Bill Colleran, who has died at the age of 78, was a towering figure, both in the earth of music publishing, and literally: his tall, graceful presence was an unmissable element of the London concert view over quintuplet decades. His career in publishing began in the 1950s, when he coupled the old-established firm of Banks Music in York. In 1958 he touched to the London power of the Vienna-based euphony publisher Universal Edition (UE), which had been founded in 1901 and was to turn the preeminent publisher of 20th-century medicine, signing Mahler, Bartok, Schoenberg and Jan�cek among many others.
Bill remained with UE until 1994. His first role there was to develop the educational catalog and, together with John Paynter, he concentrated on introducing music by living composers into the educational system. This they highly-developed further with the New Music in Action summer school at the University of York, which flourished until the late 1970s.
Bill's flair for working with composers cursorily led him to be offered responsibleness within UE for promoting their present-day music catalog, and among the get-go composers he brought in was Harrison Birtwistle. Many other major names followed, including Morton Feldman, Bernard Rands, Cornelius Cardew, Nigel Osborne, Steve Reich, David Bedford, Dominic Muldowney, Simon Holt, James MacMillan and David Sawer.
His taste was for the avant-garde, simply this did not mean that he was deaf to composers whose expectation was more conventional. His loyalty to and affection for them all was generously returned in the many works that were dedicated to him throughout his career. Of these he was especially proud of Feldman's Coptic Light, and the composer's former death in 1987 stumble him hard.
As a publisher, he took a delight in the physical appearance of music, and the commemorative edition of gobs for the 50th day of remembrance of UE London that he supervised in 1986 was recognized by the Royal Society of Arts' Radcliffe award for excellence in graphics and music publishing. Other recognition came late in life - the 2002 Leslie Boosey award of the Performing Right and Royal Philharmonic Societies honoured his contribution to contemporary music piece, earlier this year, the University of York appointed him honorary fellow of the department of music.
Much of his time at UE was spent travel and promoting the catalogue worldwide, and as well as consolidating the London base, he was instrumental in setting up UE Australia and UE Canada. But his achievements were to be undermined by internal problems in Vienna, and when it became clear in the previous 1980s that the contracts of many of his composers were not to be renewed, Bill was understandably bitter.
It was not easy for him to advise those who remained to delay with UE, and it was plausibly inevitable that most would leave, including Birtwistle, wHO signed a new squeeze with Boosey & Hawkes. Although he stayed on until statutory retirement years, Bill's middle was no longer in the job, and he became severely depressed.
In 1992 I invited him to join the board of the recording company NMC; with a new nidus on living composers, he was a committed and stimulating professorship from 1993 until 2004. In 1994 he established, together with the composer David Blake, the University of York Music Press, which became a haven not only for some of the composers he had had to abandon but to many more, both young and conventional.
Born in Epsom to a German-Jewish mother, Bill was brought up first by his stepfather's cousin-german in Ireland, and then by his maternal granny in Surrey. His puerility was difficult, and his education was interrupted by frequent bouts of t.B., necessitating long periods in sanatoriums. As a consequence, he never completed his law level at Cambridge.
He was a remarkable intermixture of the urbane, fastidious and depressed to earth, with a cutting common sense of witticism. His droll and apparently offhand manner concealed a fierce intelligence information and a firmness of purpose which he would not often reveal. He was a very secret man: his many friends - especially women friends - power get to know a part of him, simply rarely the whole. A composer close to him described Bill as basically mysterious - it was almost as if he had invented himself, so little did his early years interrelate to his working life.
Illness dogged his last age, but he remained as active as he could be, and he was determined non to miss the performance of Birtwistle's The Minotaur at The Royal Opera House in April. His late marriage to Elizabeth brought him great happiness: the prospicient years he had exhausted in the sanatorium, had been, he said, the only untroubled part of his life until he met her.
He is survived by Elizabeth, by his first married woman, Pat, and second married woman, Kate, and by Marcus, the boy of his first marriage.
Nigel Osborne writes: Bill was a man of many parts. My opine is that the County Mayo son became the perfect English gentleman in the academy of strong knocks and survival. He was the jet-setting promoter of the 20th century's iconic catalog, but besides the hardworking music rep: Pennies from Heaven-style, traveling bag of samples, B&Bs and a ugandan shilling in the gas metre. He had an undefiled sensibility for contemporary art as intimately as a streetwise wit, and the fastest repartee in township. In later years, the no-nonsense patrician gaze over half-moons would readily meld into the mischievous smiling of a dedicated nihilist and excuser of all human weakness.
Bill was more than a publisher. His inspiration and enthusiasm reached to the quick of the music itself. He had an animal instinct for value in new work and a commitment to modernism tempered, like Toledo steel, in the blood of assassins. He gave his composers tough love: flat in reinforcement, frank in criticism. The world of contemporary art is much darker without his elucidation.
� William Martin Colleran, euphony publisher, born November 25 1929; died July 6 2008
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