Malcolm Lipkin (Liverpool, England, 2 May 1932 - 2 June 2017) was an English composer. While a schoolboy at Liverpool College, Lipkin studied the piano privately with Gordon Green from 1944 to 1948, and theory with Dr Caleb Jarvis. In 1949 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, where he continued his piano studies with Kendall Taylor until 1953, as well as harmony and counterpoint with Bernard Stevens. From 1954 to 1957 he studied composition with Mátyás Seiber and later read music externally at London University for his B.Mus under the guidance of Dr Anthony Milner, eventually being awarded the degree of D.Mus.Lond for his published, reviewed, publicly performed works. The death of Seiber in 1960 in a car accident, while on a lecture tour in South Africa, shocked Lipkin, and the middle movement of his Second Violin Concerto was written in his memory. This work, like much of Lipkin's music in the 1960s, was composed in his early tonal style, as was the String Trio which is dedicated to Joy Finzi, to whose country home at Ashmansworth he was encouraged to come and compose. Sinfonia di Roma, Lipkin's first symphony, was a turning point in his developing style, revealing the influence of Seiber in its construction from small melodic and rhythmic cells. However, Lipkin never fully adopted serial technique, so fashionable in the 1960s, and he always remained his own man, becoming something of an outsider in the context of compositional trends of the time, eventually finding an individual identity in his later music. During the 1970s, the influence of 17th-century English poetry resulted in Four Departures for Soprano and Violin (settings of Herrick) and The Pursuit (Symphony No. 2), inspired by a quatrain of Andrew Marvell. Herrick was again a starting point for another major work, Sun (Symphony No.3), premiered in 1993. It is in such works and the Oboe Concerto of 1988, commissioned by the BBC, that Lipkin found a truly personal voice. As The Listener commented on The Pursuit (14 February 1983): "Lipkin, who studied with Seiber and Blacher, doesn't exactly sound new but he doesn't sound like anyone else either." As a pianist, beginning his compositional career writing music for his instrument (he played his Second Sonata to Georges Enesco at the 1950 Bryanston Summer School of Music), he returned to composing for the piano in later years, since 2000 completing his Sixth Sonata and the last five of his eight Nocturnes. For many years he was a member of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain and for a time served on its Executive Committee. He was a Patron of the Seiber Trust. Lipkin died on 2 June 2017. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Malcolm+Lipkin">Read more on Last.fm</a>. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.