THE death occurred on Wednesday 3 April 1996 of the composer Walter Koehler Beckett, a member of Aosdána and one of Ireland's most accomplished musicians, whose talents enabled him to make a distinctive contribution in several different areas of music. Walter Beckett had a very varied career as a teacher and lecturer in Ireland, England and Italy, but of course this restricted his time for composition. He taught piano, composition, harmony and counterpoint, as well as organ, voice and class music in schools in England and Ireland; he conducted the Dublin Operatic Society and the Dublin Musical Society, and in England he was the conductor of the Leamington Spa Bach Choral Society. He lectured in Trinity College, Dublin and in the early 1970s he succeeded Dr Archie Potter as Professor of Harmony and Counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He was music critic of The Irish Times from 1946 to 1952.

Born in Dublin, Walter Beckett studied at the Read School of Music and at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He gained his LRAM in piano teaching in 1934 and his MusB degree in 1936, when he also became an Associate of the Royal College of Organists. He was organist at St. Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny and deputised for organists when he lived in England, particularly in Coventry. In 1947 he received his MusD degree from Trinity College, Dublin and wrote the Suite for Orchestra, one of his largest works. In 1990 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

He went to Italy to study conducting on an Italian Government scholarship and thus began his lifelong love affair with the country and its culture. From the late 1950s to the late 1960s he and his wife lived in Italy where he taught English at the Scuola Navale in Venice and wrote orchestral and vocal arrangements of Irish airs for Radio Éireann under the scheme started in the late 1940s to establish a library of good arrangements of traditional Irish music. Whilst in Italy he was able to carry out some original research on Liszt and was commissioned by Eric Blom, editor of Dent's Master Musicians series, to write a book on Liszt, published in 1956. This book included details of Liszt's tour of Ireland in 1840-1 from a source not previously used by biographers and Radio Éireann made some programmes on Liszt to which Dr Beckett contributed. Together with his great friend, the composer Humphrey Searle (another distinguished Liszt scholar) who stayed with the Becketts in Venice, he collaborated on the book Ballet Music: An Introduction published in 1958 by Cassell. His admirable First Harmony Course was published by Folens in 1975.

Walter Beckett began to compose seriously when he was twenty, but his earliest significant works date from the mid-1940s. He wrote many works for the Radio Éireann Light Orchestra and Singers and his excellent orchestrations were particularly appreciated by musicians. He had a very creative period during the ten years after his retirement from the RIAM in 1985, despite increasing ill health, and brought to fruition works he had thought about for many years, including Goldenhair, a song cycle of poems by James Joyce; a String Quartet (1986) and the Dublin Symphony (1991) for orchestra and chorus, which draws together his love of Dublin, of James Joyce and memories of Italy. J. S. Bach's organ music was a strong influence on him as well as the music of Chopin, Fauré, Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss and especially Delius, whose harmonies he greatly admired. His own music is essentially diatonic and romantic/impressionistic in idiom.

Walter Beckett was a member of a family of important musical and literary figures, including Samuel Beckett (their fathers were cousins), John, Edward and Brian Beckett. Walter's father, James Walter Beckett, was a TD in the first Fine Gael Government under Liam Cosgrave and Walter was a nephew of Thomas Goodwin Keller, a poet and friend of AE. The last paper that Walter Beckett wrote was on music in Samuel Beckett's works, a contribution to a forthcoming book on the writer. He greatly admired Sam's poetry and attempted some settings, but none were finalised.

Dr Beckett's chief hobby was playing piano and cello in chamber music. He regarded the string quartet as the highest form of musical expression and summed up a lifetime's experience in his own String Quartet which the Vanbrugh Quartet has played in Ireland and England and recorded on the Chandos CD, Ceathrar (CHAN 9295). He was a champion sailor, winning many trophies in Dragon Class and Cruiser competitions, and was a member of Howth Yacht Club and the Irish Cruising Club. He and his brother won a cup for sailing around Ireland in his cruiser, Dara. Walter Beckett is survived by his wife Hylda, their daughter Lisa and four grandchildren. He is buried in Rathnew, Co. Wicklow.

Sarah M. Burn