Kenneth Leighton

Kenneth Leighton (2 October 1929 – 24 August 1988) was a British composer and pianist.

His compositions include church and choral music, pieces for piano, organ, cello, oboe and other instruments, chamber music, concertos, symphonies, and an opera.

He had various academic appointments in the Universities of Leeds, Oxford and, primarily, Edinburgh.

Leighton was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, on 2 October 1929, to parents of modest means, who noted his musical ability as a child and enrolled him as a chorister at Wakefield Cathedral.

Encouraged by his mother and the parish priest (who helped obtain a piano), he began piano lessons and progressed precociously.

In 1940, he gained a place at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, played at school assemblies and concerts, and composed settings of poetry for voice and piano and solo piano pieces (including the Sonatina Op.1a, 1946, his first published work).

While still at school (in 1946) he obtained the Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music (LRAM) in piano performance.

With the benefit of a State scholarship to study Classics at University, Leighton was admitted to the Queen's College, Oxford in 1947, where he also won a Hastings Scholarship, obtaining a BA in Classics in 1950.

At Oxford he came to the attention of Gerald Finzi, an early supporter and friend, who performed some of his works (e.g. Symphony for Strings, Op.3, 1949) with the Newbury String Players and introduced him to Vaughan Williams, who facilitated and attended some of his performances in London.

Leighton's earliest youthful works, characteristic of his Oxford years and well exemplified by Veris Gratia (Op.9, 1950), were influenced in part by the English tradition as represented by Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Herbert Howells, and Walton.

His own more distinctive style, however, emerged and consolidated rapidly between 1950 and 1955, and probably owes as much to the period of study with Petrassi in Italy and familiarity with the work of a wide range of 20th-century European composers.

After commencing his Classics degree he began to study simultaneously for a degree in Music, tutored by the composer Bernard Rose, and gained the Oxford Bachelor of Music in 1951.

Leopold Stokowski premiered his overture Primavera Romana (Op.14) with the Royal Philharmonic in Liverpool in 1951.

In the same year he was awarded a Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled him to study with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome, where he met his first wife, Lydia Angela Vignapiano, by whom he had two children (Angela Leighton, academic and poet; Robert, archaeologist).

On his return from Italy in 1952, Leighton taught briefly at the Royal Marines School of Music in Deal.

He held a Gregory Fellowship in music from 1953–56 in the University of Leeds, and in 1956 was appointed Lecturer, then Reader, in Music in the University of Edinburgh.

He maintained a lifelong passion for the music of Bach (cf. his award-winning Fantasia Contrappuntistica Op.24, 1956).

A few pieces reflect experimentation or flirtation with serialism, although Leighton's works are more generally typified by a strong sense of lyricism, diatonicism, contrapuntal mastery, chromaticism and rhythmic invention.

He composed a wide range of music (over 100 works, 96 with opus numbers, below) for many different configurations of instruments, often for commissions, specific occasions and performers.

Fond of walking his dog on the hills, Leighton loved the Scottish highlands and frequently visited the western islands (in the 1960s often in an old camper van).

In 1968, he moved to Oxford University, where he succeeded Edmund Rubbra as Fellow in Music of Worcester College.

Leighton returned to Edinburgh as Reid Professor of Music in 1970, holding the chair until his death in 1988.

After the spell in Italy, his life was dominated by composing, which continued uninterrupted, notwithstanding an unsettled period in the late 1970s and early 1980s associated with divorce and remarriage.

Leighton was a rather private man, averse to self-promotion and slightly shy of social occasions, who treasured peace and quiet, although he enjoyed family life and teaching (notably harmony and counterpoint).

For most of his career he managed to reconcile university commitments with composing, but found this increasingly difficult in later years and was intending to retire early to have more time for composition.

Indeed, Leighton never felt entirely at home or at ease with the title of 'university professor' and became disenchanted with the burden of administrative duties at Edinburgh.

At Leeds he formed friendships with the poet Geoffrey Hill and the painters Terry Frost and Maurice de Sausmarez.

A lasting friendship with the Wallfisch family (musicians Peter, Raphael and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch) also dates from this period.

Amongst his distinguished students at Oxford and Edinburgh were Donald Runnicles, Nicholas Cleobury, and Nigel Osborne, who succeeded him as Reid professor at Edinburgh.

James MacMillan also studied at Edinburgh during Leighton's tenure and described him as "a marvellous teacher".

While Leighton wrote a good deal of church music, and has occasionally been categorised too reductively as a church-music composer, he was not a church-goer or member of any congregation, nor even conventionally religious.

His interests in literature and love of nature and countryside are reflected in the settings of English poetry in many works, such as Laudes Animantium (Op.61), Symphonies 2 and 3 (Opp.69 & 90) and Earth, Sweet Earth (Op.94).

Trips to Mull and Iona in the early 1970s foreshadow the opera Columba (Op.77, 1978).

He also had friends on the island of Arran, which he visited regularly.

He married Josephine Anne Prescott in 1981.

Unlike most of his Oxford contemporaries, Leighton came from a working-class area of an industrial northern town; so his early rise to prominence is all the more remarkable.

Although he spent much of his adult life in Scotland, he always regarded himself as a down-to-earth Yorkshireman.

He eschewed the possibility of a career as a pianist, hoping that a University position would allow him greater creative freedom and time to compose, although he periodically gave recitals and broadcasts, and conducted the University (Reid) orchestra.

He died at home in Edinburgh in 1988, six months after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.

His grave is in the Glen Sannox cemetery on Arran.