expects to yield more or less gracefully to the next. Yet, in 2025, the all-but-vanished post-war age seems markedly at odds with its successor. After 1945, British culture responded to the initiatives the European émigrés brought with them: it found the unfamiliar voices galvanizing, and enjoyed moving into unknown territory. The new age, by contrast, can seem enclosed, self-righteous and barely concerned with the past. So, even as it doffs its hat and bids its farewells, this collection of memoirs and tributes implicitly calls for a more open and better-rooted future. The majority of the twenty-two figures who make up this ‘paddle of ducks’ are musicians. Almost all are, or were, known to the editor. The composers are Benjamin Britten, members of the ‘Manchester School’ – Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr – as well as three Europeans – Benet Casablancas, Gérard Grisey and Egon Wellesz; performers are represented by Paul Hamburger and Anthony Negus; and critics by Hans Keller and Bayan Northcott. As a composer-writer, Hugh Wood is a distinguished hybrid. Beyond music, there are entries on Lindsay Anderson and Dirk Bogarde (cinema), Isaiah Berlin (philosophy), Patrick Heron (painting) and a number of academics – Geoffrey Chew, Robert Donington, Peter Evans, David Gervais and John Simopolous. There is also an illustrated tribute to the Anglo-Brazilian artist Ana Maria Pacheco that includes a set of her drypoints. By exploring the many ways of paying homage, this amusing but focussed collection mounts a novel exercise in contemporary rhetoric. 

CHRISTOPHER WINTLE is an emeritus musicologist at King’s College London. He has also written books on Britten (All the Gods) and opera (What Opera Means) and edited ten volumes of essays by the émigré Hans Keller and his circle. His aphorisms on life and art form the backbone of Metapoetics, which also includes pictures by Ana Maria Pacheco. 

Welcome

Plumbago Books and Arts is a small, not-for-profit award-winning academic press launched in London in 2000 to publish and promote writings and events in music and the arts that might otherwise have no outlet. It takes its name from the plant that grows in the wild across Europe and elsewhere but in Britain needs to be protected from the cruel frost of the climate. Its logo was designed by Mary Fedden OBE, RA after the characteristic blue flower of the plumbago capensis. The company is based in Clapham Old Town in South West London with its technical support in Oxford. Its books are distributed internationally by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. from Woodbridge, Suffolk, and its main printer is the MPG Books Group of King’s Lynn, Norfolk. It has received financial support from The Hans Keller Trust, The Cosman Keller Art and Music Trust, King’s College London, the Institute of Advanced Musical Studies (KCL), the Faculty of Music of Cambridge University, the Britten Estate Ltd., The Jewish Music Institute (SOAS) in conjunction with the Millennium Award scheme funded by the National Lottery, The William Alwyn Foundation, The William Scott Foundation and private donors. Its books are scrupulously refereed and are regularly reviewed in leading journals.

In its first decade, Plumbago Books has developed three strands: The Hans Keller Archive, The Poetics of Music and a General List. The Hans Keller Archive is part of the publishing outlet for a project to assemble in book form the principal writings of the well-known and influential Austrian émigré Hans Keller (1919-85); the editorial office is at King’s College London (where the Director is currently a Senior Research Fellow) and many of the publications are supported by the Cosman Keller Art and Music Trust (of which the Director is a Board Member). Plumbago Books is responsible for four titles: The Jerusalem Diary: Music, Society and Politics, 1977 and 1979 (with drawings by Milein Cosman) (2001); Music and Psychology: From Vienna to London, 1939-52 (2003); Film Music and Beyond: Writings on Music and the Screen, 1946-59 (2006); and Alison Garnham’s account of Hans Keller and Internment: The Development of an Émigré Musician, 1938-48 (2011). The Jerusalem Diary won the Royal Philharmonic Society Book of the Year Prize for 2001: Joan Sutherland presented the award to Milein Cosman during the Society’s annual dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, London on 8 May 2002. The Poetics of Music series is an attempt to map out a modern equivalent to the ars poeticus (Horace), the artistic instruction of the ancients, with wilfully heterogeneous volumes by composers, critics, scholars, performers, analysts and others. The first four volumes show how its repertory is drawn from music new and old: Julian Littlewood’s The Variations of Johannes Brahms (2004, with an introduction by Alexander Goehr), Hugh Wood’s Staking Out the Territory and Other Writings on Music (2007, with an introduction by Bayan Northcott), Bayan Northcott’s The Way We Listen Now and Other Writings on Music (2009), Christopher Wintle’s All the Gods: Benjamin Britten’s Night-piece in Context (2006) and Metapoetics: Aphorisms, Thoughts and Maxims on Life, Art and Music (2010). The General List has opened with a book by Leo Black, a member of Hans Keller’s circle, BBC Music in the Glock Era and After: A Memoir (2010).

From the outset, Plumbago Arts has consistently supported small projects, events and concerts in London. Most recently it published a 2010 calendar of Dancers by Milein Cosman on behalf of the Cosman Keller Art and Music Trust; on 24 April 2010 it contributed to an evening devoted to the pianist, teacher and former BBC employee Paul Hamburger at the Austrian Cultural Forum (Knightsbridge); and it continues to supply King’s College London with A3-size ‘Schenker’ manuscript paper.