Simon Bainbridge, composer inspired by architecture and Hieronymus Bosch – obituary

Simon Bainbridge, who has died aged 68, was a composer and professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London; much of his music was related to space, buildings and architecture, such as Chant (1999), a BBC commission for chorus and ensemble inspired by York Minister that involved a reworking of medieval plainchant by Hildegard of Bingen.

Buildings designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind also featured in Bainbridge’s compositions. He explained how Music, Space Reflection (2007) was written with Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum North, near Manchester, in mind. “I heard the music almost as columns of different densities, which could be thrown throughout the space to connect with the buildings’ angles and walls,” he said.

Many works had a difficult gestation. He told the writer Andrew Palmer that it took a long time to work his way into the medium for his second string quartet, which was first heard in 2016, saying: “I sketched about a hundred pages of score and threw them all away before I began to be aware of a really strong characterisation to the music.”

Bainbridge never felt constrained by the classical idiom, producing works such as For Miles (1994), a distinctly jazzy tribute to Miles Davis. Nor were all his works abstract. Garden of Earthly Delights (2012), which was first heard at the Proms for his 60th birthday, plunges the listener into the lurid world of Hieronymus Bosch’s eponymous triptych.

Simon Jeremy Bainbridge was born in London on August 30 1952, the son of the artist John Bainbridge and his wife Nan (née Knowles), who worked in advertising; he recalled discussing with his father the process of getting pictures on to canvas, something he tried to emulate in his music.

He was educated at Highgate School and by the age of eight or nine had decided to become a composer, taking music lessons at the Central Tutorial School for Young Musicians (now the Purcell School). At the Royal College of Music he studied clarinet with Sidney Fell and composition with John Lambert, who made him write a piece of 16th-century style counterpoint every week.

The young Bainbridge, like Benjamin Britten before him, was unable to get his music performed at the college. Instead, his first big exposure came in a concert organised by the Society for the Promotion of New Music at Aldeburgh in 1971 when the English Chamber Orchestra performed his Spirogyra, a chamber ensemble piece that displays the sensuous textures seen in many of his later works.

He did postgraduate study at Tanglewood, Massachusetts, with Gunther Schuller who helped to foster his handling of instrumental colour as demonstrated in his Viola Concerto, a wild canvas of Japanese gongs and microtonality written in 1976 for Walter Trampler. This, together with the Fantasia for Double Orchestra (1984), written for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, are often described as the best of his early works.

There was a brief flirtation with minimalism, such as in Voicing (1986) written for the Nash Ensemble, but he found the concept limiting. Similarly, he spoke of embracing serialism “but never to control every aspect of my music, rather, as one element”.

In 1997 he won the $150,000 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition for Ad Ora Incerta – Four Orchestral Songs from Primo Levi, a work for mezzo-soprano, bassoon and orchestra that evokes images of concentration camps. It draws on Levi’s wartime poetry and his own memories of visiting Auschwitz to create an intense and haunting sound described by one Telegraph critic as “ambitious and daring”.

His other major works include Landscape and Memory (1995), a concerto for horn and chamber orchestra, which he described as music frozen in time as the listener in effect walks through and around musical objects; a Guitar Concerto (1998) that was given its first performance by David Starobin and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group; and Concerti Grossi (2010) which, like its baroque predecessors, relays the musical pulse from one group of soloists to another.

Bainbridge was appointed head of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in 2001. Although rewarding, it took a good deal of his time and energy and after seven years he was relieved to revert to leading composition seminars. He found the exchange of ideas with the most successful students stimulating, but was increasingly concerned by the number who had little knowledge about the music of even the great composers let alone the techniques of composition.

Simon Bainbridge, a tall, personable man with a deep sonorous voice, large glasses and a trimmed beard, suffered from back problems for which surgery four years ago was unsuccessful. In 1997 he married the soprano Lynda Richardson for whom he wrote Landscapes and Magic Words (1981) based on Inuit poetry that was first heard at the Edinburgh Festival; she survives him with their daughter, the actress Rebecca Bainbridge.

Simon Bainbridge, born August 30 1952, died April 2 2021