Justin Connolly

[2] He was educated at Westminster School, went on to national service in the Army, and briefly studied law at the Middle Temple before deciding on a career in music.

From 1958 he studied at the Royal College of Music – composition with Peter Racine Fricker, piano with Lamar Crowson and conducting with Sir Adrian Boult[3] – graduating with a BMus degree.

His students included Catherine Jones, Minna Keal, Jay Alan Yim, Geoffrey King, Andrew McBirnie, Alwynne Pritchard and Kevin Raftery.

He could devise a limitless number of continuations at any given point in a composition, and the burden of choice led finally to a psychological and creative cul de sac.

[8]On arrival in the US, Connolly's development was swift, such that Anthony Gilbert (writing in 2012) could describe the premieres of Antiphonies and Poems of Wallace Stevens I in the late 60s both as "electrifying".

[9] His subsequent music continues the outwardly modernist idiom, rigorously crafted: glittering, sometimes pointillist, often concerned with the interplay of complex and detailed textures.

Connolly's mature output has been described as "characterized by clear groupings, by massive overall integrity, and by movement upwards, inwards and outwards towards the op.

It could easily be accepted as an early example of the burgeoning movement towards instrumental music theatre, which genre does not of course necessitate a set or even actors - the groups of players could equally perform that function, if optimally placed.

He composed four cycles to poems by Wallace Stevens, also setting Henry Vaughan, George Seferis, Sappho, Drummond of Hawthornden, Thomas Traherne, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Japanese poetry.

Bonnie and Josie, dressed in calico, are dancing round a stump, the erotic symbolism of which is again graphically brought to the fore in the instrumental writing, particularly in the final bar.

Here the tape tracks prepared with the collaboration of Peter Zinovieff consist of straight and distorted recordings of the four instrumentalists; they produce a complicated flux of opposed tempos as well as a fascinating interplay of noise and sound, echo and re-echo.