Patrick Gowers obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/28/patrick-gowers

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A composer’s study might be expected to contain artefacts designed to encourage the muse, but you would be hard pressed to find a greater variety than those of Patrick Gowers, who has died aged 78. Music scores of every period, CDs of jazz, Bach cantatas and the French impressionists Debussy and Ravel, mathematical tomes, computers, the Bible, poetry, partially dismantled synthesisers and a battered Bechstein upright piano; this incomplete list reveals only some of Patrick’s eclectic passions, from which he picked certain elements and produced music of great originality.

It made its biggest impact through film and TV scores, from the late 1960s onwards. An early break was Hamlet (1969), directed by Tony Richardson and starring Nicol Williamson. The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970) followed, with an impressive cast that included Franco Nero, Joanna Shimkus and Honor Blackman. Patrick’s ability to create atmosphere and drama through spare but arresting textures was welcomed by directors not wanting the bland or ordinary; he could adapt his style to a children’s film, as in The Boy Who Turned Yellow (a collaboration with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1972), but could also deal with tragic drama, as in Children of Rage (1975), set amid the Palestinian crisis.

In 1978, Stevie, centred on the poems of Stevie Smith and featuring the guitarist John Williams, was the subject of the BBC documentary How to Score, and the music then grew into a guitar concerto. Thérèse Raquin (1980), starring Kate Nelligan, with intense music for a small string ensemble, was the first of several collaborations with the director Simon Langton. Bread Or Blood (1981), a five-part series directed by Peter Smith, dealt with riots in East Anglia. In 1983 Patrick won a Bafta for original music for Smiley’s People, The Woman in White and I Remember Nelson.

The following year he embarked on music for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Jeremy Brett, to be followed by three further series over the next 10 years. With its romantic violin solos, often performed by his daughter Katharine, the theme music was key, and Patrick composed some of his most imaginative incidental music for the 40 episodes. He also worked on many other television productions, including My Cousin Rachel (1983), with Geraldine Chaplin; Anna Karenina, starring Jacqueline Bisset, Christopher Reeve and Paul Scofield (1985); and Mother Love, featuring Diana Rigg (1989).

Patrick was born in Islington, north London, the son of a solicitor, Richard Gowers, and his wife, Stella (nee Pelly). He was the grandson of Sir Ernest Gowers, civil servant and author of the guide to English usage Plain Words, and great-grandson of the neurologist Sir William Gowers. He went to Radley college, Oxfordshire, and while he was studying music at Cambridge displayed his quirky humour when collaborating on a revue with Bamber Gascoigne and Keith Statham called Share My Lettuce (1957). This transferred to the West End for more than 300 performances, with Maggie Smith and Kenneth Williams heading the cast, and by 1959 he was writing for the Cambridge Footlights with John Bird and Peter Cook, while for Dudley Moore he wrote a jazz piano concerto. He also taught composition, was a jazz critic for the Financial Times and assistant conductor of Bill Russo’s London Jazz Orchestra, played for the New Swingle Singers and in 1964 was music director of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Marat/Sade.

In 1961 he married Caroline Maurice, a fellow musician and piano teacher; three children helped to fill a rambling house in Clapham, south London. His continuing musical studies eventually resulted in a PhD (1966). Though he continued to pursue a love of scholarship, his approach was never drily academic.

The sheer quantity of his music might imply that he was able to churn it out, but in fact he would agonise over tiny details and found composing against deadlines extremely stressful.

Patrick expressed his convictions concerning contemporary music in his quietly persuasive way. Suspicious of atonality, he found his own form of “extended tonality”, developed principally from jazz harmony and 20th-century French music. The results could be striking, nowhere more tellingly so than in his concert and church music.

His Toccata, commissioned by Simon Preston and composed in 1970, is one of the most flamboyant and blisteringly difficult works in the organ repertoire. A fugue was added in 1986, and other works for organ include the quietly remote Adagio, and the witty Occasional Trumpet Voluntary, which mixes something akin to Widor’s Toccata with Jeremiah Clarke’s piece. Meanwhile, having always been interested in electronic instruments, he set up an electronic studio at Dartington Hall, Devon, where he often taught.

For the consecration of Richard Harries as bishop of Oxford in 1987, Patrick was commissioned to compose Viri Galilaei, with its dramatic core but beautifully mystical opening and closing. The large-scale Cantata (1991), for chorus, orchestra and organ, harks back to Purcell and JS Bach, achieving a sense of intense meditative timelessness. Holy, Holy, Holy and Aveto Augustine are among other anthems expressing Patrick’s mystical approach to spirituality. In 1990, the first performance of his Suite for solo violin and chamber orchestra, commissioned by the Prince of Wales in honour of the Queen Mother’s 90th birthday, was given at Buckingham Palace by the English Chamber Orchestra under Raymond Leppard, with José-Luis García as soloist.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, Patrick devoted huge amounts of energy to the Association of Professional Composers, working assiduously to improve the lot of composers. He then became a director of the Performing Right Society, where his intellect and ingrained sense of justice ruffled feathers but brought welcome changes. To those who did not know him, Patrick could appear somewhat aloof; to those who did, you could not find a more kindly, sympathetic soul.

He is survived by Caroline and their three children, Katharine, Rebecca and Timothy.

• William Patrick Gowers, composer, born 5 May 1936; died 30 December 2014