Wilfrid Mellers

Wilfrid Howard Mellers (born April 26, 1914 in Leamington Spa , † May 16, 2008 in Scrayingham ), was a British music critic, scientist, educator and composer.

Life

The son of an elementary school teacher attended Leamington College and studied English and music at Downing College , Cambridge from 1933 . In Oxford he studied composition with Egon Wellesz and Edmund Rubbra . In the 1940s he was an editor of the critical magazine Scrutiny and taught at Downing College . He then worked for more than ten years at Birmingham University and received a visiting professorship at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s . In 1964 he was founding professor of the music faculty at the newly founded University of York , where he taught until retirement in 1981. In 1982 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire . On his 90th birthday he was honored at the York Late Music Festival with a concert at Downing College , for which Stephen Dodgson , David Matthews and Howard Skempton composed works. Mellers composed several operas as well as dozens of chorale variations and songs and published more than thirty books.

Works

Compositions

Rose of May (1964)
Yeibichai (1969)

Fonts

Music and Society (1946)
François Couperin and the French Classical Tradition (1950; 1987)
Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (1964)
Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles (1973)
Bach and the Dance of God (1980)
A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (1984)
Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (1989)
Percy Grainger (1992)
Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century (2001)
Celestial Music? Some Masterpieces of European Religious Music (2002)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Mellers, Wilfrid
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Mellers, Wilfrid Howard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British musicologist, critic, educator and composer
DATE OF BIRTH	April 26, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH	Leamington Spa
DATE OF DEATH	May 16, 2008
Place of death	Scrayingham