Arthur Butterworth

Born: August 4, 1923; Died: November 20, 2014.

Arthur Butterworth, who has died aged 91, was a trumpeter with the Scottish National Orchestra from 1949 until 1955, during Walter Susskind's adventurous post-war period as conductor and later under the more conservative Karl Rankl.

He returned to his native Manchester for seven years with the Halle Orchestra and Sir John Barbirolli. But by then his main interest lay in composing, which he taught at the Huddersfield School of Music from 1963; among his pupils there was Lynne Walker, who was later to become the SNO's fine publicity officer in Glasgow.

Butterworth was not a composer of the stature of Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, the famed members of what became known as the Manchester School. Nor was he a Gustav Holst, who had once been a trombonist in the SNO.

But he was (like his fellow trumpeter Malcolm Arnold) prolific, producing a stream of symphonies, concertos, and a wealth of landscape music in the tradition of his predecessor George Butterworth (no relation) who was killed in the First World War after writing his English rhapsody A Shropshire Lad and Banks of Green Willow - music filled with the most magical sense of poetry and still deservedly in the repertoire.

If Arthur Butterworth never quite created such magic in his music, he was undoubtedly adept at evoking the English countryside in such pieces as The Path Across the Moors and A Dales Suite. He was a Nordic composer through and through, with a northern English flair for brass bands, for which he wrote ambitiously, extensively, and with great zest.

But once he had left Scotland there was a certain (though by no means complete) loss of contact. Although Rankl had not exactly encouraged him to compose (the Austrian conductor's contempt for English music more advanced than Vaughan Williams was notorious) he found Butterworth's idiom conventional enough not to be a deterrent, and from time to time allowed him to conduct his own music with the orchestra, which saved Rankl the bother of learning it himself.

As a result, such works as the Sinfonietta, Op 9, composed in 1949, had a better chance of being heard in Scotland than they might have done otherwise, thereby satisfying Butterworth's desire to conduct as well as compose. The Viola Concerto (one of eight concertos) and the third and fourth of his seven symphonies were all recorded by the RSNO under the composer's conductorship, even if they failed to win a place in the orchestra's repertoire. Similarly his Symphony No 1 was recorded by Barbirolli and the Halle Orchestra in Manchester, where Butterworth championed his own music actively.

As a Mancunian, he had studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music (now the Royal Northern College of Music) where Richard Hall taught him composition. His Symphony No 6 had its premiere in St Petersburg in 2009, when Butterworth was 86 and still composing. He was made an MBE in 1995.