Anthony Payne

rdf:langString Anthony Payne

rdf:langString Anthony Payne

rdf:langString Anthony Payne

rdf:langString Islington, Greater London, UK

rdf:langString London, UK

rdf:langString right

rdf:langString #c6dbf7

rdf:langString Anthony Edward Payne

rdf:langString Payne's principal compositional influences Delius and Vaughan Williams, top, and Elgar, bottom

rdf:langString Edward Elgar.jpg

rdf:langString Fritz Delius .jpg

rdf:langString Ralph-Vaughan-Williams-by-Hoppé-1921.jpg

rdf:langString Edward Elgar

rdf:langString Ralph Vaughan Williams

rdf:langString Frederick Delius

rdf:langString Composer

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rdf:langString critic

rdf:langString musicologist

rdf:langString "It was an absolute tour de force of insight and imagination into Elgar's world... [Payne] hadn't initially intended to try to reconstruct the piece – but eventually he realised there was a lot more there than anyone imagined."

rdf:langString "I wanted to marry English late romanticism with the European avant-garde of the 1960s. Everyone thought I was mad, to think of Gerhard, Lutoslawski, and Vaughan Williams, all in the same piece. But they were the things I was passionate about, and I refused to believe one had to exclude the other"

rdf:langString Colin Matthews on Payne's completion

rdf:langString Payne, The Telegraph, 2002

rdf:langString A Day in the Life of a Mayfly performed by Jane's Minstrels

rdf:langString 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, 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 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.

rdf:langString [[#List of compositions