Duncan Druce

Robert Duncan Druce (23 May 193913 October 2015) was an English composer, string player and musicologist, noted for his interest in early to contemporary music, as well as the music of India.

Education and academic life Druce was born in Cheshire in 1939, the son of Robert Druce, a bacteriologist, and Katy Chesters. In 1957, he entered King's College, Cambridge, which later awarded him a double first in music. Subsequently, he completed a Masters at the University of Leeds and, in 1984 embarked upon a second master's degree, at the University of York, choosing the music of southern India as the topic of his thesis. In 1991, Druce stood down from his long-standing post as senior lecturer at Leeds University's Bretton Hall Campus, to continue to work as a performer and composer. Druce lectured in composition part-time at the University of Huddersfield until his death.

Druce married Clare Spalding in 1964. The couple had two daughters, Alison and Emily. His wife, daughters, four grandchildren, a great-grandson, and his sister Cathy survived him at the time of his death. In 1984, Druce finished a new completion of Mozart's Requiem, which was performed at The Proms in 1991. This completion (which is published by Novello and includes a new edition of the original and most famous Süssmayr completion) is still widely performed today. In his preface to the score, Druce explains:

'Whilst the work as a whole has proved to be one of Mozart's best loved and most admired, it has been clear ever since [Süssmayr's completion] was first published that it sometimes lacks the perfection of detail, smooth craftmanship, the imaginative relationship of subsidiary material to the whole that is so characteristic of Mozart's other mature masterpieces. Süssmayr's orchestration [...] may not often get in the way of Mozart's vision, but rarely enhances it. '

Other Mozart works which Druce completed include Quintet Movement for clarinet and strings K.516c (commissioned by Alan Hacker), a quintet in F for clarinet, basset horn, violin, viola and violoncello K. Anh. 90 (580b), and Concerto movement for horn and orchestra in E, K.494a. Druce also provided a 66-bars ending to a Symphony movement in A by Franz Berwald and a completion to Artaxerxes by Arne.