Edward Harper

Designed to form a double-bill with Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, from which it movingly quoted Dido's closing lament, it was initially staged by Edinburgh University at the George Square Theatre and later by Scottish Opera, who transformed the two works into a highly successful triple bill incorporating Gustav Holst's Savitri.

Born in Taunton, Somerset, Harper studied music at Oxford and was a pupil of Gordon Jacob and (in Milan) of the avant-garde Franco Donatoni before settling in Scotland in the 1960s. As a lecturer at Edinburgh University, where he sustained his flair for modern music, he won fame with his orchestral work Bartok Games, which established itself in 1972 as one of his brilliant early successes.

The pleasure he took in establishing connections with other composers also resulted in his substantial Symphony No 1, written in tribute to Elgar's Symphony No 1, for Sir Alexander Gibson and the RSNO, and in an instrumental fantasy inspired by Britten's Peter Grimes.

But it was in Fanny Robin that he most productively displayed his ability to capture the essence of a book and pithily pin down its characters in a forceful and dramatic way. The music was memorable, written in an atmospherically intimate style and revealing in its tavern chorus a Somerset composer's liking for good beer.

Harper's operatic flair was stretched further - some thought slightly overstretched - by his next opera, the full-length Ibsen-inspired Hedda Gabler in 1985, though once more an admirable Scottish Opera production displayed his keen dramatic sense. With The Mellstock Quire in 1988 he returned to Hardy for inspiration, for a taut comedy based on episodes from Under the Greenwood Tree.

A further opera, based in 1993 on the Cornish-born William Golding's novel The Spire, again showed his good taste in literary sources, and this work had a number of instrumental spin-offs including his Scena (1996) for solo cello and a sequel for flute, cello and piano, as well as a further sequel composed in 2006 for him to play with his cellist wife Louise Paterson and the flautist Anna Jones.

As a pianist, Harper was founder and director of the New Music Group of Scotland, which made its Edinburgh Festival debut in 1974. Thea Musgrave's Second Chamber Concerto, in which, in homage to Charles Ives, a solo viola runs amok in the course of a work for woodwind, strings and piano, was included in the programme, and Martin Dalby's Whisper Music, adding a trumpet, harp and percussion to Harper's ensemble, was also played. With the inclusion finally of Edward McGuire's Rebirth, Scottish music did indeed seem to be born anew and, thanks to Harper, the Composers' Guild proclaimed 1974 the year of the Scottish composer.

Thereafter the New Music Group appeared for a period almost annually at the Festival, on one occasion featuring Harper as composer of In Memoriam Luigi Dallapiccola, in homage to the modern Italian composer, and on another his colourful Intrada after Monteverdi, in homage to a great earlier Italian.

As a guest conductor, Harper was associated both with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Reid Orchestra, his big moment occurring when Simon Rattle, appearing with the SCO, was felled by a stomach bug in the middle of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh. On that occasion there famously came the question: is there a conductor in the house? Harper stepped forward and steered the orchestra through the rest of the programme, obtaining a conspicuously accomplished account of Beethoven's Fourth.

Harper was married three times, and is survived by his first and third wives, Penny and Louise. His second wife, Dorothy, by whom he had two children, Edward and Alice, who also survive him, died some years ago.