Posted on 05/20/2008 8:00:57 AM PDT by Borges
Composer and scholar whose influence on cultural life in Britain was disseminated through his music, books and teaching
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.
Though Cambridge-based, with an emphasis on performance and composition, the new course soon developed much further, encouraging students to train their responses to chosen works or topics by means of the disciplines most relevant to their talents. Mellers himself was an inspiring teacher, lecturing from (or sometimes on top of) the piano, ranging in his subjects from Bach by way of jazz and blues to the Beatles.
His Beatles lectures drew much attention but also consternation, from fellow-academics for trendiness and from the pop world for professorial interference in its affairs. However, he made his position clear in one of his most significant books, Caliban Reborn (1967), in which he insisted that, “Developments in pop music cannot be isolated from what is happening in ‘serious’ music, and the West’s veering towards the East and the primitive can be understood only as complementary to the East’s need of the West.” His pages on the Beatles in this book were developed into a longer study, Twilight of the Gods (1973).
Mellers was still able to find time for composition. One of the most important works of this time was Yeibichai, which he described as “a parable about the intermittent necessity for a return to the instinctual life”. Commissioned for the 1969 Proms as part of a trilogy about “the savage state” and the modern world, it employed a Navajo night chant and was written for large, colourfully scored forces whose soloists included a coloratura soprano and a scat singer. His interest in modern experience set against a prelapsarian state of innocence found more traditional expression in a work based on William Blake, Sun-flower (1972-73).
Thirty years’ reflection were drawn together in two substantial studies, Bach and the Dance of God (1981) and Beethoven and the Voice of God (1983), which were followed by a turning back to his own roots and a tribute to “the Mind of England” in Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (1989). Though each of these books takes careful study of individual works as its basis, their titles reflect his continuing interest in making connections and seeking wider relevances and meanings, constant and even absolute if not specifically religious. A number of his reviews and articles, which were not confined to academic journals and included distinguished contributions over many years to the TLS, were collected in Between Old Worlds and New (1997).
An article of his about abstract expressionism in Modern Painters magazine in spring 1999 repeated ideas and quotations from a book by David Anfam without proper acknowledgment. When Anfam complained, Mellers apologised, giving an explanation that, as he said, was “not an excuse”.
Mellers’ 90th birthday brought concerts and special events in York, Cambridge and the Ryedale Festival. He continued writing into the new century, his last two books being Singing in the Wilderness (2001), on music and ecology, and a study of religious masterpieces, Celestial Music (2001).
Mellers was appointed OBE in 1982. He retained into old age his lively, questing mind and enthusiasm for new ideas. In person he was short, his spectacles flashing with interest, in conversation as keen to listen as to hold forth.
He was three times married, first to Vera Hobbs in 1940 (dissolved), second to Peggy Lewis in 1950 (also dissolved), third to Robin Hildyard in 1987. He is survived by his third wife, two daughters of his second marriage and a third daughter by another relationship.
Professor Wilfrid Mellers, OBE, composer and author, was born on April 26, 1914. He died on May 17, 2008, aged 94
Classical Music PING
I wonder what he would have thought about AC/DC?
I wouldn't have minded using Diana Rigg in 1964 myself...
Where the F*** have you been??
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