His death was confirmed by Jonathan Wainwright, director of the music department at the University of York, where Mr. Mellers taught for many years. As broad as Mr. Mellers's canvas was, the unifying current that ran through his writing was a sense that he considered music of all kinds crucial to the fabric of society, and worth explaining in depth.
His books and articles, published over 60 years, examine the technical nitty-gritty of composition. But Mellers invariably offset specialized discussions of key centers, rhythmic juxtapositions and melodic shape with explorations of a composer's cultural milieu as well as the psychological underpinnings that helped a composition speak to its listeners, both in its day and across the centuries.
Particularly notable among his books was Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (1964), an absorbing overview that traced American composition from Colonial times through jazz (with glancing mention of rock), published at a time when European musicologists paid scant attention to music in the United States.
His Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles (1973), the first full-length serious analysis of the Beatles' songs, was published only three years after the group split up. Mr. Mellers later took a similar approach in A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (1985). He also published books on more straightforwardly classical subjects, including Bach and the Dance of God (1980), Franois Couperin and the French Classical Tradition (1950) and Percy Grainger (1992), as well as Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century (2001).
Mellers was born in Leamington Spa, England, on April 26, 1914, and studied music and English at Leamington College and Cambridge University. In the 1940s, he joined the editorial board of the critical journal Scrutiny and taught at Downing College, Cambridge, and then settled at Birmingham University, where he taught for more than a decade. In the early 1960s he was a visiting professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh, during which he wrote “Music in a New Found Land." From 1964 to 1981 he was a professor of music at the University of York, in England.
Mr. Mellers's compositions, though rarely performed in the United States, had champions in England. Among them were several operas, including “The Tragicall Historie of Christopher Marlowe" (1950-52) and “The Borderline" (1958), and dozens of stylistically varied choral and vocal works.
He is survived by his third wife, Robin Hildyard, and three daughters, Caroline, Judy and Sarah.
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