Roger Smalley obituary

The British-born composer Roger Smalley, who has died aged 72, was not only one of the most distinctive composers of the post-second world war generation; he was also active as a pianist, teacher and concert organiser. Following a composer residency at the University of Western Australia in Perth, he took up a permanent post there, and went on to be a significant force in Australian musical life for four decades.

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His first published works – the Variations for Strings (1964), Piano Pieces I-V (1965) and String Sextet (1965) – pointed to his interest in new and experimental music. But they also showed an incipient interest in Renaissance music that came to the fore in a series of works based on keyboard pieces by the 16th-century organist and composer William Blitheman. Two works called Gloria Tibi Trinitas (one for orchestra, 1965, the other, which won a Royal Philharmonic Society prize, for soloists, chorus and orchestra, 1966) were followed by his Missa Brevis (1967) and two works called Missa Parodia (one for piano, the other for piano and ensemble, both 1967).

Smalley nonetheless retained an individual voice, and was critical of what he considered to be the over-prescriptive approach of Pierre Boulez. In 1965-66 he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. The music that Smalley wrote for Intermodulation – the live-electronics ensemble he co-founded with Tim Souster, Peter Britton and Robin Thompson – reflects a degree of influence by Stockhausen, but is less mystical in character.

Accord (1975), for two pianos, first performed by the composer with Stephen Savage, was the work he regarded as his “real” Op 1. It is both brilliantly structured and powerfully communicative. A recording by the pianists Daniel Herscovitch and Erzsébet Marosszéky was released earlier this year on the Continuum label.

Like a number of other works, Accord was inspired by the view from a high point of Perth and its environs. Australia made a great impact on him during his visit there in 1974, and he returned to make it his home for the rest of his life, moving to Sydney in 2007. Works created in his adopted country included Didgeridoo (1974), for four-track tape, and, for orchestra, Diptych (Homage to Brian Blanchflower, 1991), based on some of the Perth-based dedicatee’s artworks, and Close to the Edge (1995), inspired by the miniatures of another Western Australian artist, Lesley Duxbury.

However, Smalley never simply nurtured a confined territory of his own: he remained open to ideas in music of all periods, as in a series of works based wholly or partly on the mazurkas of Chopin, notably his Variations on a Theme of Chopin (1989), Piano Trio (1991) and Poles Apart, for a mixed quintet of wind and strings (1992). All three can be found on a recording on the NMC label, Poles Apart and Other Chamber Works (2004).

Of his larger-scale works, his Symphony was premiered at the BBC Proms in 1982, and he was the soloist in his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra when it was commissioned by the BBC for European Music Year 1985; the two were coupled on a CD for Vox Australis (1987). The Cello Concerto was first performed in Perth in 1997 by Raphael Wallfisch, to whom it was dedicated, and is included in a recording titled Kaleidoscopes, on ABC Classics (2003).

A native of Swinton, near Manchester, Roger was the son of Lionel Smalley, a secondary school headteacher, and his wife, Dorothy, the school secretary. Roger took to playing the piano as if performing at the Royal Albert Hall, so his father made a key for the existing piano lock to restrict his access to the instrument in the hope that the boy would do some homework. From Leigh grammar school, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, London, to study the piano with Anthony Hopkins and composition with Peter Racine Fricker, John White – a CD of whose piano sonatas he recorded for NMC (1997) – and, privately, with Alexander Goehr.

I first met Smalley when he was at the RCM, and, impressed by his brilliance as a pianist, later invited him to give a recital at Kingston Polytechnic, south London, where I was music director. We were both on the committee of the Macnaghten Concerts, promoting contemporary music, and had great fun trying to bring up to date what was by then a rather conservative organisation, on one occasion attracting a large audience to the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for a programme featuring both Intermodulation and rag music by Scott Joplin.

In 1989, Smalley became the first artistic director and conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s 20th Century Ensemble, which he continued to conduct until 2000. He received the Australian government centenary medal in 2001, was proclaimed a Western Australian Living Treasure in 2004, and, in 2011, was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia.

In 1967 he married Sarah Roe. The marriage ended in divorce, but they remained good friends. He is survived by his partner, Patricia Benjamin, the children from his marriage, Rachel and Davey, and three granddaughters.