Ian Parrott - Telegraph While stationed in Cairo in 1941, Parrott produced The Sergeant-Major's Daughter, a burlesque opera that proved a hit in the officers" mess at Heliopolis. Soon afterwards came Luxor, a symphonic impression of his leave in Upper Egypt. It was described in the 1954 edition of Grove as inhabiting a "slightly strange universe." Thanks to his 33 years as Gregynog Professor of Music at Aberystwyth, Parrott was often considered a Welsh composer, and he did little to dispel this myth, taking an O level in the language in 1959 and becoming a founding member of the Guild for the Promotion of Welsh Music. His opera Black Ram (1951), which uses a bilingual text and Welsh folk songs, is based on a lurid 18th-century tale of a bad baronet and was enthusiastically received when it was first staged in 1966. Among his many books and papers was a biography of Elgar for the Master Musicians series in 1971, in which Parrott explained how the Edwardian composer would have heard St Paul's "Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate" (1 Corinthians) at Mass on Quinquagesima Sunday in 1899, eight days before he completed the score of his Variations. The "enigmatic" phrase is often translated as "Now we see through a glass darkly," something which Parrott wrote was "the real interpretation," of Elgar's great work. Ian Horace Parrott was born in Streatham, south London, on March 5 1916. His mother, Muriel, had studied piano and was soon teaching the instrument to her son. His Siberian March for piano was written when he was 12 and within a year he was taking harmony lessons with the composer Benjamin Dale. At Harrow, Parrott arranged the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, with its dance-like 5/4 rhythm, for a school chamber ensemble. In the early 1930s he spent two years at the Royal College of Music ("writing one sort of music for my teacher, and another freely created sort for myself"), passed a summer in Munich practising both the German language and the viola, and won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, where he befriended the composer Humphrey Searle. Afterwards he taught at Malvern College . Commissioned into the Royal Corps of Signals, Parrott completed his doctorate examinations wearing his gown over his uniform before sailing for Egypt . There he and his comrades kept fresh water in old gin bottles; one morning their manservant inadvertently made coffee from a new bottle, with entertaining results. Parrott was posted to the War Office in London in 1941 and soon became an examiner for Trinity College of Music. He joined the music department at Birmingham University in 1946, won a Royal Philharmonic Society award for Luxor in 1949, when it was performed by the London Philharmonic under Sir Adrian Boult, and was appointed to Aberystwyth in 1950. In 1977 he organised the music for the installation of the Prince Charles as Chancellor of the University of Wales. Parrott demonstrated his more colourful side through his friendship with Rosemary Brown, who attracted much attention when composers "dictated" new works to her. One such work was a movement from a Symphony in F minor "by Beethoven" that Parrott later orchestrated. His memoir, Parrottcisms, was published by the British Music Society in 2003. He also published The Crying Curlew in 1994 to mark the centenary of the composer Peter Warlock. Ian Parrott married first, in 1940, Elizabeth Cox, who died in 1994. Two years later he married Jeanne Peckham, who died in 2010. He is survived by two sons of his first marriage. Ian Parrott, born March 5 1916, died September 4 2012