My father, Dennis Wickens, who has died aged 94, was a composer who reached his widest audience after his 80th birthday.
It was not until he was singing at the cathedral and teaching at the Royal grammar school in Worcester in his 40s that he started writing music down. But his output as a composer grew significantly towards the end of his time as music adviser for Hampshire. A sabbatical term in 1987 studying with John McCabe culminated in a Symphony for Brass Band, first performed that year under Timothy Reynish at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
Dennis’s output grew to include more orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal and keyboard music. His sixth song cycle, The Heart Oppressed, to poems by Thomas Wyatt, was recorded in 2008 by Jeremy Huw Williams and Nigel Foster for the English Poetry and Song Society, and his seventh, This Life, to poems by WH Davies, recorded in 2017 by Johnny Herford and Nigel Foster. His last song cycle, Mountains of the Mind (2019), sets five texts by various writers for high voice and orchestra.
Born in Thornton Heath, south London, Dennis was the son of Leonard Wickens, a civil servant, and his wife, Rosina (nee Beanie). Leaving Thornton Heath central school at 14, Dennis became a telephone engineer, but also took piano lessons while qualifying at night school for a civil service job at the Ministry of Education.
There he was introduced to the possibilities of music as a profession by Bernard Shore, HM inspector of schools and a former principal viola with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Dennis conducted the ministry choir, and after the second world war took up a scholarship to Trinity College of Music, London, graduating in 1951.
In 1959 he became head of music at Worcester Royal grammar school. Worcester Cathedral choir recorded his early choral work O Vos Omnes in 1967. Two pieces at the Three Choirs festival and one at the Cheltenham festival followed, the latter, his song cycle The Everlasting Voices, performed and later broadcast by Ian and Jennifer Partridge in 1971.
From 1966 Dennis served as music adviser for the Isle of Wight. Then, from 1976 until his retirement in 1988, he undertook the equivalent role for Hampshire, conducting the county youth orchestras.
He spent his retirement was spent in Oxfordshire, enjoying his passion for gardening and writing music most days.
In 1949 Dennis married Muriel Vaughan, and they had three children. They divorced, and in 1979 he married Jean Nixon. She survives him, along with his children, Arnold, Helen and me, and five grandchildren, Caitlin, Lucas, Maddy, Nicholas and Michael.
