Wilfrid Mellers (1914–2008) has had an enormous influence on several generations of British musicians at their most impressionable phase – as university students. He started the Music Department at York University in 1964 and it quickly became a beacon of enlightenment at a time when new universities were being founded and there was a real need to redefine Music in this context. Throughout his career he has produced a steady stream of books and articles which have earned him a place as one of the most influential and readable writers on music in the twentieth century.

Unlike most British university music departments, which were dominated by musicologists, York started with a faculty of young composers – David Blake, Bernard Rands and the late Peter Aston and Robert Sherlaw Johnson. The curriculum also gave performance a high place since Mellers felt that there should be no separation between theory and practice, which is widely accepted today. He also put contemporary ideas at the centre of his new Department and, thanks to him, most of these beliefs have penetrated higher education in Britain. In the next round, new music departments were able to build on the foundations of York – Keele, which I started in 1974, and City University in London, started in 1975 by Malcolm Troup, a York graduate. Since then, departments in the newer universities have been able to do the same.

Many of the causes Mellers advocated then are now part and parcel of our flourishing musical culture at all levels. He brought music for young people into the curriculum in the same natural way that Britten composed for children. Composition was encouraged, leading towards the opportunities now available within the national curriculum in schools. Mellers was open to all kinds of musical expression, anticipating the pluralism and multi-culturalism of the scene today rather than the inherited distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow. The centre of all this was Mellers himself. His lecturing technique has always been uniquely charismatic: approachable and elucidatory at the same time, he had a magical ability to enthral an audience.