The composer Joan Trimble, who died on August 6th aged 85, was a remarkable link between Ireland North and South, and, up to her death, the proprietor of the oldest family-owned newspaper in these islands, the Impartial Reporter of Enniskillen. Born in Dublin on June 18th, 1915, at a critical juncture in both Anglo-Irish and North-South relations (her birthplace was also the birthplace of the Unionist leader Edward Carson), she was a member of an intensely musical family - her father was a singer and important collector of folk song and her mother, Marie Dowse, was one of Dublin's outstanding violinists and teachers - she and her sisters constituted a string octet in Adolph Wilhelmj's class at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM). Joan Trimble and her sister Valerie (1917-1980), followed their mother to the RIAM, and she took her Mus.B degree from Dublin University. She recalled the change of government in 1932 and, with it, a change in fashion: "no longer did we wear green sashes or drop curtseys to the Governor-General; we now shook hands with the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Alfie Byrne."
She went on to study composition at the Royal College of Music in London with Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams, and piano with the Australian composer and pianist, Arthur Benjamin. With his encouragement, the sisters were to form a two-piano team which became a household name in the 1940s and 1950s, and for whom Benjamin wrote the Jamaican Rumba which they made a worldwide favourite.
As a composer, Joan Trimble made an early mark with her Phantasy Trio - written at Vaughan Williams's suggestion - with which she won the 1940 Cobbett competition. Among her many compositions from that period are her Sonatina for two pianos, the Suite for Strings commissioned by Arthur Duff of Radio Eireann in 1951 (both recently recorded) and many settings of Irish folk song.
However, her performing career and her marriage to Dr John Greenwood Gant made so many inroads on her time that she described herself as an "occasional" composer. Thus she produced her television opera Blind Raftery (1957) as a result of a BBC commission but wrote almost nothing after this until the Arts Council of Northern Ireland commissioned the elegant wind quintet for her 75th birthday in 1990, and a choral work commissioned for the National Chamber Choir for her 80th birthday in 1995.
During the second World War (in which she worked full time with the Red Cross) the Trimble sisters were regular performers for the BBC from its wartime Bristol studios and at the National Gallery lunch-time concerts organised by Myra Hess. Their first of many Prom appearances was in 1943. Their repertoire was very wide, including Arnold Cooke, Dallapiccola and Stravinsky, and such was their achievement that they were invited to give the premieres of the two-piano concertos of Bliss and Berkeley.
From 1959 Joan Trimble was Professor of Accompaniment and of General Musicianship at the Royal College of Music from which she retired in 1977 to take on the managing directorship of the Impartial Reporter.
She was the fourth generation in direct succession and her daughter Joanna (who received the OBE in the 1998 honours list for community service) followed her as managing director, Joan Trimble herself maintaining a keen interest (as chairman) up to her last days.
She was also deeply involved in cultural affairs in Northern Ireland. From 1981 to 1985 she was on the board of Ulster Television, and from 1983 to 1988 a member of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's Advisory Committee.
She received many honours - from the Royal College in 1960, from Queen's University, Belfast in 1983 and in 1985, alongside her contemporary, friend, fellow-composer and fellow Northerner, Havelock Nelson, Fellowship of the RIAM, of which she became a vice-president in 1997.
The elegance and craftsmanship of her composition are one reason for regretting the smallness of her output. Perhaps of greater significance is the attention she paid to the "Irishness" of writing: she put considerable thought into what constituted an "Irish" work, and, near the end of her life, was thrilled to discover the advice of Michele Esposito, Professor at the RIAM, who had said that Irish composers would write Irish works not by slavishly employing Irish airs but by virtue of their inherent Irishness wedded to the craft of classical composition.
Her knowledge of Irish music and musicians was legendary, and augmented by her own prodigious memory and research. She had a scholar's interest in, and knowledge of, Irish traditional music and one of her regrets, as she returned to composition late in life, was that she could not do more to foster a more effective mutual understanding of the two genres, which had co-existed for generations within her own family.
Joan Trimble was predeceased by her husband on July 22nd and is survived by their son, Nicholas and daughters Joanna and Caroline.
Joan Trimble: born 1915; died, August 2000