Read more about Wilfrid Mellers

Over six decades, Wilfrid Mellers exercised a stimulating influence on British musical life in three roles — as a composer, as a critic of rare range and intelligence and, not least, as a pioneering teacher.

Since his central ideas were concerned with making connections, he saw these activities as complementary rather than conflicting. The influences on his compositions embraced the Baroque, music theatre, jazz and the folk music of various cultures; he wrote perceptive studies of composers in the central stream of European tradition, and on those as different as Couperin, Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger and the Beatles; and, as Professor of Music at York University, 1964-81, he developed a novel course in which technical study was led by the composing and making of music.

If this diversity seemed bewildering, it was unified by a steady intelligence that took all music as worthy of study (though not necessarily acceptance), and saw music’s function as “to reveal what we live for”. This even-handed approach was not to be confused with a mindless egalitarianism: Mellers was sharp in his judgments, insisting that “a limitless plurality of values is indistinguishable from no values at all”. While in this he reflected the influence of one of his most important mentors, F. R. Leavis, there was certainly never any Great Tradition of music in his thinking.

Wilfrid Howard Mellers was born in 1914 and educated at Downing College, Cambridge, where he obtained a first in English. He took a further degree in music, also studying composition with Egon Wellesz and Edmund Rubbra in Oxford. Returning to Cambridge, he was found a post by Leavis at Downing as college supervisor in English, and began writing literary and musical reviews for Scrutiny, also lodging rent-free in the Leavises’ house until a quarrel with Queenie Leavis led to his departure in 1948.

He had meanwhile begun composing, especially settings of English verse and Biblical texts. His first books were Music and Society (1946) and essays collected as Studies in Contemporary Music (1948), in which his preoccupations with music as social function and as a language (“the most probing we have”) were revealed in commentary both lively and penetrating.

Mellers found a niche as a composer for Midlands repertory theatres while acting as staff tutor in music to the extramural department of the University of Birmingham. Here he ran a summer school at Attingham Park to which he invited American composers including Copland, Virgil Thomson and Marc Blitztein, as well as Rubbra and Wellesz. He composed much, in particular an opera on Christopher Marlowe whose theme “had its roots in our past and was relevant to our present”. It was a substantial statement of another of Mellers’ central preoccupations, the breaking up of a world of stable order into one of tensions and conflicts. The relationship between modern complexities and what he frequently called an “Edenic” innocence had not a little to do with his subsequent interest in native music, and even modern pop, alongside the most mature European music.

However, his first significant book was what remains an authoritative study, François Couperin and the French Classical Tradition (1950). He also published two volumes on music from the mid-18th to mid-20th centuries as the latter part of Man and His Music (1957). They constitute both an enlightening introduction for students and a thoughtful history to which experienced musicians can return with profit. As always, his style was fluent and witty, his judgments provoking at least as much argument as ready acceptance, as he preferred.

They could sometimes be rather sweeping, which some Americans, disconcerted by his European approach to their hard-won traditions, found difficult to accept when he came to write his Music in a New Found Land (1964). Sometimes, perhaps, his concern to draw context and resonance from everything could attach itself to what proved, on inspection of the score, to be a very ordinary harmonic progression. But if this were a fault, he would have seen it as one on the right side, as did most of his readers; and the book is one of his most important.

It was in part the fruit of his time as visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1960-62, where rekindled interests included jazz and the inter-relationships of different kinds of music, which he encountered when working in a deprived all-black school in the city.

Back in England, he wrote Harmonious Meeting (1965), concentrating on English vocal music between Byrd and Handel and exploring his literary interests in arguing that “the interpenetration of words and music is not the same as the simple addition of one to the other”. His compositions of the time included a commission from the 1964 Cheltenham Festival, Rose of May, using an actress (Diana Rigg) as well as a singer and instruments to create a remarkable piece of music theatre on the Ophelia texts from Hamlet.

In 1964 Mellers was invited to join the newly founded University of York. He invented a degree course, characteristically entitled Musica Poetica, with an emphasis on theatre together with ethnic music, folk music and jazz. This led to music becoming a separate department under his professorship, and to a radical rethinking of the purpose of university music education.