The composer, pianist, author, academic and broadcaster Peter Dickinson, who has died aged 88, introduced music lovers in Britain to new sounds from America, from ragtime and jazz to the most experimental pieces. He inspired interest in unfamiliar works and was a pioneer in the teaching of jazz and popular music in UK degree courses.
An authority on American and British composers from Aaron Copland and John Cage to Sir Lennox Berkeley and Lord Berners, he wrote books including The Music of Lennox Berkeley (1988) and CageTalk: Dialogues With and About John Cage (2006).
The French composer Erik Satie was among his diverse passions and, as one critic observed, Dickinson helped make Satie a “cult favourite throughout Europe” from the 1960s onwards.
These composers in turn inspired Dickinson to write concertos for organ (1971), piano (1984) and violin (1986). Other major works included his Blue Rose Variations for organ, which was performed at the BBC Proms by David Titterington in 2009, and his Mass of the Apocalypse, played by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the Aldeburgh festival in 2015.
Dickinson was ahead of his time. He never forgot an apparent snobbism decades earlier towards jazz that led to BBC Radio 3 refusing to broadcast George Gershwin, whose masterpieces include Rhapsody in Blue, with its fusion of jazz and classical music.
He was born in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, the son of Frank Dickinson, the contact lens pioneer, and Muriel (nee Porter). After attending the Leys school in Cambridge, Peter got an organ scholarship to Queens’ College at the university. He could have pursued a route into cathedral music, but he decided instead to go to the US.
From 1958, he spent three formative years in New York, initially as a graduate student at the Juilliard School. “It changed my life,” he later recalled. “The impact of New York was extraordinary. London was dull around 1960. New York was mind-blowing.”
The composers he encountered there included Charles Ives, who combined popular tunes, revival hymns, barn dances and classical music, and Cage, whose 4′33″ involves a performer remaining silent onstage. He saw them as “powerhouses of a new way of thinking about music”, and told Gramophone magazine in 2014: “With Ives the popular music of his time, which might have been looked down on, was part of an art culture as well. With Cage it’s anything that is making a noise anywhere that can be included in one’s concept of music. These are pretty shattering ideas in ways that we’re still digesting.”
In 1962, after returning to Britain, he lectured at the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea, and met his future wife, Bridget Tomkinson, who had been a student at the nearby Royal College of Music. They married in 1964 and had two sons, Jasper and Francis, eventually settling down in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. With her support, Dickinson combined academic posts with a busy career as a composer and performer.
After lecturing at Birmingham University, he became professor of music at Keele University in 1974, introducing ragtime, jazz and pop into its degree courses, and establishing the Centre for American Music. He staged conferences and concerts, drawing on his personal connections with composers such as Copland, Cage, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.
He left in 1984, becoming professor emeritus, and later transferred to London University where, between 1991 and 1997, he was professor of music at Goldsmiths’ College, subsequently professor emeritus, and then head of music at the Institute of United States Studies until 2004.
Dickinson’s own compositions combined different genres and soundworlds, from the experimental to ragtime. He believed that all kinds of music can belong together. Pop was another inspiration, as in his tribute to the Beatles in his crossover composition, Merseyside Echoes, commissioned in 1986 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.
Other compositions included The Judas Tree: A Musical Drama of Judas Iscariot (1965), which was performed in the US across three nights in Holy Week 1967 at Washington National Cathedral, playing to some 3,000 people. The Washington Post wrote: “No one can come away from a performance of this work unmoved by its drama, untouched by its poetry, untroubled by its meaning.”
As a pianist, he regularly performed with his sister, the mezzo Meriel Dickinson, for whom, in 1965 and 1984 respectively, he set poems of EE Cummings and Stevie Smith to music – a reflection of his strong literary bent.
Some of his books drew on the lengthy interviews that he conducted for BBC Radio 3 documentaries: “When you make these programmes, you probably have 15 hours of interview tapes; the programme would be under an hour.”
In the 90s, he and his friend, the musicologist Bernarr Rainbow, established the Rainbow Dickinson educational trust, supporting hundreds of orchestras, choirs, festivals and community groups with grants and guidance.
It says a lot about him that his students – including me – stayed in touch decades after they graduated. He was a softly spoken, generous and supportive teacher, who quietly inspired others with his knowledge and enthusiasms, as well as a disarming modesty.
He is survived by his wife, his sons and his sister.
• Peter Dickinson, composer, writer, academic and pianist, born 15 November 1934; died 16 June 2023
