Anthony Milner

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Anthony Milner (born May 13, 1925, in Bristol, UK, died September 22, 2002), was a composer, teacher and conductor.

Milner was educated at Douai School, Woolhampton, Berkshire. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied piano with H Fryer and theory with R. O. Morris. He also studied composition privately with Mátyás Seiber.

Milner's teaching career began at Morley College, London, where he taught music theory and history from 1948 until 1964. He was Lecturer in Music at King's College London, from 1965 until 1971, when he moved to Goldsmiths' College as Senior Lecturer, becoming Principal Lecturer in 1974. In 1980 he was appointed full-time Principal Lecturer at the Royal College, where he had taught part-time since 1961. He remained in this post until his retirement in 1989.

Milner had close academic ties with North America. From 1964 onwards he gave frequent summer lecture tours in the USA and Canada.

Milner's teaching interests centred on twentieth-century British music and on sacred and liturgical music. He was Composer-in-Residence at the Summer School of Liturgical Music at Loyola University, New Orleans, in 1965 and 1966, and the first Director of Spode Music Week, an annual residential Music school that places particular emphasis on the music of the Roman Catholic liturgy. In 1985 Pope John Paul II appointed Anthony Milner a Knight of St. Gregory, in recognition of his work for Catholic liturgical music.

Milner's early compositions were influenced by Michael Tippett, who was Morley College's music director at the time of his appointment to the staff. As he developed his own voice, he continually sought new ways of expressing himself within an essentially tonal style. Contrapuntal rigour and the influence of plainsong are evident in most of his works. A commission for the Leicestershire Schools Music Festival in 1967 resulted in a Te Deum, first performed by the Leicestershire Schhols Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in May that year under the direction of the composer.

From 1954-65 Milner was director and harpsichordist of the London Cantata Ensemble, with whom he gave the first broadcast performances in the UK of many Buxtehude cantatas. He also frequently conducted performances of his own music.

Milner was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his 40s. As the illness progressed, composition became an increasingly difficult activity. His last work, the Oboe Concerto, was completed in 1994. He spent the last two years of his life in Spain and died there on 22 September, 2002.

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