Melanie Ruth Daiken
composer
Melanie Ruth Daiken (27 July 1945 – 25 June 2016) was an English conductor, composer and music educator. She taught at the Royal Academy of Music and became Deputy Head of Composition in 1986. Her compositions have been performed on radio and she was commissioned to write an opera by the Edinburgh Festival.
Life
She was born in London, the daughter of a Canadian mother and Leslie Daiken, a Russian-Jewish writer from Ireland. She began violin lessons at an early age, and studied piano with Vivian Langrish and composition with Hugh Wood at the Royal Academy of Music. She also studied at the University of London, the University of Ghana, and was awarded a scholarship to study at the Paris Conservatoire with Yvonne Loriod and Olivier Messiaen in 1964. During this time she became friends with Samuel Beckett, who was her friend of Daiken's father. After completing her studies, she took a teaching position with the Royal Academy of Music and became Deputy Head of Composition in 1986. Daiken also taught at Morley College and London University.
Daiken's compositions are often settings of writing, including work by Paul Eluard, F. Garcia Lorca, Rupert Brooke and Samuel Beckett.
“Melanie Ruth Daiken” enters the record as composer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Melanie, Ruth and Daiken can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Melanie Ruth Daiken” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Melanie, Ruth and Daiken provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6811346. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 2016, 1986 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Melanie Ruth Daiken” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.