27 Facts About Anthony Payne

Anthony Edward Payne was an English composer, music critic and musicologist.

Anthony Payne is best known for his acclaimed completion of Edward Elgar's third symphony, which gained wide acceptance into Elgar's oeuvre.

Anthony Payne continued to write choral and vocal works, almost exclusively to British poets.

Anthony Payne found difficulty in subsequent composition until a series of orchestral works for the Proms, Visions and Journeys, The Period of Cosmographie and Of Land, Sea and Sky.

Anthony 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.

Anthony Edward Payne was born in London on 2 August 1936 to Edward and Muriel Payne; his father was a civil servant.

Not from a particularly musical background, at the age of 10 Anthony Payne went to see relatives in Godalming and first experienced classical music from a radio broadcast of Brahms's Symphony No 1.

From 1947 to 1955, Anthony Payne attended Dulwich College where he mainly studied the classics, though he still found time to engage in music.

Anthony Payne began further exploration of Western Classical repertoire, particularly Mozart and Haydn of the classical period and the Romantics Dvorak and Sibelius.

Anthony Payne spent his hiatus primarily as a freelance music critic and musicologist.

Anthony Payne later revised both the Phoenix Mass and Paraphrases and Cadenzas in 1972 and 1978 respectively.

Later in 1971 Anthony Payne wrote Paean for solo piano, in which a synthesis of the aria and toccata forms is dominated by numerology and tone clusters.

For 16 voices and text by Thomas Hardy, Anthony Payne won the Radcliffe Award for another unaccompanied vocal piece, First Sight of Her and After.

Anthony Payne was commissioned by the BBC Proms for The Stones and Lonely Places Sing, a tone poem that has a numerology-based structure and evokes "the bleak coastline of western Britain and Ireland".

Anthony Payne 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.

Payne's version of the symphony, titled Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne, was first performed in February 1998 at the Royal Festival Hall, London by Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Anthony Payne released a book in 1998, Elgar's Third Symphony: The Story of the Reconstruction, discussing his process of completion for the work.

From 2012 to 2013, Anthony Payne was a Professorial Fellow the University of East Anglia's composition department.

Anthony Payne's last major work, Of Land, Sea and Sky was a commission for The Proms.

Anthony Payne was 84, and died a month after the death of his wife, which reportedly affected his health.

Anthony Payne and Manning had no children, but were survived by a nephew and two nieces.

Apart from opera, Anthony Payne engaged in most traditional genres: large-scale orchestral, brass band, chamber works, solo piano, solo strings, choral works and song cycles.

Anthony Payne was forced to supplement his composition with work as a music critic and musicologist.

Anthony Payne was not a particularly mainstream composer of contemporary classical music, in part from his straddling the worlds of English Romanticism and modernism.

At the Proms on 13 August 2021, the BBC Symphony Orchestra played Anthony Payne's Spring's Shining Wake as a memorial tribute.

Alongside his career as a composer, Anthony Payne simultaneously built up a reputation as a writer on music, writing books about Arnold Schoenberg and Frank Bridge.

Anthony Payne became a renowned critic, regularly writing for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and Country Life.