Perhaps more salient still was Payne's brass band commission, Fire on Whaleness (1976), a baleful evocation, complete with sad fanfares and billowing smoke music, of the funeral scene at the end of Beowulf. And not just in such vocal works as the eloquent Thomas Hardy settings A First Sight of Her and After (1974) for 16 voices - though these were to lead to the exquisitely sensitised Tennyson setting for Jane Manning and ensemble, The World's Winter (1976), and the fiery Book of Revelation setting for chorus and organ, The Sea of Glass (1976). It was over the full four-year period it took him gradually to elaborate the 20-minute span of what he was fittingly to title his Phoenix Mass - a period that coincided with the beginning of his lastingly happy marriage to the soprano Jane Manning - that Payne began to discover the complexities to which such simple procedures could lead. By the time he had substantially completed its grandly hieratic structure for choir and brass in 1969, he had elaborated many of the most characteristic techniques of his mature music.

These he immediately began to explore, often with an almost mathematical rigour, in a sequence of early scores that remain his closest in spirit to the Continental avant-garde and culminated in his String Quartet (1978), an astringent mosaic structure in which the contents of three contrasting movements are continuously cross-cut.Yet already such manipulations were beginning to be infiltrated by Payne's more poetic proclivities. Ultimately, he seems to have concluded that he could only achieve a personal synthesis by returning to the most basic musical materials. Then, in his final term, he suffered a nervous breakdown that put an end to creative work for over four years - during which time he gradually established himself as a professional writer on music instead.But the hiatus also set him thinking about the gap between the then rather unfashionable English tradition that he loved and the challenging new techniques of the Continental avant-garde that excited so many of his contemporaries. By the time he arrived at Durham University to read music in 1958, he had already composed quite a portfolio of pieces, increasingly influenced by such early 20th-century Romantics as Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams. None the less, his schooldays at Dulwich College were largely to be filled by attempts to compose in the styles of Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and Sibelius, whose music he was excitedly exploring, and about whom he continues to write with special warmth. Before the Independent, he contributed for many years to the Daily Telegraph, assigning more analytic articles to such periodicals as Tempo, while publishing books on the music of, respectively, Schoenberg and Frank Bridge that have become standard texts. Yet Payne would undoubtedly regard his manifold activity as an explainer of music - which, over the decades, has also run to a great deal of broadcasting and more recently to university teaching both at home and abroad - as secondary to his central concern, which has always been composition. Or, at least since his 11th year when, visiting relatives in Godalming, he chanced to hear a chunk of Brahms's First Symphony on the wireless and found himself rooted to the spot - a wholly unexpected revelation, since there had been no "classical" music to speak of in his background.