Professor Wilfrid Mellers: Musicologist and composer

Wilfrid Mellers exerted an enormous influence on several generations of British musicians at their most impressionable phase – as university students. He started the Music Department at York University in 1964 and it quickly became a beacon of enlightenment at a time when new universities were being founded and it was necessary to redefine the teaching of music in this context. Throughout his career, he produced a steady stream of books and articles which earned him a place as one of the most influential and readable British writers on music in the 20th century.

Mellers was born at Leamington Spa in 1914. He was an only child and his father was a teacher in an elementary school. He attended nearby Leamington College and, encouraged by his history master, edited the school magazine and was awarded a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge. Here he gained a first-class degree in English; then took the MusB; and stayed on to teach for some years in both fields. At Downing he became a disciple of F.R. Leavis, admired his wife Queenie, and wrote articles and reviews for his famous magazine, Scrutiny.

Some of Mellers' early articles caused trouble. A lengthy letter was published in which Boris Ford and Stephen Reiss objected to the fact that his writings were not "tempered with the same degree of critical rigour as the generality of articles in Scrutiny" and they disliked the excessively enthusiastic tone of everything Mellers wrote. Mellers replied noting that a reputation for critical rigour was more easily gained through the negative approach often found in Scrutiny rather than his own positive and inclusive attitude. For more than 60 years since then we have benefited from the generosity of his affirmative outlook, which is still too rare.

But far from being opposed to "critical rigour", Mellers exemplified it in his own way. He developed a technique based on applied historical knowledge and derived from the study of literature, where the context is used to inform understanding of the work itself. Music is not just notes to be played, but emanates from people.

Unlike most British university music departments, then dominated by musicologists, York started with a faculty of young composers – Peter Aston, David Blake, Bernard Rands and Robert Sherlaw Johnson – and also gave performance a high place in the curriculum. Mellers' starting point was that music was not music until it was heard and so there should be no separation between theory and practice. With this credo Mellers put contemporary ideas at the centre of his new department and, thanks to him, most of these beliefs have penetrated higher education in Britain. He brought music for young people into the curriculum in the same natural way that Britten composed for children. Composition was encouraged, leading towards the opportunities now available within the national curriculum in schools.

Mellers was open to all kinds of musical expression, anticipating the pluralism and multi-culturalism of the 21st-century scene rather than the inherited distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow. The centre of all this was Mellers himself, whose lecturing technique was uniquely charismatic. He was always a pioneer with an uncanny ability to see the way things were going, to find music that was not well known but ought to be and eventually would be.

The list of Mellers' books is long and shows incredible industry, especially after his retirement from York in 1981. Each one was a landmark. He published the first study of François Couperin in 1950; he recognised the seminal significance of Erik Satie; and was the first British writer to take American music seriously in Music in a New Found Land (1964), completed after he had spent two years as Visiting Mellon Professor at Pittsburgh.

Mellers raised eyebrows when, as a university professor, he wrote Twilight of the Gods: the Beatles in retrospect (1973). Undeterred, he followed it with A Darker Shade of Pale: a backdrop to Bob Dylan (1984) and Angels of the Night: popular female singers of our time (1986). His mainstream interests were represented by books on music and society as well as monographs such as Bach and the Dance of God (1980), Beethoven and the Voice of God (1983), Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (1989), Percy Grainger (1992) and Francis Poulenc (1993) as well as studies of less familiar figures such as Frederic Mompou (1989).

His writing opens up new experiences in the manner of the best adult education of the kind for which he was renowned when he was Staff Tutor in Music at the Extramural Department of Birmingham University (1948-64). Between Old Worlds and New (1997) is an anthology of his critical writings from some of the leading periodicals and selected by John Paynter, a colleague at York for many years: it was followed in 2002 by Celestial Music? Some Masterpieces of European Religious Music.

Another dimension of Mellers was his own music, which was overshadowed by his other activities. He started composing in an English idiom rather close to that of his teacher, Edmund Rubbra, but he soon moved on. Most of his works are vocal or theatrical, with a vast range of texts and subjects, and some pieces were simply practical, for local demand and performers who happened to be around. For example, when Mellers was at Pittsburgh he wrote a piece for choir and piano for a largely black school in a poor area. This was A Ballad of Anyone, an enchanting setting in jazzy style of a poem by e.e.cummings. It was the American experience which caused Mellers to see music whole, bringing in jazz, pop and ethnic musics.

This affected his critical stance as well as his composing. After this his concern for music education developed and led him to produce projects such as The Resources of Music (1969) based on the cantata Life Cycle for young people. At the opposite extreme Resurrection Canticle (1968), a setting of Hopkins for 16 solo voices, is a tour de force of vocal virtuosity.

A landmark was Yeibichai, commissioned by the BBC for the 1969 Proms. It was pure 1960s in the way it brought together a coloratura soprano, a scat singer, an improvising jazz trio, orchestra and tape. As with his writings, it showed Mellers' ability to identify with the permissive young and their clamouring concerns. Appropriately it was Yeibichai which was the climax of the York University concert for Mellers' retirement in 1981. His honours included the DMus from Birmingham in 1960 and an honorary DPhil from City University in 1982, the year he was appointed OBE. He was made an Honorary Fellow of Downing College in 2001 and the Spring Festival at York University presented a celebration for his 90th birthday in 2004. After this he wrote: "The evening was indeed a Red Letter Day for me – over 500 people, love and bravos ringing the rafters, and a potent awarenes again that I was a Real Composer!"

After a private life that was not without its upheavals, about which he was often gloriously indiscreet, he was lucky to meet and marry Robin Hildyard who gave him the security he needed in his final years. His Concertino for Solo Violin and Orchestra called The Wellspring of Loves (1981) ends with "Aphrodite the Postponer of Old Age". We can be grateful that the goddess was able to exert her influence on Mellers' longevity and that his irrepressible enthusiasms were never suppressed by those carping critics who once had the nerve to complain to Scrutiny.

Peter Dickinson

Wilfrid Howard Mellers, writer and composer: born Leamington Spa, Warwickshire 26 April 1914; Supervisor in English and College Lecturer in Music, Downing College, Cambridge 1945-48; Staff Tutor in Music, Extramural Department, Birmingham University 1949-60; Visiting Mellon Professor of Music, University of Pittsburgh 1960-62; Professor of Music, York University 1964-81 (Emeritus); OBE 1982; married 1940 Vera Hobbs (marriage dissolved), 1950 Peggy Lews (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1975), 1987 Robin Hildyard; died Scrayingham, North Yorkshire 16 May 2008.