My father, Jonathan Lloyd, who has died aged 76, was a leading British composer whose work combined dazzling range with a playful humour. His music – whether written for the Proms, the Southbank Centre or for a village hall – was characterised by a quiet determination to make contemporary music inclusive.
Born in London, to Geoffrey and Nancy Lloyd, Joe (as he was known) went to school locally in Osterley, west London, and then studied composition at the Royal College of Music under John Lambert and Edwin Roxburgh, after early lessons with Emile Spira, a former pupil of Anton Webern.
While still a student, he worked with the Twentieth Century Music Ensemble, won the Mendelssohn scholarship and had early success with his piece Cantique for orchestra. He later studied with Henri Pousseur and György Ligeti, and at the Tanglewood Music Center in the US was awarded the Koussevitzky prize for Scattered Ruins (1973), recognition that confirmed an emerging voice of striking independence.
He was never one to chase trends. His early works – Everything Returns (1977-78), Toward the Whitening Dawn (1980) and the Viola Concerto (1979-80) – show a composer unafraid to mix the refined and the rough, the serious with levity. He was a big fan of Frank Zappa, and electric guitar, saxophones and mandolin might appear in his work alongside strings and winds, not as gimmicks but as honest reflections of the sounds of his world.
His Symphony No 4, commissioned by the BBC for the 1988 Proms, captured that spirit perfectly: exuberant, rhythmically daring and slyly funny. Other works, including the Mass (1983) for six voices and Missa Brevis (1984), blended Renaissance counterpoint with modern sonorities, while his opera The Adjudicator (1986), written for the Oxfordshire village of Blewbury, showed his generosity in making music for amateurs. Later, he composed a new score for Hitchcock’s silent classic Blackmail (1992) and arranged Jonathan Miller’s production of The Beggar’s Opera (1999) at Wilton’s Music Hall in London.
At home he was thoughtful and quietly witty – interested in ideas and people as well as sound. He taught his sons a love of music and sport and to notice details in everyday life that others might miss: the rhythm of footsteps on a pavement, or a melody whistled absent-mindedly by a passerby. He was always open to new sights and sounds and, even in his 70s, was as happy listening to hip-hop as he was classical music. His body of work remains a testament to an independent spirit – one who believed that modern music could be inventive, funny and, above all, alive.
My father met my mother, Poppy Holden, in 1968 when they were both students at the Royal College of Music. They married in 1970 and had me in 1971. After the marriage ended, he married for a second time, in 1980, to Katherine Lloyd. They had two sons, Keir and Theo, before separating in the early 2000s.
Dad is survived by my brothers and me, and by his six grandchildren, Isabel, Joseph, Ollie, Owen, Rory and Kaśka.
