David Johnson, who has died aged 66, was a Scottish composer, musicologist and author of two trailblazing books on the country�s musical history.

Composer and musicologist

Born October 27, 1942
Died March 30, 2009

David Johnson, who has died aged 66, was a Scottish composer, musicologist and author of two trailblazing books on the country's musical history.

The first of them, Music and Society in Lowland Scotland, and its successor, Scottish Fiddle Music in the Eighteenth Century, established him as a major authority on these subjects. The first, which at the time of its publication provoked battle between Scottish historians (who welcomed it) and musicians (who didn't), won him his PhD at Cambridge.

The second, a seminal study, meticulously explored decade after decade of unknown Scottish music leading up to the emergence of Neil Gow in 1745 as Scotland's fiddle player par excellence.

Today both books remain vital contributions to the fine detail of their subjects. Thanks to Johnson, Italian baroque composers, Highland pipers, Army trumpeters, the Church of Scotland, the music of Henry Purcell and the 1707 Act of Union all slot vividly into the Scottish musical scene.

The book on fiddle music invaluably incorporates nearly 100 pieces - pibrochs, dances, sonatas - edited by him from eighteenth-century sources such as William McGibbon, Daniel Dow and the Gow brothers, Neil and Nathaniel. Neil's fame, as Johnson has established, began when he entered a fiddle competition at which the judge, who was blind, declared that he could distinguish the stroke of Neil's bow among those of a hundred other players.

From these books, the Edinburgh-based Johnson progressed to anthologies entitled Stepping Northward, Thistle and Minuet and The Scots Cello Book (he was himself a cellist). As a composer, he wrote more than 50 works, including his operas All There Was Between Them (1969) and Thomas the Rhymer (1976), inspired by the Scott border ballad, which was successfully staged in Edinburgh by a company formed and led by Johnson himself.

Among other pieces were a comic opera for students entitled Sorry, False Alarm, a chamber concerto and a birthday song for the soprano Jane Manning.

The son of the late Sir Ronald Johnson, Scottish-based civil servant and secretary of the Scottish Home and Health Department from 1963 until 1972, David was a prolific contributor on matters Scottish to The New Grove Dictionary of Music, and played the cello in performances of old Scottish music demanding the services of that instrument.

Both his parents were musical, his father an expert on old keyboards (he once left an important meeting saying he had to go and tune a virginal) and organist of St Columba's-by-the-Castle in Edinburgh. His mother was also an organist, at Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian, and was a formidable conductor of her own choir, the Holst Singers.

David, ever busy musically, was a familiar face in the audience at concerts of the sort that attracted him and which, from time to time, he reviewed as a critic.

Attending the premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies's austere musical seascape, Stone Litany, by the RSNO, he seized his opportunity to call it just another Hebrides overture.

Educated at the Rudolf Steiner School in Edinburgh, where he was later briefly a teacher, and at Aberdeen University as well as Cambridge, he composed lucid, tonal music of his own, with influences ranging from Britten to the Beatles. He had, in some ways, the air of a perpetual schoolboy - one who was thin, bespectacled, eager, tousle-haired, chain-smoking, buttonholing and full of theories. Some thought him thrawn, but he seemed always a genuine, dedicated musician, with an unfulfilled ambition to compose an opera on one of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books, Secret Water, set in the marshlands of Essex.

His death was sudden and solitary. His marriage - from which was born his son, Martin, followed by three grandchildren - did not last. But those on his wavelength will remember him fondly. His Burns cantata, which was entitled The Mortal Memory, had a recent Glasgow performance.

His 67th birthday concert, planned for October, will now become a memorial one.