Although he was active at a time when many people wrote twelve-tone music, he decided not to write in this idiom; instead, he devised his own distinctive style.

His parents encouraged him in his music, but they were not professional musicians, though his mother had a good voice and sang in the church choir, and his father played the piano a little, by ear.

He was lost in the magic of the moment, losing all sense of the scenery round about him, just being aware of "downward drifting sounds that seemed isolated from everything else around".

[5] At the age of 14, he left school and started work in the office of Crockett and Jones, one of Northampton's many boot and shoe manufacturers.

Edmund was delighted to be able to accrue a number of stamps from parcels and letters sent to this factory, as stamp-collecting was one of his hobbies.

He also continued to study harmony, counterpoint, piano and organ, working at these things daily, before and after his clerk's job.

[5] Rubbra's early forays into chamber music composition included a violin and piano sonata for himself and his friend, Bertram Ablethorpe, and a piece for a local string quartet.

[6] At the age of 17, Rubbra decided to organise a concert devoted entirely to Cyril Scott's music, with a singer, violinist, cellist and himself on the piano, at the Carnegie Hall in Northampton Library.

Rubbra was able to obtain cheap rail travel because of his job with the railway, so he was able to get to Scott's house by train, paying only a quarter of the usual fare.

Before Rubbra's last term at the college, he was unexpectedly invited to play the piano for the Arts League of Service Travelling Theatre on a six-week tour of Yorkshire, since their usual pianist had been taken ill.

The tour provided him with invaluable experience in playing and composing theatre music, which he never regretted and which stood him in good stead for his later dramatic work.

The War Office asked him to form a piano trio to play classical chamber music to the troops.

Rubbra was happy to oblige, and the trio, with William Pleeth the cellist, Joshua Glazier violinist and himself on the piano took six months acquiring a repertoire of chamber music.

On one occasion an overzealous entertainment officer thought there would be a better audience by advertising with big posters for "Ed Rub & his seven piece Band".

[9] After the war, on 4 August 1947 (the Feast of St Dominic), Rubbra became a Roman Catholic, writing a special mass in celebration.

The army trio kept meeting, playing at clubs and broadcasting, for a number of years, but eventually Rubbra was too busy to continue with it.

[10] It is a measure of the high esteem in which Rubbra was held in the 1940s, that his Sinfonia Concertante and his song Morning Watch were played alongside such works as Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, Kodály's Missa Brevis and Vaughan Williams's Job, at the 1948 Three Choirs Festival.

[12] In connection with the same occasion, he was invited by Benjamin Britten to contribute to a collaborative work, a set of Variations on an Elizabethan Theme.

[13] On Rubbra's retirement from Oxford, in 1968, he did not stop working; he merely took up more teaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where his students included Michael Garrett and Christopher Gunning.

Indeed, he kept up this activity right until the end of his life: he started a 12th Symphony in March 1985, less than a year before his death, but only one page of manuscript short score (bearing the opus number 164) was completed.

[14] Sir Adrian Boult commended Rubbra's work by saying that he "has never made any effort to popularize anything he has done, but he goes on creating masterpieces".

Rubbra did not base his composition on formal rules, preferring to work from an initial idea and discover the music as he composed.

He found his method of composition, working from a single melodic idea and letting the music grow from that, to be very exciting.

Grover recognises a "sense of relaxation engendered by a greater flexibility in the handling of materials" which sets this work apart from earlier symphonies.

The last was written in 1977 in memory of Bennett Tarshish, a young American admirer of Rubbra's work, who died in his thirties.

[29] The Cello Sonata of 1946 was dedicated to William Pleeth (the cellist in The Army Classical Music Group) and his wife.

Other chamber works in Rubbra's oeuvre include those for oboe, cor anglais and viola.The Quartets have all appeared on the Dutton Epoch label.

One of them, Variations on "The Shining River", was a test piece for the Brass Band Championships of Great Britain, 1958, held in the Royal Albert Hall.

He also orchestrated Rachmaninov's Prelude in G minor, though when this was recorded by Frederick Fennell and the London Pops Orchestra in 1959 for 'Mercury', he was not given due credit on the LP sleeve or label.

Rubbra wrote numerous articles during his lifetime, about both his own music and that of others, including Gerald Finzi, Constant Lambert, John Ireland, Paul Hindemith, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Benjamin Britten, Johann Sebastian Bach, Alexander Scriabin, Béla Bartók and Dmitri Shostakovich.