Music critic, editor, and publisher; Born September 19, 1930; Died July 25, 2009. David Drew, who has died aged 78, was one of the great background figures of modern music in Britain, a world authority on Kurt Weill and director of publications at Boosey and Hawkes, the music publisher whose output of contemporary works he revitalised.

Music critic, editor, and publisher;
Born September 19, 1930;
Died July 25, 2009.

David Drew, who has died aged 78, was one of the great background figures of modern music in Britain, a world authority on Kurt Weill and director of publications at Boosey and Hawkes, the music publisher whose output of contemporary works he revitalised.

Though born in London, he spent his early boyhood in Campbeltown, Argyll. Educated at Harrow School and Peterhouse, Cambridge, he became a protege of F R Leavis, Wilfrid Mellers and Roberto Gerhard, the Catalan composer who settled in England and whose works he was determined to champion. As music critic of the New Statesman, Drew championed other modern composers with similar perception, before becoming editor of Tempo magazine, Britain's principal voice of contemporary music, in 1971. It suited him to perfection.

Yet it was Boosey and Hawkes which, from 1975, gave him the greatest scope to develop his musical passions and to work with composers such as Peter Maxwell Davies, H K Gruber, Robin Holloway, Berthold Goldschmidt and Henryk Gorecki, whose qualities all mattered deeply to him. By then, Davies had already moved to Orkney, and the presence of other Scottish or Scotland-based composers, including James MacMillan and the young David Horne (whose full-scale opera, Friend of the People, was staged by Scottish Opera in 1999), on his list proved that he had not forgotten the land of his early upbringing.

His devotion to Gorecki was no less characteristic of him. It was thanks to Drew that Gorecki's Symphony No 3 achieved international acclaim in the 1990s, partly through Dawn Upshaw's Nonesuch recording with David Zinman conducting the London Sinfonietta. Claimed to be the most successful performance of a new work in the history of recorded music, the disc was completed in the presence of Drew, along with the composer and Nonesuch's president Bob Hurwitz, who reported later that, overwhelmed by the experience, his life was saved when Drew pulled him back from the wheels of a speeding taxi while crossing a road.

A pleasure to meet, Drew belied the often pretentious name of musicologist. He was a man not only of high and acute intelligence, but with it he was warm, interesting and elegant. He is survived by his wife, whom he married almost half a century ago, and three children.

CONRAD WILSON