Anthony Edward Payne was born in London on 2 August 1936 to Edward and Muriel (née Stroud) Payne; his father was a civil servant. Not from a particularly musical background, at the age of 10 Payne went to see relatives in Godalming and first experienced classical music from a radio broadcast of Brahms's Symphony No. 1. Recalling the significance of the moment in a 2013 interview with Time Out, he said he "was absolutely translated" and "hooked like a fish". A recording he was given the next year of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 solidified his interest; he began composing at around age 11. From 1947 to 1955, Payne attended Dulwich College where he mainly studied the classics, though he still found time to engage in music. Besides private study with Stanley Wilson, he worked on an orchestral suite and piano sonata and regularly played clarinet with Alan Hacker. Payne began further exploration of Western Classical repertoire, particularly Mozart and Haydn of the classical period and the Romantics Dvořák and Sibelius. However, his principal compositional inspirations were the late English Romantics Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams, influences which are increasingly prominent in various early works: two—in addition to the earlier one—piano sonatas, a clarinet sonata, and the Polyphonic suite.

After a brief stint in the Royal Corps of Signals (1955–1957), Payne read music at the Durham University Department of Music in St Cuthbert's Society, Durham University (1958–1961). During this time, studying Palestrinian counterpoint and working with the musicologist Peter Evans assisted the growth of his musical maturity. Around his graduation, he had a nervous breakdown and largely stopped composing for four years. He spent his hiatus primarily as a freelance music critic and musicologist. Before his halting of composition, in 1959 Payne had drafted parts of the symphonic poem It Happened Once, and returning to it in 1964 under the name of Liebestod, he began to discover a newly personal style of composition.

Payne's new compositional style was first fully realised in the Phoenix Mass for SATB choir and brass, which he began in 1965 and finished by 1969. Commentators note that the 'Phoenix' of the title is both metaphorical and literal, because it is, in the words of music critic Barry Millington, "a symbolic revivification of his compositional ambitions with a newly fashioned method of structural organisation." Characterised by the use of harmonic intervals for specific themes and movements, Payne declared the work to be his first major composition. Payne married the soprano Jane Manning in 1966.

Paraphrases and Cadenzas (1969), his next work, was a 14-minute piece for viola, clarinet and piano, that shared much of the harmonic language of the Phoenix Mass. Payne later revised both the Phoenix Mass and Paraphrases and Cadenzas in 1972 and 1978 respectively. Commissioned and premiered by the Baccholian Singers of London in 1970, his Two Songs without Words for five unaccompanied male voices shifted focus from intervallic organization to music based on numerology. Payne's Sonatas and Ricercars premiered the next year; the nine-movement work featured four full ensemble movements and five movements of solos for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn. Later in 1971 Payne wrote Paean for solo piano, in which a synthesis of the aria and toccata forms is dominated by numerology and tone clusters. Throughout 1972 and early 1973, various writing commissions halted his music composition. By 1970 Payne and Manning had moved to a house in Islington, where they lived until the end of their lives.

In the Spring of 1973 Payne returned to Liebestod, but quickly set it aside to work on the unaccompanied vocal piece A Little Passiontide Cant to an anonymous text from 14th-century England, and later his Concerto for Orchestra (1974) commissioned by Richard Bradshaw and the New London Ensemble. The latter was his largest-scale work to date, featuring ritornellos and—like the Sonatas and Ricercars—rotating instrumental solos. For 16 voices and text by Thomas Hardy, Payne won the Radcliffe Award for another unaccompanied vocal piece, First Sight of Her and After (1975). Though now he planned to finish Liebestod, he was commissioned by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band and Elgar Howarth so instead wrote a tone poem-funeral ode inspired by Beowulf, Fire on Whaleness (1975–1976), for brass band. Throughout 1976 to 1979, Payne embarked on four more choral pieces, three of which were by British figures: The World's Winter (1976, text by Alfred, Lord Tennyson); The Sea of Glass (1977, text from the Book of Revelation); A Little Ascension Cant (1977, text attributed to Cynewulf); and A Little Whitsuntide Cant (1977, text by Emily Brontë). He was commissioned by the BBC Proms for The Stones and Lonely Places Sing (1979), a tone poem that has a numerology-based structure and evokes "the bleak coastline of western Britain and Ireland".

External audio
A Day in the Life of a Mayfly performed by Jane's Minstrels
A Day in the Life of a Mayfly

In the A Day in the Life of a Mayfly (1981) Payne first embraced his earlier English Romantic influences, and synthesised them with his predominant modernist style; Susan Bradshaw described this as "modernized nostalgia". Commissioned by the Fires of London and premiered 24 September 1981 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, A Day in the Life of a Mayfly soon became Payne's best known work up to that point. He continued his renewal of the English tradition in his next major orchestral work, The Spirit's Harvest, which was his second commission for the Proms. Throughout the 1980s he engaged in a variety of genres; he wrote solo, choral, orchestral, brass and chamber works. Also in the 1980s, he held various academic posts. He spent 1983 as a visiting professor at Mills College, California and from 1983 to 1985–6 taught composition at the London College of Music. During 1986 he was also a composition professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, New South Wales. Among his students was the composer Enid Luff.

