Bayan Northcott, who has died at the age of 82, was an inspiring force in British music for half a century and more. He was Chief Music Critic of The Independent from 1986 to 2009, and wrote for many other newspapers and journals including The Sunday Telegraph, Tempo and BBC Music magazine, where he was a regular contributor until his death.

In a disobliging piece about Elliott Carter after his death in 2009, Richard Taruskin acknowledged Northcott among the composer’s foremost advocates, alongside Stravinsky, William Glock, Joseph Kerman, Andrew Porter and Charles Rosen. Albeit viewed from an oblique angle – and Bayan did plenty of that in his own writing – this was the company he deserved to keep.

In his magazine articles, journal essays, booklet notes and overnight reviews, Northcott was the crafter of the exquisite miniature and the penetrating aperçu that left his windier colleagues standing and opened out petals of meaning the more you read it. No one but he could have come up with ‘Messiaenic Brahms’ to anatomize a passage of Alexander Goehr (the opening of the Third Quartet) with a double-edged compliment which also looks sideways at Schoenberg’s praise for the ‘messianic Brahms’.

Goehr had been one of Northcott’s teachers at the University of Southampton, where he studied music after reading English at Oxford and a period of teaching. His earliest acknowledged work is a Sonata for Solo Oboe from 1977-8, and he continued to compose for small forces alongside his journalism. If in due course he becomes remembered as a composer and writer rather than the other way around, posterity may come to recognise the value of a fastidious but substantial body of work.

Never a waster of words, he spoke and wrote about music in satisfyingly musical terms, and these qualities correspondingly mark out his own compositions. They are music about music, as well they might be with a comprehensive internalised knowledge of the western canon at his instant recall. Coming to terms at length with the full apparatus of the symphony orchestra, he produced a scintillating single-movement Concerto, premiered at the 2016 BBC Proms, which converses with the fluency of one who admired Haydn as much as he did Carter.

Northcott was kind and encouraging to younger colleagues – including myself – who could look across a crowded room at a concert or event and find a welcoming face which might just as readily crinkle into a smile as pull a doleful expression before delivering a coup de grace of positive scepticism. More importantly, Northcott sought out, prodded and advised many composers of younger generations, who came to rely on him for an incisive second pair of ears.

As a director and moving force behind the NMC label for decades, Northcott gave many of these composers their first break on record. For his own, intricately worked Fantasia for Guitar to take its natural place alongside works by Peter Racine Fricker (1920-90) and Charlotte Bray (b1982) pays its own tribute to the continuity of his presence, his voice and his quiet influence over British music during the last half century.

Northcott’s Fantasia for Guitar, recorded by Antonis Hatzinikolaou for NMC

The premiere of Northcott’s Concerto for Orchestra from the BBC Proms in 2016

Selected writings: The Way We Listen Now (Plumbago Press: 2009)