My friend and colleague Andy Whitfield, who has died aged 70 from bowel cancer, was a composer and performer possessed of boundless energy. Sometimes a creative artist needs to find the right place to apply their talent and, in Lancaster, Andy found that community.
A trained actor, Andy was a circus ringmaster in the West Country, with Del Oro’s Circus and Zoo (1973-74), before taking to the folk-club circuit as one half of the celebrated Valance Brothers. In Mold, Clwyd, in the late 1970s, he helped establish Theatre Camel, with whom he acted and composed.
In 1980, Andy met Nicole Carassik at a party in Hammersmith, west London. They married in Paris in 1985, a year after the couple had moved to Lancaster when Andy was appointed composer at the Dukes Playhouse theatre company, where he and I worked together. He wrote scores for a string of shows, most notably It’s A Girl!, “an antenatal comedy for the nuclear age”, which would go on to win an award for best off-West End musical.
In 1987, Andy wrote music for the Dukes’ inaugural outdoor production in Williamson Park in Lancaster, a promenade version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He suggested the music be sung and played by a choir and band drawn from the citizens of Lancaster, laying the foundation for both the Lancaster Millennium Choir and the highly popular annual promenades that continue to this day.
The Millennium Choir was a new challenge that Andy rose to with characteristic originality and wit. Compositions ranged from sung accompaniments to classic films such as Frankenstein, which were great fun for audiences and singers alike, to serious pieces such as For Every Child, an oratorio based on the UN Charter of Children’s Rights.
Andy was born in Herne Hill, south London, to Sheila (nee Leary), a secretary, and Peter Whitfield, a finance director, and attended Dulwich college (1961-69). He studied acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, then a PGCE at St Martin’s College, Lancaster.
Much later, in 1991, he was awarded an MPhil in music from Lancaster University. That year he taught at Milnthorpe primary school, then worked in other primaries as a peripatetic teacher and as a music teacher at Lancaster girls’ grammar school. In 1997, he established an intergenerational steel-pan ensemble in Cumbria. Somehow he also found time to write fiction, create stained-glass windows and, from 1990, serve a term as a Labour councillor for the John O’Gaunt ward in Lancaster.
I watched Andy bring live music, fun and pride to his community – and how he in turn was nurtured by Lancaster. The choir is currently rehearsing his last composition, a four-part analysis of the tropes of JS Bach (sung in the style of … JS Bach). They learn and laugh as they rehearse, as will the eventual audience. What more can an artist bring to their community?
Andy is survived by Nicole, their daughters, Zoe and Lily, a grandson, Jem, and by his siblings, Sarah and Tim.
