Edwin Carr (by Martin Anderson)

After the death of Douglas Lilburn in 2001, the acknowledged leader of New Zealander composers was Edwin Carr, whose music trod a fine, though vigorous, line between tradition and modernity. He was aware of the potential dichotomy:

So-called serious music has lost or not been able to attract a good deal of its audience because so many composers are obsessed with intellectual experimentation the results of which fail to communicate directly. I too explore possibilities from time to time in my work but I am mostly preoccupied with bringing back the melodic side of music and never being too abstruse, harmonically, rhythmically or formally. Apart from the important evocative element in music I like to make music which is never too far away from "song and dance".

A childhood fascination with music was fed by his father's collection of jazz, pop and classical records. Prom concerts in Wellington simultaneously encouraged an interest in the orchestra and an aversion to Wagner, and a New Zealand visit of the Coldstream Guards in 1933 sparked a fondness for brass, percussion and Sousa marches - all influences later reflected in his own works.

Carr attended Otago Boys' High School from 1940 to 1943 before going on to study music at Otago University in 1944-45 and Auckland University College in 1946-47, though he left without finishing his degree when a bursary from the New Zealand government brought him to London. Here, until 1953, he was a composition student of Benjamin Frankel at the Guildhall School of Music, establishing a reputation of his own at the same time: his Mardi Gras Overture, written in 1950, carried off the first prize at the Auckland Festival (the president of the jury was Eugene Goossens), and he won the medal of the Royal Overseas League with his Prelude, Three Dances and Epilogue for two pianos (1953). His run of trophies continued in 1954, with a British Council scholarship that allowed him to study with the late Goffreddo Petrassi at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome; a further scholarship, in 1957, brought him to Carl Orff at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich.

While in Italy, Carr composed two ballets – Cacciati dal Paradiso and Electra, both in 1955 – for Il Nuovo Balletto d'Italia; they were scored for two pianos and Carr, a fine pianist, toured Italy with the company, acting as both music director and duo pianist.

His return to New Zealand in 1958 was marked by a first orchestral commission, for Nightmusic – Scherzo, performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under John Hopkins. It initiated a long series of orchestral works, including four symphonies (1981, 1984, 1987 and 1993), a Sinfonietta (1979), two piano concertos (1962 and 1985) and one for violin (1995).

His early commissions – which included a request for an Organ Sonata in 1958 – didn't hold him in New Zealand for long, and in 1960, after a period as a lecturer in Victoria University in Wellington in 1959, he moved first to Sydney, where he worked for the Australia Broadcasting Corporation, and then returned to Britain. For twelve years (1960-72) he was a part-time teacher at the Suffolk Rural Music School; he also taught at the New Ipswich Civic College. And in 1961-62 he renewed his studies with Benjamin Frankel.

Carr enjoyed regular performances in Britain, and commissions frequently came his way. One of them, in 1970, was from the Arts Council, for Nastasya, an opera based on Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and required a trip back to New Zealand to work with the librettist, Edward Hill. In 1973 a two-year Mozart Fellowship at the Otago University (in Dunedin) brought a longer stay, but afterwards Carr was on the move again, this time settling in Australia, taking up a part-time lecturing post at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music - most of the rest of his time, of course, being consumed by a steady stream of commissions from, for example, the New Zealand Embassy in Bonn, Radio NZ and the Australia Council. He was also active as a conductor, working with all five of the ABC symphony orchestras, usually in performances of his own music.

His permanent return to New Zealand followed in 1984, maintaining the balance of teaching and writing until 1987, when retirement allowed him to devote himself entirely to composition, after 1991 in a house on Waiheke Island, in the Hauraki Gulf by Auckland Harbour. His already brisk output now speeded up yet futher: the list of works from the 1990s is almost double that of each preceding decade; in 2001 he added an autobiography, A Life Set to Music.

Carr's final tally of works sit at around the hundred-mark. They cover a wide range of expression, admitting both dissonant modernity and the reassuring outlines of tonal melody. He had a lively ear for orchestral colour and a buoyant feeling for rhythm. For the writer Rob Barnett, the beginning of Carr's Fourth Symphony suggested "the opening orchestral bars of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd evocative of a heartless city thudding with callous Stravinskian energy" – but they're followed by a yearning, lyrical melody not too far from West Side Story.

A practical composer, Carr was ready to turn his hand to some unusual instrumental combinations. The Four Elements (1988) features two mandolins, mandola and guitar, Waiheki (1996) is for four oboes, and In the Rangitaki Valley and Coup de Folie (both 1998) require eight hands on two pianos. They joined a sizable corpus of more conventionally scored chamber music, including two string quartets (1954 and 1979), a piano quintet (1966), horn trio (1982) and an octet for winds (1989).

Carr – "Ted" to everyone who knew him – was conscious of his role as a New Zealand composer, and New Zealand imagery and texts are a regular feature of his music. An early homage to one of his first composition teachers came in 1948, in the form of his Variations on a Theme by Douglas Lilburn for piano. Maori often appears in the titles of his works, such as Te Tau ("The Seasons" (1976), consisting of Makariri – Koanga ("Winter – Spring") for piano (1976) and Raumati – Ngahuru ("Summer – Autumn") for piano duet), and Akaraua, four symphonic sketches from 1999. And a 1996 commission from the NZSO saw him working with Bruce Mason, one of the country's most prominent writers, on a sea-scape called The End of the Golden Weather. His national status was acknowledged in 1999, when he was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Carr the composer enjoyed wider respect than Carr the man. He could be tactless and prickly. Gillian Whitehead, President of the Composers' Association of New Zealand, was diplomatic about his relations with his colleagues:

Many composers received critical letters or phone calls immediately after a performance of their work. Although such advice was often difficult to receive, it did show the extent to which he listened to NZ music, and the passion with which he cared about the art and craft of music.

Playing under him could be a trial, as a former member of the NZSO recalled:

He was one of those composers who should have left the conducting of his music to professionals. He was not a conductor and I think he knew it. He had no sense of humour, and as soon as he stood in front of an orchestra there was bad feeling between him and the musicians. His acid-tongued attack on the players won him few friends – although the problem was usually that he didn't know what to do. He was his own worst enemy on the podium. Even off the podium he had an unfortunate nature whereby he felt the whole world was wrong except him.

One acquaintance reported that he "had an annoying habit of turning up just before dinner". Another was blunter: "He was a pain in the ass. The last years of his life saw an aging fairy turn into a bitter old queen. He was very rude and put everybody's nose out of joint".

His music provides a happier tombstone. Its ebullience and energy reflect a viewpoint he outlined in a seventieth-birthday interview: "Life is a fantastic festival.… I think we have to get into the depths of things very early on in our lives and that's what education should be about - because we only have short lives".

©MARTIN ANDERSON

Edwin James Nairn Carr, composer, born Auckland, 10 August 1926, died Waiheke Island, New Zealand, 27 March 2003.