In 1988 he co-founded the new music ensemble Jane's Minstrels with Manning. Many of his works, such as transcriptions of seven songs by Peter Warlock entitled the Aspects of Love and Contentment (1991), were composed for Jane's Minstrels. The group also performed music by Purcell, Elgar, Bridge, Grainger, Webern, Schoenberg, and Maxwell Davies.

Payne's next important orchestral work, Time's Arrow (1990) was his third orchestral commission for the BBC Proms. The piece was well received and described by Millington as "one of his finest achievements". The work is a musical depiction of the Big Bang, beginning in almost complete silence and utilizing dense brass and percussion textures to represent the immensity of the subject. Another orchestral work, Symphonies of Wind and Rain (1991), was commissioned by the Endymion Ensemble and premiered the following year.

Payne's realisation of the sketches for Edward Elgar's incomplete Third Symphony took several years to complete. When Elgar died in 1934, he left an incomplete score for a third symphony commissioned by the BBC. Elgar's own thoughts on posthumous completions were ambiguous: though he had expressed a wish that no-one should 'tinker' with the sketches, but also said "If I can't complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it". Although initially reluctant to allow anyone to use this material, the Elgar family realised that in 2005 the sketches would come out of copyright. After hearing Payne's 1995 radio talk on his ideas, the composer's estate approved his elaboration, which Payne had been working on since 1993, having studied the sketches since 1972. Elgar's sketches were fragmentary; he often wrote inconsistently and haphazardly, recording unrelated ideas side by side in the 130 pages—141 individual sketches—that he left behind.

Payne's version of the symphony, titled Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne, was first performed in February 1998 at the Royal Festival Hall, London by Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The work was immediately acclaimed and after it quickly began receiving further performances, totalling over 150 performances in four years. As of 2021 the piece has been recorded six times, and it has gained wide acceptance into Elgar's oeuvre. Payne released a book in 1998, Elgar's Third Symphony: The Story of the Reconstruction, discussing his process of completion for the work.

While Payne worked on the symphony from 1993 to 1997, he simultaneously engaged in commissions for various English ensembles: Hidden Music (1992) for the London Festival Orchestra; Orchestral Variations – The Seeds Long Hidden (1994) for the English Chamber Orchestra; and Empty Landscape – Heart's Ease (1995) for the Nash Ensemble. Other activities during this time include his tenure as the co-artistic director of the 1994 Spitalfields Music with Judith Weir and Michael Berkeley, and teaching composition at the University of Western Australia during 1996.

After his international success in completing Elgar's 3rd symphony, Payne initially found difficulty in composing further. Payne explained "It was rather like an actor must feel in a role – I was playing Elgar to the best of my ability. However, I was seriously worried at the end of it that I would not be able to be myself again. For 18 months I was living inside this work. It was fantastic while I was doing it, but I thought: How can I possibly get back to writing my stuff?". He wrote the Micro-Sonata (1997) and Hommage to Debussy (1998)—his first solo piano works since 1980. Payne's resurgence in large-scale composition came with the Isles of Scilly-inspired Visions and Journeys (2002), an orchestral commission for the Proms that was especially well received.

Payne subsequently also composed a version of Pomp and Circumstance March No. 6 from Elgar's incomplete sketches for the work, which received its first performance under the baton of Sir Andrew Davis at a Prom concert on 2 August 2006 – Payne's 70th birthday. From 2012 to 2013, Payne was a Professorial Fellow the University of East Anglia's composition department. His String Quartet No. 2 (2010) won the Chamber category of the 2011 British Composer Awards. His last major work, Of Land, Sea and Sky (2016) was a commission for The Proms. The piece was written around his 80th birthday, and took inspiration from the sounds of horses' hooves, masses of clouds and the landscape art of Arthur Streeton.

Payne died on 30 April 2021. He was 84, and died a month after the death of his wife, which reportedly affected his health. His colleague and fellow composer Colin Matthews noted that "They were inseparable in life, and I suppose it's not a surprise that he would follow her so soon after". Payne and Manning had no children, but were survived by a nephew and two nieces.

Though Payne was drawn to various Classical and Romantic composers in his youth, the late English Romanticism of Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams proved to be the most impactful on his work. His success from the Elgar Symphony completion led to orchestrations of various works by all three; he likened Vaughan Williams in particular to a "musical godfather". These influences are considerably apparent in the works from his time at Dulwich and Durham. By the mid-1960s, Payne began to readily engage with modernist aesthetics, looking for musical content by more narrow means.

