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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kenneth Leighton (2 October 1929 - 24 August 1988) was a British composer and pianist. His compositions include church and choral music, pieces for piano, organ, cello, oboe and other instruments, chamber music, concertos, symphonies, and an opera. He had various University appointments, most notably as Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh.
Leighton was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire on 2 October 1929, to parents of modest means, with some musical interests (his father and brother sang in the local church choir). He became a chorister at Wakefield Cathedral and gained a place (in 1940) at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. Encouraged by his mother and helped by school teachers, he had piano lessons and showed precocious ability, performing at school assemblies and concerts, while also composing settings of poetry for voice and piano and solo piano pieces (including the Sonatina Op.1a, 1946, his first published work). While still at school he gained the Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music (LRAM) in piano performance (in 1946). As a university student at Queen's College, Oxford from 1947-1950, on a Hastings Scholarship to study Classics, he continued to study music; his teachers included the composer Bernard Rose at Oxford, where he came to the attention of Gerald Finzi, who performed some of his works (e.g. Op.3 Symphony for Strings, 1949) with the Newbury String players. He obtained a BA in Classics in 1950, and a BMus in 1951. In 1951 he was awarded a Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled him to study with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome, where he met his first wife, Lydia Angela Vignapiano, by whom he had two children (Angela and Robert).
On his return from Italy in 1952, he taught briefly at the Royal Marine School of Music in Deal, and held a Gregory Fellowship from 1953-56 as composer-in-residence at the University of Leeds (where he was a friend of Geoffrey Hill). An accomplished pianist of professional standard, he periodically gave public performances and broadcasts. In 1956 he was appointed lecturer in music at the University of Edinburgh. Following a period as Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University from 1968 to 1970, Leighton returned to Edinburgh as Reid Professor of Music on the retirement of Sidney Newman. He held the chair at Edinburgh until his death from oesophageal cancer in 1988. He married Josephine Anne Prescott in 1981.
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