Michael Graubart, who has died aged 93, was a composer, conductor and educationist. He spent a significant part of his career as director of music at Morley College in London.
He served in that post from 1969 to 1991, during which time he installed an electronic music studio and invited Britain’s most controversial avant-garde composer, Cornelius Cardew, to run an experimental music course.
He also conducted many first performances at Morley College, including the premiere of Elisabeth Lutyens’ last opera, Lament of Isis on the Death of Osiris, and the first British production of Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis.
Michael’s own music was firmly in the idiom of the second Viennese school, its finely crafted economy most reminiscent of the Austrian composer Anton Webern. Although his compositional output was modest, the quality of his work was recognised by prominent musicians: his viola sonata was performed by Cecil Aronowitz in 1969 and his string quartet by the Arditti Quartet in 2008.
In 2018 he received a commission from the BBC Singers for a choral piece as part of a series dedicated to music inspired by the experiences of refugees in Britain.
Michael was born in Vienna into a prosperous music-loving Jewish household; his father, Siegfried, was a businessman, and his mother, Oda (nee Soloveitchik), was a medic and later a housewife.
The family fled Austria in 1938 after the German Anschluss, and arrived in Britain as refugees, settling in St Albans, Hertfordshire, where Michael was bullied at St Albans county grammar school for boys – not for being Jewish but for being “German”.
He studied physics at Manchester University, but spent much of his time there composing music and playing the flute. He graduated in 1952 and worked first as an electronics engineer for EMI, then as a teacher of maths, physics and music in various schools while studying composition with the Hungarian émigré Mátyás Seiber.
In 1966 he was appointed as a tutor and conductor at Morley College, an adult education institute of which my father, Barry Till, was principal. Four years later, when the college’s director of music retired, my father gave Michael the job on the basis that he needed ‘“someone who will actually do the work” rather than a famous composer who would be a figurehead.
After 22 years in that post, Michael moved to become a senior lecturer at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, working in its school of academic studies and as director of its contemporary music ensemble until retirement in 1996.
In 2004 he returned to Vienna for the first time since he had fled the city 66 years previously. He went there again, for one last time, in 2019, when the Exilarte Centre in Vienna dedicated a portrait concert to him as part of its Echo of the Unheard series.
Michael is survived by his second wife, Val (nee Coumont), a psychotherapist whom he married in 1996, by three children, Lucy, Aaron and Elva, from his first marriage to Ellen (nee Clark), which ended in divorce, and a grandchild, Zeke.
