other commitments). His miniatures, such as the Four Short Pieces for clarinet and piano and the Three Sketches for flute and piano, have a crystalline intensity, as if hinting at much larger works (Tait) – Anton Webern was a composer he admired, even if stylistically Ferguson's own work belongs to the sound world of twentieth century Romanticism. Ferguson was always highly self-critical as a composer: after writing the large choral work The Dream of the Rood in 1958-9, he received a commission to write a string quartet. It was during the composition of this that he felt he was merely repeating his previous work, so he destroyed the sketches and gave up composing, saying that in his relatively few works he had said all he wanted to say. For the next decades he concentrated on musicology. His editions of such repertoire as early keyboard music and the complete piano sonatas of Schubert are outstanding, with a meticulous attention to detail which makes them authoritative (Tait). Ferguson also worked with Gerald Finzi to select and edit the songs of Ivor Gurney for publication after his death: five volumes of ten songs were issued between 1938 and 1979. In his later years he lived in a white-painted converted farmhouse in Barton Road in Cambridge, his quiet hospitality legendary (Tait). He wrote a cookbook in the 1990s, Entertaining Solo, which commemorates the remarkable welcome he gave to so many friends, as does the memoir mentioned below. In the same decade he also prepared an edition of letters between himself and Gerald Finzi, which is an invaluable source of information on the professional lives of Ferguson and his circle. Late in his life, a friendship with the German singer Reiner Schneider-Waterberg led to his rediscovering a song written in 1958 as part of incidental music for a William Golding play, The Brass Butterfly, and subsequently rearranging it for counter-tenor and piano (originally harp) as "Love and Reason" (1958/1994), a moving postscript to a compositional output whose great characteristic is powerful emotions expressed through superb and strictly controlled craftsmanship. (Tait) Compositions Op. 1 Two Ballads, for baritone and orchestra (1928–32) Op. 2 Violin Sonata No. 1 (1931) Op. 3 Three Mediaeval Carols, for voice and piano (1932–33) Op. 4 Octet, for clarinet, bassoon, horn, string quartet and double-bass (1933) Op. 5a Partita, orchestral version (1935–36) Op. 5b Partita, version for two pianos or piano four