Professor Ian Kemp

Professor Ian Kemp, who has died aged 80, was a distinguished Scottish-born academic, famed for his vivid and revelatory biography of Sir Michael Tippett, published in 1984 in honour of the composer’s 80th birthday. In the course of a long and active career, he was also acclaimed for his major international research on other composers, including Berlioz, Hindemith and Kurt Weill.

Though born in Edinburgh, he was educated at Chelmsford and Felsted, before studying music at Cambridge University under Robin Orr (also Scottish-born) and Patrick Hadley.

The New Statesman briefly employed him as music critic, but a decade with German publishers Schott Music proved more in keeping with his academic leanings. Schott brought him into contact with major composers such as Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies, as well as with Tippett, and gave him the experience he needed for some of the publications he was already planning. By the 1960s, however, he was back in Scotland for seven years as a lecturer at Aberdeen University, where the Haydn expert Reginald Barrett-Ayres was his head of department and The Herald music critic Michael Tumelty was one of his students.

Thereafter, as an established scholar, he moved from university to university, ending with professorships at Leeds (1977-81) and Manchester (1981-91).

Though tall, ascetic in appearance and at first impression somewhat dry in manner, Mr Kemp held spirited musical opinions.

After a Scottish Opera performance of Don Giovanni in Aberdeen, I can recall joining him and the conductor Alexander Gibson in the lounge of the Station Hotel where I found them heatedly disputing how the opening of the overture should have been played.

Gibson had favoured atmospherically prolonging the bass notes of the first two menacing chords, as in the written score. Mr Kemp would have preferred to cut them off abruptly, as Mozart notated in his catalogue of opening bars. The world of academe had collided head on with that of operatic tradition, with each of them believing he was right. My own opinion as a critic, veering towards long-held notes, was awaiting publication next day.

About Tippett, Mr Kemp’s views were no less stirring. What gave his biography one of its memorable insights was his decision to name, for the first time in public, the Scottish boarding school from which the openly gay composer had famously run away when he was a teenager but the identity of which, until then, had been kept secret. Having once interviewed Tippett for a newspaper article on the same subject, I myself had reached an impasse.

Though privately willing to name the school as Fettes, and to describe his experiences there in considerable detail, he insisted that the secret be kept – and those were the days when journalists honoured such confidences.

But by 1984, Mr Kemp and Tippett had clearly decided the time had come for Fettes to be named, along with the threat made by Tippett’s parents (who lived abroad) to publicise the goings-on unless the headmaster was removed.

When Tippett in 1991 finally wrote his autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues, he returned to the subject by declaring how he had been pressurised by his housemaster into standing before the entire school and accounting for the sexual behaviour of every boy he knew.

Mr Kemp’s other books – among them his fine Tippett symposium, published previously, and a critical study of Hindemith (1970) – were less sensational, despite his assertion that Hindemith, while important in his day, had had no significant influence on composers of later generations.

His valuable services to Berlioz included the editing of Nuits d’Ete and other great orchestral songs in Volume 13 of the New Berlioz Edition (1975).

In 1977, Mr Kemp was the dedicatee of Tippett’s Symphony No 4.

Mr Kemp is survived by his second wife, the conductor Sian Edwards, and their son. By his first marriage (to Gillian Turner) he has a son and four daughters.