Anthony Payne

Anthony Edward Payne (2 August 1936 – 30 April 2021) was an English composer, music critic and musicologist. He is best known for his acclaimed completion of Edward Elgar's third symphony, which subsequently gained wide acceptance into Elgar's ''oeuvre''. Apart from opera, his own works include representatives of most traditional genres, and although he made substantial contributions to orchestral and choral repertoire, he is particularly noted for his chamber music. Many of these chamber works were written for his wife, the soprano Jane Manning, and the new music ensemble Jane's Minstrels, which he founded with Manning in 1988. Initially an unrelenting proponent of modernist music, by the 1980s his compositions had embraced aspects of the late romanticism of England, described by his colleague Susan Bradshaw as "modernized nostalgia". His mature style is thus characterised by a highly individualised combination of modernism and English romanticism, as well as numerology, wide spaced harmonies, specific intervallic characterisations, and the frequent alternation between strict and fluid rhythmic frameworks.

Born in London, Payne first seriously studied music at Durham University. Though a composer since childhood, his professional career began around 1969 with his first major work, the ''Phoenix Mass'' for choir and brass band, which was firmly rooted in the modernist tradition. He continued to write choral and vocal works, almost exclusively to British poets, particularly Thomas Hardy, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Edward Thomas. From his 1981 chamber work ''A Day in the Life of a Mayfly'' on, he synthesised aspects of English romanticism from his primary influences, Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams. Two orchestral commissions for The Proms, ''The Spirit's Harvest'' (1985) and ''Time's Arrow'' (1990) were well received. After several years, Payne created a completed version of Elgar's unfinished third symphony, which brought him international attention and future commissions for completions and orchestrations of works by Delius, Elgar and Finzi. Unsure of his musical identity, Payne found difficulty in subsequent composition until the 2002 orchestral Proms commission, ''Visions and Journeys'' (2002). Further major works include ''The Period of Cosmographie'' (2010) and ''Of Land, Sea and Sky'' (2016) for The Proms. He died in April 2021, a month after the death of his wife.

Payne held academic posts at various institutions throughout his career, including Mills College, the London College of Music, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the University of Western Australia and the University of East Anglia. Despite regular commissions from a variety of English ensembles, Payne was not a particularly mainstream composer and was forced to supplement his income with writings. A renowned critic, he wrote for ''The Daily Telegraph'', ''The Independent'' and '' Country Life''. Other writings include publications on a variety of musical topics, notably —a study on the composer Arnold Schoenberg—and numerous works on the music of Frank Bridge, to whom he was particularly devoted.

Life and career

Youth and education (1936–1964)

Anthony Edward Payne was born in London on 2 August 1936 to Edward and Muriel (née Stroud) Payne; his father was a civil servant. Not from a particularly musical background, at the age of 10 Payne went to see relatives in Godalming and first experienced classical music from a radio broadcast of Brahms's Symphony No. 1. Recalling the significance of the moment in a 2013 interview with '' Time Out'', he said he "was absolutely translated" and "hooked like a fish". A recording he was given the next year of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 solidified his interest; he began composing at around age 11. From 1947 to 1955, Payne attended Dulwich College where he mainly studied the classics, though he still found time to engage in music. Besides private study with Stanley Wilson, he worked on an orchestral suite and piano sonata and regularly played clarinet with Alan Hacker. Payne began further exploration of Western Classical repertoire, particularly Mozart and Haydn of the classical period and the Romantics Dvořák and Sibelius. However, his principal compositional inspirations were the late English Romantics Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams, influences which are increasingly prominent in various early works: two—in addition to the earlier one—piano sonatas, a clarinet sonata, and the ''Polyphonic suite''.

After a brief stint in the Royal Corps of Signals (1955–1957), Payne read music at the Durham University Department of Music in St Cuthbert's Society, Durham University (1958–1961). During this time, studying Palestrinian counterpoint and working with the musicologist Peter Evans assisted the growth of his musical maturity. Around his graduation, he had a nervous breakdown and largely stopped composing for four years. He spent his hiatus primarily as a freelance music critic and musicologist. Before his halting of composition, in 1959 Payne had drafted parts of the symphonic poem ''It Happened Once'', and returning to it in 1964 under the name of ''Liebestod'', he began to discover a newly personal style of composition.

