I knew Joan Trimble only during the closing years of her life, but from our first meeting in her charming home in Enniskillen, and our subsequent correspondence and friendship, came the realisation that I was in contact with one of the most remarkable Irishwomen of her time. She had that rare and enviable ability to live and work in the North of Ireland, totally in tune with the Ulster ways, both Anglo- and Gaelic-oriented, and at the same time to be completely at home with Southern ways.
From her birth in 1915 in Dublin's Harcourt Street (a house in which Edward Carson had also been born) she had known Ireland before partition; from her adolescence she had experienced the increasing difference between North and South, Catholic and Protestant; and from her musical training in London and her subsequent career there, she was able to absorb an English way of life which did nothing to stand in the way of her return to the complexities of Ulster in 1977
It is hard to imagine that anyone today could encompass such a variety of careers: a world-famous piano duo with her younger sister Valerie in the 1940s and 1950s; a professorship of accompaniment and general musicianship at London's Royal College of Music in the 1960s and 1970s; a much lauded position as a composer of piano and orchestral music and songs; and a marriage culminating in a 20-year devotion to her increasingly disabled husband, Dr Jack Gant, which coincided with her return to Enniskillen in 1977 when she took up the managing directorship of The Impartial Reporter, the longest surviving family-owned newspaper in these islands.
Her mother, Marie Dowse, a member of a huge and hugely musical family, grew up and was educated, along with several sisters, at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. One of those sisters, Rosalind, became a member of the inaugural Radio Eireann orchestra in 1926, and was thus associated with the incipient National Symphony Orchestra - a connection renewed by Joan herself when Arthur Duff commissioned her to write a suite for strings for that orchestra in the 1950s.
Her family traditions embraced the two musical genres on this island. This allowed her to celebrate - and celebrate she did - the so-called "classical" method of composition and at the same time the spontaneous, lawless method of recreating the indigenous or "ethnic" musical modes. Joan was passionately interested in the fate and fortunes of Irish music. While from her mother's side of the family she was strictly trained in the `classical' style on which her own compositions and her own career as a teacher and performer were founded, her intimate knowledge and love of folk-song was rooted in her father's and, I think, grandfather's personal collection and was a constant source of inspiration as well as a challenge to her as a composer.
The RIAM was always the pivot of her musical life, regardless of the status of her professors in London, including Vaughan Williams. It was here that the "village" of Dublin, to which she never became a stranger, took on its musical character, with personalities such as the legendary Annie Lord, Edith Best and Rhona Clark, contemporaries and near contemporaries such as Frederick May and Walter Starkie, and the memory of great teachers such as Adolf Wilhelmj and Guido Papini.
She was delighted to be awarded the rarely-bestowed honour of Fellowship of the RIAM in 1985, an honour succeeded only three years ago by her election as a vice-president. This position gave her an opportunity, unfortunately limited by her own and her husband's ill-health, to take an active interest in its work.
Joan was a tremendously supportive friend and colleague. If she believed in what you were doing, she gave it her every attention. Letters from Joan were real epistles, lively, determined, authoritative, full of viewpoints, facts and pointers.
In 1999 she made one of her rare visits to Dublin to celebrate the publication of a CD of all her music for two pianos by Una Hunt and Roy Holmes - a visit which, with hindsight, was a valediction. This CD, and the slightly earlier issue of a CD by the Irish Chamber Orchestra of her Suite for Strings, brought her a palpable excitement and gratification and it was thrilling to find her both rediscovering her own music and meeting the evident admiration and enthusiasm of a younger generation.
I will always remember with awe, the astonishing breadth and depth of her knowledge of Irish music and musicians; with admiration, the energies and resources of an octogenarian who would put most of us to shame; with respect, the self-effacing dignity of a truly Irish citizen; and with deep affection an old friend of whom there are now so few.
R.B.P.