Kenneth Leighton: Paean (Organ Solo)
Kenneth Leighton (1929 – 1988) was an English composer and teacher of great distinction. He was a chorister at Wakefield Cathedral and educated at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. In 1947 he went up to The Queen's College, Oxford, on a Hastings Scholarship in Classics; in 1951 he graduated both in classics, and music. In the same year he won the Mendelssohn Scholarship and went to Rome to study with Petrassi.
Kenneth Leighton was Professor of Theory at the Royal Marine School of Music in 1952-1953, and Gregory Fellow in Music at the University of Leeds from 1953 to 1955. In 1955 he was appointed Lecturer in Music at the University of Edinburgh where he was made Senior Lecturer and then Reader; in 1968 he returned to Oxford as University Lecturer in Music and Fellow of Worcester College. In October 1970 he was appointed Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, the post which he held until his death in 1988.
Among the many prizes for composition awarded to Kenneth Leighton were the Busoni Prize (1956), the National Federation of Music Societies Prize for the best choral work of the year (1960), the City of Trieste First Prize for a new symphonic work (1965), the Bernard Sprengel Prize for chamber music (1966) and the Cobbett Medal for distinguished services to chamber music (1967). In 1960 he was awarded the Doctorate in Music by the University of Oxford, and in 1977 was made an Honorary Doctor of the University of St Andrews for his work as a composer. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1982.
In addition to leaving behind many choral works, he also contributed a significant number of organ works. Paean is a celebratory piece, in which many familiar Leighton traits are used, from the striding rhythms to a variety of articulation. While Leighton’s work always maintained the importance of melody at the forefront, and certainly in Paean, in his later works the composer looked beyond the influence of English composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten to the serialism of the Second Viennese School.