Initially an unrelenting proponent of modernist music, by the 1980s his compositions had embraced aspects of the late English romanticism, described by his colleague Susan Bradshaw as "modernized nostalgia".

From his 1981 chamber work A Day in the Life of a Mayfly on, he synthesised modernism with the English romanticism of Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams.

He found difficulty in subsequent composition until a series of orchestral works for the Proms, Visions and Journeys (2002), The Period of Cosmographie (2010) and Of Land, Sea and Sky (2016).

[3] Besides private study with Stanley Wilson, he worked on an orchestral suite and piano sonata and regularly played clarinet with Alan Hacker.

[3] Commentators note that the 'Phoenix' of the title is both metaphorical and literal, because it is, in the words of music critic Barry Millington, "a symbolic revivification of his compositional ambitions with a newly fashioned method of structural organisation.

[8] Commissioned and premiered by the Baccholian Singers of London in 1970, his Two Songs without Words for five unaccompanied male voices shifted focus from intervallic organization to music based on numerology.

[9] Later in 1971 Payne wrote Paean for solo piano, in which a synthesis of the aria and toccata forms is dominated by numerology and tone clusters.

[5][n 1] In the Spring of 1973 Payne returned to Liebestod, but quickly set it aside to work on the unaccompanied vocal piece A Little Passiontide Cant to an anonymous text from 14th-century England,[10] and later his Concerto for Orchestra (1974) commissioned by Richard Bradshaw and the New London Ensemble.

[8] He was commissioned by the BBC Proms for The Stones and Lonely Places Sing (1979), a tone poem that has a numerology-based structure[2] and evokes "the bleak coastline of western Britain and Ireland".

[1] In the A Day in the Life of a Mayfly (1981) Payne first embraced his earlier English Romantic influences, and synthesised them with his predominant modernist style;[8] Susan Bradshaw described this as "modernized nostalgia".

[2] The work is a musical depiction of the Big Bang, beginning in almost complete silence and utilizing dense brass and percussion textures to represent the immensity of the subject.

[24] Other activities during this time include his tenure as the co-artistic director of the 1994 Spitalfields Music with Judith Weir and Michael Berkeley,[1] and teaching composition at the University of Western Australia during 1996.

6 from Elgar's incomplete sketches for the work, which received its first performance under the baton of Sir Andrew Davis at a Prom concert on 2 August 2006 – Payne's 70th birthday.

[1] The piece was written around his 80th birthday, and took inspiration from the sounds of horses' hooves, masses of clouds and the landscape art of Arthur Streeton.

[2] Though Payne was drawn to various Classical and Romantic composers in his youth, the late English Romanticism of Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams proved to be the most impactful on his work.

[3][27][n 5] As a part of his interest in modernistic music, each movement of the Phoenix Mass centres on a particular interval,[3] such as whole tones in the Gloria and major thirds in the Sanctus.

[28] Another interest of Payne's was numerology; the virtuosic Paean (1971) is built on a series of sequences based on a random number table: 7 3 4 1 1 2 5 2 1 9 5 5 7 8 4 2 3 3 4 9 9 6.

[2] Other musical trademarks include wide spaced harmonies and frequent alternation between strict and fluid rhythmic frameworks.

[8] However, he was principally a composer of chamber music,[8] much of which was written for Jane's Minstrels and often included vocal parts specifically for Manning.

[1] Payne was not a particularly mainstream composer of contemporary classical music, in part from his straddling the worlds of English Romanticism and modernism.

"[1] Along these lines, Michael White of The Independent described Payne as "a quiet but thoughtful presence in British music [that] always strikes me as a kind of anchorage in sanity, confirming the continuing life of trusted values".

[30] Payne made substantial contributions to both the orchestral and choral/vocal repertoires: his Time's Arrow (1990) and Visions and Journeys (2002) for orchestra were acclaimed, and he was a prolific composer of song cycles.

[1] Though he developed a highly individual style, The Telegraph asserts that Payne's legacy is "inevitably dominated" by his Elgar completion.

[31][32] Alongside his career as a composer, Payne simultaneously built up a reputation as a writer on music, writing books about Arnold Schoenberg and Frank Bridge.