Anthony Milner 1925–2002

The premiere of Peter Grimes, in 1945, was widely viewed as a watershed in British musical life – the definitive re-entry of its homegrown composers into a world arena after nearly three centuries of indifference. Similarly, the emergence of the Manchester triumvirate, Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies and Goehr, during the 1960s proved to be another strong endorsement of its international credentials. Composers born between these two generations were less fortunate, however, and had to fight harder to maintain a presence on the overcrowded concert-platform – even those as evidently gifted as Malcolm Arnold, Malcolm Williamson, Iain Hamilton, and Anthony Milner.

When Milner’s op.1, the cantata for contralto, chorus, woodwind and strings Salutatio angelica, was first performed, five years after the Grimes premiere, its engagingly sprung rhythms, lyrical beauty, and fastidious craftsmanship announced the arrival of a civilised, unmistakably English temperament, in which musical means and ends were perfectly matched. Further vocal works from the 1950s, such as an a cappella Mass and a cantata, The city of desolation, confirmed that initial impression. Such was its unarguable quality and maturity that Hugh Wood, writing in the Pelican Books symposium European music in the twentieth century, felt able to single this music out for special mention: ‘Working in a strongly conservative idiom, but with wide and humane musical interests, Milner has succeeded in bringing an enlightened and refreshing breath of life to the English choral tradition.’

Milner went on to compose another fifty or so deeply felt and scrupulously crafted vocal and instrumental works, notably a set of orchestral Variations on the fifteenth-century carol ‘Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen’, first performed at the Cheltenham Festival by the Hallé Orchestra under Barbirolli, a large scale choral commission for the Three Choirs Festival, The water and the fire, and three ambitious symphonies. Recordings of Salutatio angelica, the cantata Roman spring, the Variations and the First Symphony were duly issued and enthusiastically received. At the same time, Milner gained a reputation as a highly regarded teacher, lecturer and writer, in the USA as well as UK.

Inevitably, however, as composers began to be judged as much for their novelty and promotional value as for their ability to sustain a purely musical argument, Milner’s music began to fall from favour, and major works were offered less frequently. The First Symphony, commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, was eventually premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, so protracted was its gestation, and the final pieces, the last an Oboe Concerto completed in 1994, were composed under the shadow of a multiple sclerosis which made composition an arduous, even superhuman, task.

Milner was aided in such adversities, however, by a deeply held Roman Catholic faith, which nourished even his ‘secular’ music – the Variations, for instance, are structured around the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary – and imbued it with an enduring strength and joy not always evident on the surface. Just as in the Catechism of the Catholic Church subjective insight is articulated through objective truth, the irrational forces of Milner’s creativity were subdued and shaped by carefully calculated technical procedures, many of them derived from the medieval and Renaissance masterpieces which he knew intimately and discussed in the popular surveys he contributed to the second volumes of Man and his music (1959) and The Pelican history of music (1963).

But Milner’s Catholicism was no mere ivory-tower ultramontanism. He was actively engaged with the Church’s introduction of vernacular liturgy after the Second Vatican Council, lectured and wrote on the subject, composed congregational hymns and Mass settings, and was, for services thus rendered, made a Knight of St Gregory by Pope John Paul II. And mindful of the Church’s universality, the texts he set were not confined to Sacred Scripture and the Liturgy, but embraced the ancient wisdom of Egypt, the great Latin writers, as well as more modern poets. Roman spring, for example, includes settings of Horace, Lucretius and Catullus, while Midway for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra gives musical voice to the improbable conjunction of Sappho, John Donne and Walter de la Mare.

Born in Bristol in 1925, Anthony Francis Dominic Milner was educated at Douai School and the Royal College of Music, where he studied piano with Herbert Fryer and theory with RO Morris. Composition was studied privately, with Matyas Seiber, whom he soon joined at Morley College in the first of a long series of distinguished teaching posts, which included a Lectureship at King’s College London from 1965 to 1971, a Senior (later Principal) Lectureship at Goldsmiths College from 1971 until 1980, and from 1980 until his retirement in 1989 a Principal Lectureship at the RCM, where he had taught part-time since 1961.

His teaching skills were also in demand overseas, and from 1964 he made frequent summer trips to the United States, often lecturing on the British music which he felt had been unjustly overlooked or misunderstood. It was a passion maintained throughout his life and was forcefully articulated in the early 1990s in a triptych of articles for The Musical Times – in which he had published several level-headed contributions nearly forty years earlier previously and in one of which had discussed rhythmic techniques in the music of Michael Tippett, a composer with whom he felt a strong affinity, despite their differing religious convictions.

Milner was not a naturally gifted writer, however, and it will be as a composer that he should be best remembered. For their freshness and vitality, his early works, at least, deserve frequent revival and recording. Given the opportunity to hear them, unprejudiced music-lovers will perhaps then be equipped to hail some distinctive and enduring contributions to twentieth-century British musical life.

Anthony Milner: born Bristol, 13 May 1925; died Spain, 22 October 2002.