Wilfrid Mellers

Wilfrid Howard Mellers (26 April 1914 – 17 May 2008) was an English music critic, musicologist and composer.

Born in Leamington, Warwickshire, Mellers was educated at the local Leamington College and later won a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge, where he read English under F. R. Leavis.

He later lodged with the Leavises for three years while pursuing a Music degree.

Mellers also took private composition lessons in Oxford from Egon Wellesz and Edmund Rubbra.

After writing many articles for Leavis's journal Scrutiny since the September 1936 issue, he appeared on the editorial board of the January 1942 issue, and continued in that position until the December 1948 issue.

Mellers also wrote regularly as a critic and reviewer for New Statesman, The Listener, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and The Musical Times.

From 1938 he taught at Dartington Hall, and in September 1940 he married Vera Muriel Hobbs.

He spent the Second World War working on the land as a conscientious objector.

In 1945 Mellers was appointed to teach English and music at Downing College, and from 1948 until 1964 he became extramural tutor in music at Birmingham University.

While there he established a series of music summer schools for adults at Attingham Park in Shropshire, attracting prominent international composers, performers and scholars to help.

His early publications include Music and Society (1946) and François Couperin and the French Classical Tradition (1950), the first major study of Couperin.

Following a divorce from Vera, Mellers married the singer Peggy Pauline Lewis in 1950.

From 1960 for two years he lived and worked in America as Andrew Mellon visiting professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh.

Visiting America in the early 1960s he developed a lasting interest in the music of Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Marc Blitzstein and others.

From 1964 until 1981 he was founding professor and head of the Music Department at the University of York; he remained emeritus professor of music there until his death.

In contrast to most university music departments at the time which were dominated by musicology, Mellers focused the courses on performance leading towards composition and staffed his department with young composers, including Peter Aston, David Blake, Bernard Rands, and Robert Sherlaw Johnson.

John Paynter joined a little later.

He was also an honorary fellow at Downing College, Cambridge.

Out of that period came the book Music in a New Found Land (1964).

At some risk of being accused of "trendiness" Mellers also began writing about popular music, including the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

It was commissioned by the Cheltenham Festival in 1964, where it was performed by Diana Rigg, April Cantelo and the Wigmore Ensemble". His two surviving operas, including The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe (1950–52), were withdrawn after workshop performances and remain unpublished.

Jazz, folk and indigenous music, as a representation of the social forces of music, is another common thread.

In Caliban Reborn (1967), he argues: "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".

The passages on the Beatles were later expanded into a longer study Twilight of the Gods (1973), drawing criticism from both his academic colleagues and from the pop world, which regarded it as "professional interference".

Peter Dickinson has pointed out that Mellers "anticipated the pluralism and multi-culturalism of the twenty-first century rather than the inherited distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow".

Preoccupations such as music as a language ("the most probing we have") and the relationship between modern complexity and "Edenic" innocence became evident.

They divorced in 1976.

On 12 July 1981, he received an honorary degree of music from the City University, London.

His later books Bach and the Dance of God (1981), Beethoven and the Voice of God and Vaughan Williams and the Voice of Albion (1989) proceeded from visionary social and philosophical bases, "spiritual if not specifically religious", commented The Times.

He married for a third time in 1987 to Robin Stephanie Hildyard.

There were four daughters.

He died of heart disease at his home, The Granary, Plaster Pitts Farm, Scrayingham, Malton, in Yorkshire.

In his writings, Mellers continuously combined his interest in music with literature, philosophy and social history.

Between Old Worlds and New (1997) collects his occasional writings and includes a list of compositions.

His final book, Celestial Music (2002) was a study of religious masterpieces.

As a composer, Mellers completed several operas (he destroyed some others), works for chamber ensembles, two large-scale compositions for keyboard instruments and many songs and choral works, including settings of William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kathleen Raine and many American poets.

His early works show the influence of Tudor and Baroque forms, using a chromatic and often polyphonic musical style.

His visits to America exposed his music to influences well beyond the European tradition.

Poetry and drama are often central.

Rose of May: A Threnody for Ophelia, scored for speaker, soprano, flute, clarinet and string quartet, is based on the scene from Hamlet.