As a part of his interest in modernistic music, each movement of the Phoenix Mass centres on a particular interval, such as whole tones in the Gloria and major thirds in the Sanctus. Paraphrases and Cadenzas (1969) also utilises specific intervallic designations for each movement, each of which align with a movement of the Mass. Another interest of Payne's was numerology; the virtuosic Paean (1971) is built on a series of sequences based on a random number table: 7 3 4 1 1 2 5 2 1 9 5 5 7 8 4 2 3 3 4 9 9 6. The Stones and Lonely Places Sing (1979) uses numerology of a different fashion; the proportions of 3 2 7 4 1 6 5 decide the phrase length, resulting in phrases of 21 bars (3x7), 14 bars (2x7), 49 bars (7x), 28 bars (7x4), 7 bars (7x1), 42 bars (7x6) and 35 bars (7x5). Other musical trademarks include wide spaced harmonies and frequent alternation between strict and fluid rhythmic frameworks.

Apart from opera, Payne engaged in most traditional genres: large-scale orchestral, brass band, chamber works, solo piano, solo strings, choral works and song cycles. However, he was principally a composer of chamber music, much of which was written for Jane's Minstrels and often included vocal parts specifically for Manning. Other chamber ensembles Payne wrote compositions for include the Baccholian Singers of London, New London Ensemble, the Fires of London, the Endymion Ensemble, the London Festival Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Nash Ensemble. Bradshaw asserts that these chamber works most clearly demonstrate the compositional evolution of Payne throughout his career. Despite these regular commissions, Payne said in 2005 that after 30 years as a composer he made only what would be £15,000 in 2020 annually. He was forced to supplement his composition with work as a music critic and musicologist. Reflecting on this, Payne said "Still, you do it for love, don't you?".

Payne was not a particularly mainstream composer of contemporary classical music, in part from his straddling the worlds of English Romanticism and modernism. Payne reflected on this, recalling his 2003 Radio 3 British Composer Awards, saying "I was absolutely amazed... because I’m one of those composers who never win awards." Along these lines, Michael White of The Independent described Payne as "a quiet but thoughtful presence in British music [that] always strikes me as a kind of anchorage in sanity, confirming the continuing life of trusted values".

Payne made substantial contributions to both the orchestral and choral/vocal repertoires: his Time's Arrow (1990) and Visions and Journeys (2002) for orchestra were acclaimed, and he was a prolific composer of song cycles. However, he remains most noted as a composer of chamber music; he was best known for the chamber work A Day in the Life of a Mayfly (1981) before his 1997 Elgar completion. Though he developed a highly individual style, The Telegraph asserts that Payne's legacy is "inevitably dominated" by his Elgar completion.

At the Proms on 13 August 2021, the BBC Symphony Orchestra played Payne's Spring’s Shining Wake as a memorial tribute.

Alongside his career as a composer, Payne simultaneously built up a reputation as a writer on music, writing books about Arnold Schoenberg and Frank Bridge. He also became a renowned critic, regularly writing for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and Country Life. Other writing contributions include articles in Tempo, Musical Times and Music and Musicians.

Books

Articles

• Radcliffe Award, 1975, for First Sight of Her and After
• Listeners' award in the first Radio 3 British Composer Awards of The Ivors Academy, 2003, for Visions and Journeys
• Honorary Doctor of Music (with Manning), University of Durham, 2007
• British Composer Awards Winners: Chamber of The Ivors Academy, 2011, for String Quartet No. 2
• Elgar Medal of the Elgar Society, 2011
• Honorary Doctor of Music, Kingston University
• Honorary Doctor of Music, University of Birmingham
• Fellow of the Royal College of Music; arts research fellow for two years

• Bradshaw, Susan (March 1979). "Anthony Payne's String Quartet". Tempo (128). Cambridge University Press: 33. JSTOR 946067.
• McBurney, Gerard (March 1984). "Three Works by Anthony Payne". Tempo (148). Cambridge University Press: 26–27. JSTOR 945059.
• Oliver, Michael (1975). "Miscellany". In Foreman, Lewis (ed.). British Music Now. P. Elek. pp. 162–177 (esp. 169–171). ISBN 978-0-236-30933-7.
• Palmer, Andrew (2015). "Anthony Payne". Encounters with British Composers. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer. pp. 357–368. ISBN 978-1-78327-070-5. JSTOR 10.7722/j.ctt1814gv6.
• Rutherford-Johnson, Tim (2017). Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 246–251. ISBN 978-0-520-28314-5. JSTOR 10.1525/j.ctv1xxxq7.

• Official website
• Biography and Catalogue of works for Anthony Payne at Wise Music Classical
• Articles by Anthony Payne on The Independent
• Anthony Payne discography at Discogs
• Interview with Anthony Payne on WNIB Classical 97, Chicago, 5 March 1999
• The Symphony - all Bits and Pieces, a BBC documentary about Payne's completion of Elgar's 3rd symphony