My grandfather George Newson, who has died aged 91, was an avant garde composer whose work spanned seven decades, including operas and commissions from the BBC at the Royal Albert Hall and performances at the Venice Biennale.
His first tape composition, Silent Spring (1968), created after time spent with Robert Moog in Trumansburg on a research fellowship investigating electronic music in the US, explored electronic sampling techniques using birdsong recorded from London Zoo, and is considered one of the earliest performances of British electronic music.
The BBC commissioned Arena, a highly charged political operatic piece, for the 1971 Proms. Set to words by a friend, Len Smith, it was conducted by Pierre Boulez.
Born in London to George, a stevedore with Jamaican heritage, and Edith (nee Driscoll), who was of Irish descent, George taught himself the piano while evacuated to Taunton in Somerset during the second world war. Later, aged 14, he was heard playing boogie woogie in the basement of his local youth club and was encouraged to apply to the Blackheath Conservatoire of Music, in south-east London. The school enforced elocution lessons, and this made George even more determined to be true to himself in his musical work.
Aged 19, in 1951, he married June Gould, a typist who later ran a wholefood stall to help support the family. In 1957 George studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music to study composition with Alan Bush and Howard Ferguson. During this time he attended the Dartington and Darmstadt summer schools, where he worked with the American composers John Cage and Elliott Carter, and the Italians Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono.
After Silent Spring, George worked at the Rai studio in Milan, producing Canto 11 for clarinet and tape (1968), which was performed at the Venice Biennale in 1969. In the same year he made his third tape composition, Genus II.
In 1984 Boulez invited him to Paris to work at Ircam, an institute dedicated to the research of music and sound. There he composed a work for Boulez’s Ensemble intercontemporian, Aphelion/Perihelion, which they performed in 1989.
In 1993 the BBC commissioned Songs for the Turning Year for the 1993 Proms. Other notable works include Mrs Fraser’s Frenzy (1994), a one-act opera based on a Fleur Adcock poem, for the Canterbury and Cheltenham festivals, and the concerto Both Arms, commissioned for the 2002 Canterbury festival. For the BBC’s 50th anniversary in 1972 he set Praise to the Air to a text by the poet George MacBeth.
George held the Cramb research fellowship in composition at Glasgow University (1972-75) and was composer-in-residence at Queen’s University Belfast (1978-81), although he lived most of his life in Kent.
June died in 2019. George is survived by five children, seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
