My former composition teacher and friend, Justin Connolly, who has died aged 87, was a leading light of modernist
music in
Britain in the 1960s and 70s. A series of highly crafted, delicately wrought, notationally virtuosic chamber pieces he composed in the late 60s led to his receiving prominent orchestral commissions in the 70s for the
BBC Proms, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez, who championed his music.
There followed a period of ill health during which Justin composed nothing; after he resumed activity in the late 1980s – partly prompted by his high-profile “discovery” of the hitherto neglected 80-year-old composer Minna Keal – he never quite regained the public status of the earlier period.