Alan Ridout

Alan John Ridout (West Wickham, Kent, 1934 – Caen, 1996) was an English composer and teacher whose output ranges from children's opera to early electronic music. A figure in British musical life in the second half of the twentieth century, he was best known for his prolific output, with more than nine hundred compositions, and for his teaching in London, Cambridge, Oxford and Canterbury.

His training began very early: he entered the Guildhall School of Music at the age of fifteen and, from 1951, studied at the Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Jacob and Howells. He later completed his studies privately with Fricker and Tippett. Between 1957 and 1958 he held a scholarship from the Dutch government, which took him to work with Badings; from this period comes Psalm for Sine Wave Generators, one of the first electronic works by a British composer. He also explored microtonal scales. On his return he carried out research with Thurston Dart and, from 1960 until 1984, was a professor of theory and composition at the Royal College of Music. His radio talks Background to Music brought him public fame.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he combined university teaching in Birmingham, Cambridge (1963–1975) and later Oxford (1987–1990) with a settled position in Canterbury from the mid-1960s. There he was recognised as an inspiring teacher at the cathedral choir school and at King's School. In 1964 the cathedral organist, Allan Wicks, commissioned a work that led to a lasting collaboration and to numerous choral scores, among them seven canticles, settings of the Passions according to St Matthew and St John, and several operas for children's choirs. From 1993 he lived in France.

His legacy rests on a very wide output in which children's opera and ballet, as well as the pedagogical repertoire, stand out, together with a particular affinity for wind instruments. His style, clear and taut, moves with ease between medieval polyphony and twelve-tone serialism, and in his finest pages it reveals a rare lyrical sensitivity that makes him a distinctive voice within British music of his time.