Peter Phillips on Anthony Milner

In his last 25 years, the period of his life in which I knew him, Anthony Milner did not seem to change very much. Whatever splash he had made years before with his op.1 Salutatio angelica he was no longer in the limelight as a composer but concentrated on teaching, both as head of the BMus degree course he had been instrumental in setting up at the Royal College of Music, and as a tutor in composition. His students meant much to him, indeed they were the staple of his life as a single man, alongside his ardent Catholicism and his more general interest in books and learning.

In appearance he could seem forbidding, dressed in a style which had obtained in the 1950s and debilitated by partial deafness, a slight speech impediment and increasing MS. All these things could make an evening with Milner difficult, but at least with the MS, which made his movements somewhat clumsy, the more human side of him came out: he liked to joke that alcohol went straight to his feet.

It was too easy to assume that such a man would be narrow-minded, out-of-date in his opinions. In fact the greatness in him was that in circumstances where he could forget the trials of the world and relax (a glass of sherry helped), he could be free-thinking, able to interpret dogma and see through to the essence of an issue. In particular, throughout his life he voiced what many of his pupils and colleagues must have uneasily felt, that the British Conservatoire system of education was too rigidly in hock to Germanic ways of thinking. I shall always revere him for his outspoken advocacy of British music and musicians of every period against the unquestioned primacy of the music of Mitteleuropa on our courses.

One had the impression that he was sorely tried by his disabilities; and by his lack of recognition as a composer, even though he received more performances than many of his contemporaries. That he rarely gave any idea of internal struggle may be attributed to the sustaining powers of his faith, though one might argue that what this gave in helping him to come to terms with emotional difficulties it took away again, in making it ever harder for him to express himself outwardly or through his music. His Catholicism was particularly unhelpful in encouraging him to come to terms with his homosexual orientation, or in understanding the existence of other homosexuals.

History will determine what place Milner’s compositions should hold in twentieth-century British music. To me the best of him was in talking about literature. His generosity in lending volumes from his extensive library, written by such favourites as CS Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, GK Chesterton and Helen Waddell, and in buying me some of these, opened new perspectives. He was, anyway, instinctively sympathetic

To the inter-war period these writers represented, which also showed in his perceptiveness about the musicians of those years – Tippett, Britten, Vaughan Williams and all his colleagues in the musical renaissance of which he hoped to be recognised as being a part. That and his unforgettable way of pronouncing things. His inability to say ‘s’ clearly (one of our friends is known as Dimon to this day) and the click he had to give to certain consonants gave rise to a legion of affectionate stories and imitations. It was in conversation that Anthony Milner was at his most memorably individual.