[1] While there he established a series of music summer schools for adults at Attingham Park in Shropshire, attracting prominent international composers, performers and scholars to help.
Visiting America in the early 1960s he developed a lasting interest in the music of Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Marc Blitzstein and others.
The passages on the Beatles were later expanded into a longer study Twilight of the Gods (1973), drawing criticism from both his academic colleagues and from the pop world, which regarded it as "professional interference".
[7] Peter Dickinson has pointed out that Mellers "anticipated the pluralism and multi-culturalism of the twenty-first century rather than the inherited distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow".
Rose of May: A Threnody for Ophelia, scored for speaker, soprano, flute, clarinet and string quartet, is based on the scene from Hamlet.
Yeibichai, premiered at the BBC Proms in 1969,[11] combines a jazz trio with scat singer, chorus, coloratura soprano, orchestra and electronic devices.
[12] Shaman Songs (1980) is scored for flutes doubling saxophones, keyboards, electric bass and percussion and was written for Barbara Thompson and her Jazz Paraphernalia.
[13] The virtuosic and extensive Natalis Invicti Solis (1969) for solo piano uses corn dances of the Tewa Indians of New Mexico for some of its material.
[14] Opus Alchymicum (1969) for organ, his second large-scale keyboard work, uses the principles of alchemical studies interpreted by Jung as a starting point for musical processes.
[15] Another notable large scale piece is Sun-flower: The Divine Tetrad of William Blake (1972-3) for solo voices and orchestra, described by Roger Carpenter as his magnum opus.
A 90th-birthday tribute concert was held in October 2004 at Downing College, featuring music by Mellers as well as new pieces written for the occasion by Stephen Dodgson, David Matthews and Howard Skempton, among others.