In 1949 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, where he continued his piano studies with Kendall Taylor until 1953, as well as harmony and counterpoint with Bernard Stevens.
He played his Second Piano Sonata to Georges Enesco at the 1950 Bryanston Summer School of Music, where he also took composition lessons from Boris Blacher.
[3] The death of Seiber in 1960 in a car accident, while on a lecture tour in South Africa, had shocked Lipkin, and the middle movement of the concerto was written in his memory.
The String Trio, dedicated to Joy Finzi, to whose country home at Ashmansworth he was encouraged to come and compose, followed in 1964, showing the clear influence of Seiber, and through him, Bartók.
However, Lipkin never fully adopted serial technique, so fashionable in the 1960s, and he always remained his own man, becoming something of an outsider in the context of compositional trends of the time, eventually finding an individual identity in his later music.
"[8] Chamber music was the primary focus of his later years, with works such as the Wind Quintet (1985), Variations on a Theme of Bartok for string quartet (1989), and the Second Violin Sonata (1997).