The composer Sir Malcolm Arnold, who has died aged 84, held a remarkable position in British musical life. The stability of his reputation for more than half a century and the enduring affection of his extensive audience were both achieved without compromise.
As a figure in wider national life he never attained great eminence, though this had the compensation that he could not then be "dropped". From his first published works in 1943 to his retirement from composition in 1990, his independence of mind and individual voice won him respect from all sides of the musical world, even if from some it stopped at grudging admiration.
Against the background of the post-war trend towards the ascetic, the cerebral and the experimental, his music gave immediate and unconditional enjoyment to performers and listeners alike. It was full of tunes, technically brilliant, extrovert, unselfconscious and fun. Occasionally, a darker side to his personality would surface, sometimes in his music or, sadly during several periods, in his mental wellbeing.
His output was huge: symphonies, concertos, ballets, chamber music, orchestral suites, choral music, solo songs, and works for wind and brass bands - as well as more than 100 film scores. Only in opera was his contribution small.
The Northampton shoe-making family to whom Arnold was born was interested in music and prosperous enough to nurture his early talents. His obsession with jazz - and hearing Louis Armstrong play in Bournemouth - had, by the age of 15, led him to take lessons from Ernest Hall, the leading trumpeter of the time, and after incomplete studies at the Royal College of Music, London, he joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) in 1940.
He remained an orchestral trumpeter until 1948, apart from a period in the army, which he loathed. The bullet wound in his foot which led to his discharge was apparently not from enemy action, nor seemingly from a third party of any sort.
With the award of a Mendelssohn scholarship he left the LPO, studied in Italy for a year and took up composing full time. He had spent just a few years among orchestral musicians, yet they always claimed him as their own: an in-house composer who learned his craft in the ranks and never forgot it.
After giving up playing, Arnold was prodigious in his compositional output in the 1950s and 60s. The tally of film scores would have exhausted most composers, but alongside these came a cascade of concert music, including his most popular orchestral works: in addition to Tam O'Shanter, there were two sets of English Dances (1950 and 1951 - the second set providing the signature tune to television's What the Papers Say), the Scottish Dances (1957), and the first six of nine symphonies (1949-67).
He wrote quickly and confidently, straight into full score with very little revision, a talent which, combined with his clarity of texture and luminous orchestration, made him the perfect film composer, and the three he worked on with David Lean - The Sound Barrier (1952), Hobson's Choice (1954) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - gained him some prominence. He won an Oscar for Kwai, although the music was mainly popular for his adaptation of Kenneth Alford's Colonel Bogey march.
Whistle Down the Wind (1961), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) and the five St Trinian's films (1954-66 and 1980) have also survived well.
Arnold occupied a unique position in the genre of the concerto, of which he wrote more than 20. These were mainly commissions from household names of the day: Yehudi Menuhin, Dennis Brain, Benny Goodman, Julian Bream, Larry Adler, James Galway and many more. Often friends of his who had grown to trust his work, they knew that his priorities were the listener, the performer and lastly himself. Almost all these works were pitched at just that point in instrumental technique where there are real challenges, but none so unreasonable as to limit performance to just a handful of virtuosi.
Arnold married his first wife, Sheila, in 1941; they divorced in 1963. Two years later, he and his second wife, Isobel, settled in St Merryn, near Padstow, Cornwall.
In 1972, he moved to Ireland, and although at first he maintained his fecundity of invention, he was drinking too heavily.
A suicide attempt and the end of his second marriage in divorce, all in 1975, drained him creatively, and in 1978 he moved back to England, where he became compositionally almost silent.
With Arnold's death, we lose another of the great individualists who helped make 20th-century British music so gloriously untidy.
He leaves his children Robert and Catherine by his first marriage, and son Edward by his second.
Malcolm Henry Arnold, composer, born October 21st, 1921; died September 23rd, 2006