George Newson
Composer who danced with John Cage to The Beatles
GEORGE NEWSON, who has died aged 91, was once a leading light in the avant-garde; he composed an early piece of British electronic music, saw his oratorio Arena (1971) conducted at the Proms by Pierre Boulez and danced with John Cage to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
A hirsute figure with a large frame, Newson wrote Silent Spring (1968) using electronic sampling to superimpose bird song recorded at London Zoo and human declamation against a montage of manipulated sounds.
Three years later came Arena, which was based on the East End music-hall theatre of his childhood and formed part of the first Prom held at the Roundhouse in north London. Noisy and irreverent, it featured the King’s Singers in a Black
Magnificat, Jane Manning singing a lament inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s death and Cleo Laine telling the Garden of Eden story from Eve’s perspective.
George John Newson was born in east London on July 27 1932, one of four sons of George Newson, who was of Jamaican ancestry, and his Irish wife Edith, née Driscoll; an early memory was the funeral of a brother who succumbed to illness. During the war he was evacuated to Taunton, where he taught himself to play the piano.
At 14 he was heard playing boogie-woogie in a youth club and offered a scholarship to Blackheath Conservatoire. That led to evening classes at Morley College, where he wrote his Octet (1951) for wind ensemble, which The Daily Telegraph later said “suggests a thoughtful musical mind”.
He studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson and Alan Bush. Bush, a Communist, felt that a working-class student ought to be a working-class composer and accused Newson of betraying his roots with his avant-garde leanings.
While teaching music Newson began investigating electronic sounds with Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, resulting in The Man Who Collected Sounds, a musical drama broadcast in 1966. The following year a Churchill Fellowship took him to the US, where he witnessed Robert Moog’s synthesiser in its earliest production phase. At a recent talk in Folkestone he recalled dancing at a party with Cage who, despite received opinion to the contrary, was “the sanest man I had ever met – with a great sense of humour to boot”.
An invitation followed to the RAI studios in Milan, where he developed a close relationship with Luciano Berio. Talking to the British Music Collection, he recalled hosting the composer in the Sussex countryside and hunting for a farm to satisfy the Italian’s thirst for fresh milk.
After the high-profile premiere of Arena Newson largely dropped from sight. He was a research fellow at the University of Glasgow and composerin-residence at Queen’s University Belfast. Later works include Mrs Fraser’s Frenzy (1994), a charming one-act opera based on a Fleur Adcock poem, and the concerto Both Arms (2002) for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie.
He was an enthusiastic ornithologist and a prolific photographer, especially of composers, and many of his works are in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He created instruments out of almost anything, including old wooden butter churns tied together to make a percussion instrument, and made “sculptures” from dried banana skins.
In later years he entertained his grandchildren at the piano, modulating effortlessly from nursery rhymes into a Mozart sonata and then something spikier. At the local cricket club he planted trees to mark musical anniversaries, such as Beethoven’s birth.
Newson was 19 when he married June Gould, who worked in an art gallery in Rye, East Sussex. She died in 2019 and he is survived by their five children.