My friend and colleague Kenneth Gloag, who has died aged 56 of cancer, was a leading authority on 20th-century British classical music. He was at the same time one of a generation of scholars whose own background in the popular culture of the 1960s and 70s helped to cement the status of rock and pop in UK academic musicology.
Ken was born and brought up in Edinburgh, the son of Alexander Gloag, a roof tiler, and his wife, Violet (nee Peel). He attended Bruntsfield primary and then James Gillespie’s high school in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark’s alma mater, but he found school uninspiring and left with few qualifications. He worked in the Phoenix record shop on the Royal Mile, played rhythm guitar in the band Ducktail, and coordinated community arts. Gaining his highers through night school, he took a two-year diploma at Napier Polytechnic, followed by a BMus at the University of Surrey, an MMus at King’s College London and, in 1995, a doctorate at the University of Exeter.
That year he took up a lectureship at Cardiff University, where he spent the remainder of his career. Introducing rock, pop and jazz into the undergraduate curriculum, he also created the interdisciplinary MA in music, culture and politics with colleagues who, over the years, included the philosophers Christopher Norris and Peter Sedgwick and the historians Toby Thacker and Neil Edmunds. From these experiences emanated his Musicology: the Key Concepts, co-written with David Beard, a lucid and quotable guide to the new cultural turn in musicology. His Postmodernism in Music (2012) soon became regarded as a definitive statement, albeit on a phenomenon he saw as in transition or decline.
He wrote on many of the best-known composers active in his lifetime, including Thomas Adès, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sir Michael Tippett, while also championing the underrated Nicholas Maw. Another composer, Anthony Payne, wrote that with Gloag’s book on Odyssey, Maw’s magnum opus, “a grand and mysterious work has found its ideal expositor”.
The intellectual openness and broad cultural perspectives he passed on to his students enabled their success not only in academia but also in senior posts with music festivals and research councils. A cherished colleague, he was kind and sympathetic, but also intransigent in the best possible way, indignant at those of his generation busy kicking away the ladders of opportunity that neither he nor they could have done without.
Ken loved watching international cricket in Cardiff. He was a Chelsea supporter and attended matches at Stamford Bridge. As well as concerts and opera, he attended theatre (especially the National) and exhibitions. He had a very wide knowledge of 20th-century art and contemporary literature.
He is survived by his mother and brother, Alex.
