Jeremy Dale Roberts
Wide-ranging English composer with an unconventional streak
JEREMY DALE ROBERTS, who has died aged 83, was a composer whose music encompassed both the intimate and the monumental while also spanning both English pastoralism and the avant-garde.
He was a skilled technician with a clever sense of humour, as demonstrated in Croquis (1976-80), a series of 27 “sketches” written for the Arditti String Quartet, one of which alludes to 13 pieces by 10 other composers, all in less than three minutes.
His fondness for playing with convention reemerges in the String Quintet (2012), a work that straddles the interval of a concert. When the players return for the second half the viola player, whose music has been at the heart of the piece, is missing – a musical reflection upon the death of Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse.
In the programme note for Layers, composed for the tercentenary of Henry Purcell in 1995 and based on Dido’s Lament, When I am laid in earth, Dale Roberts writes: “I had first thought of calling this piece ‘A Good Lay’, but that didn’t seem quite seemly for the occasion.”
Michael Jeremy Dale Roberts, a twin, was born at Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, on May 16 1934. His father was the local GP and his godmother, Diana Oldridge, who had been a friend of Gustav Holst, introduced him to leading composers of the day.
At the Royal Academy of Music he became close to Christopher (Kiffer) Finzi, son of the composer Gerald. The Finzis’ home at Ashmansworth became a bolt hole, where he was welcomed into a wider artistic milieu.
He described overhearing Vaughan Williams at work on his Ninth Symphony there: “I was sleeping in the kitchen among the Aga and the cats and the huge carboys of mead bubbling away; and VW was in Kiffer’s room above. Every morning, around 4am, I would be wakened by the sound of the piano trickling down through sleep; then pad-pad-pad, as he’d go back to his desk.”
When it came to the first performance Dale Roberts was evidently nonplussed and wrote to the composer saying so, receiving a reply that read drily: “Thank you so much for writing: I am so glad you liked it – as far as you did: as the man said about Brahms – it ought never to be heard for the first time.”
His early works, such as the song cycle Beautiful Lie the Dead (1954) and the Suite for Flute and Strings (1958), are stylistically indebted to Finzi’s music.
However, his teachers at the Royal Academy had been William Alwyn and Priaulx Rainier, whose bracingly tough, Stravinskian outlook helped to reorient his musical thinking, imbuing it with an enduring muscularity, grit and tensile strength. This can be seen in pieces such as the Capriccio (1965) for violin and piano and Tombeau (1966-69), a pianistic tour-de-force.
Dale Roberts’s musical enthusiasms embraced the French Baroque, Ravel and Szymanovsky alongside artists such as KD Lang and the band Prefab Sprout. He read Proust in French and English, and translated the poetry of Saint-john Perse.
He was also widely travelled, working for a year as a private tutor in the grasslands of Cameroon.
This combination of openness and culture made him an inspirational composition teacher, both at Morley College and at the Royal College of Music, where he spent more than 30 years, latterly as head of composition.
This was followed by two periods as visiting professor of composition at the University of Iowa.
In 1966 he married Paulette Zwahlen, the Finzis’ au pair. She survives him with their son and daughter.
Jeremy Dale Roberts, born May 16 1934, died July 11 2017