Emerging composer (1965–1980)

Payne's new compositional style was first fully realised in the ''Phoenix Mass'' for SATB choir and brass, which he began in 1965 and finished by 1969. Commentators note that the 'Phoenix' of the title is both metaphorical and literal, because it is, in the words of music critic Barry Millington, "a symbolic revivification of his compositional ambitions with a newly fashioned method of structural organisation." Characterised by the use of harmonic intervals for specific themes and movements, Payne declared the work to be his first major composition. Payne married the soprano Jane Manning in 1966.

''Paraphrases and Cadenzas'' (1969), his next work, was a 14-minute piece for viola, clarinet and piano, that shared much of the harmonic language of the ''Phoenix Mass''. Payne later revised both the ''Phoenix Mass'' and ''Paraphrases and Cadenzas'' in 1972 and 1978 respectively. Commissioned and premiered by the Baccholian Singers of London in 1970, his ''Two Songs without Words'' for five unaccompanied male voices shifted focus from intervallic organization to music based on numerology. Payne's ''Sonatas and Ricercars'' premiered the next year; the nine-movement work featured four full ensemble movements and five movements of solos for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn. Later in 1971 Payne wrote ''Paean'' for solo piano, in which a synthesis of the aria and toccata forms is dominated by numerology and tone clusters. Throughout 1972 and early 1973, various writing commissions halted his music composition. By 1970 Payne and Manning had moved to a house in Islington, where they lived until the end of their lives.

In the Spring of 1973 Payne returned to ''Liebestod'', but quickly set it aside to work on the unaccompanied vocal piece ''A Little Passiontide Cant'' to an anonymous text from 14th-century England, and later his ''Concerto for Orchestra'' (1974) commissioned by Richard Bradshaw and the New London Ensemble. The latter was his largest-scale work to date, featuring ritornellos and—like the ''Sonatas and Ricercars''—rotating instrumental solos. For 16 voices and text by Thomas Hardy, Payne won the Radcliffe Award for another unaccompanied vocal piece, ''First Sight of Her and After'' (1975). Though now he planned to finish ''Liebestod'', he was commissioned by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band and Elgar Howarth so instead wrote a tone poem-funeral ode inspired by ''Beowulf'', ''Fire on Whaleness'' (1975–1976), for brass band. Throughout 1976–1979, Payne embarked on four more choral pieces, three of which were by British figures: ''The World's Winter'' (1976, text by Alfred, Lord Tennyson); ''The Sea of Glass'' (1977, text from the Book of Revelation); ''A Little Ascension Cant'' (1977, text attributed to Cynewulf); and ''A Little Whitsuntide Cant'' (1977, text by Emily Brontë). He was commissioned by the BBC Proms for ''The Stones and Lonely Places Sing'' (1979), a tone poem that has a numerology-based structure and evokes "the bleak coastline of western Britain and Ireland".

English Romanticism (1981–1992)

In the ''A Day in the Life of a Mayfly'' (1981) Payne first embraced his earlier English Romantic influences, and synthesised them with his predominant modernist style; Susan Bradshaw described this as "modernized nostalgia". Commissioned by the Fires of London and premiered 24 September 1981 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, ''A Day in the Life of a Mayfly'' soon became Payne's best known work up to that point. He continued his renewal of the English tradition in his next major orchestral work, ''The Spirit's Harvest'', which was his second commission for the Proms. Throughout the 1980s he engaged in a variety of genres; he wrote solo, choral, orchestral, brass and chamber works. Also in the 1980s, he held various academic posts. He spent 1983 as a visiting professor at Mills College, California and from 1983 to 1985–6 taught composition at the London College of Music. During 1986 he was also a composition professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, New South Wales. Among his students was the composer Enid Luff.

In 1988 he co-founded the new music ensemble Jane's Minstrels with Manning. Many of his works, such as transcriptions of seven songs by Peter Warlock entitled the ''Aspects of Love and Contentment'' (1991), were composed for Jane's Minstrels. The group also performed music by Purcell, Elgar, Bridge, Grainger, Webern, Schoenberg, and Maxwell Davies.

Payne's next important orchestral work, ''Time's Arrow'' (1990) was his third orchestral commission for the BBC Proms. The piece was well received and described by Millington as "one of his finest achievements". The work is a musical depiction of the Big Bang, beginning in almost complete silence and utilizing dense brass and percussion textures to represent the immensity of the subject. Another orchestral work, ''Symphonies of Wind and Rain'' (1991), was commissioned by the Endymion Ensemble and premiered the following year.

Elgar's Third Symphony (1993–1997)

Payne's realisation of the sketches for Edward Elgar's incomplete Third Symphony took several years to complete. When Elgar died in 1934, he left an incomplete score for a third symphony commissioned by the BBC
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