Joan Trimble, who died on Sunday at the age of 85 after a short illness, was a remarkable woman in a number of fields. She was composer, pianist, teacher and, in later life, managing director of Enniskillen's Impartial Reporter, owned by her family since 1825.
Her formal training began at 15 with weekly trips from her native Enniskillen to the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. One of her teachers, Dr John F. Larchet, recommended her to the great tenor, John McCormack, with whom she toured, playing piano solos between his groups of songs.
She took degrees in arts and music from TCD and studied piano under Arthur Benjamin at the Royal College of Music in London. She formed a piano duo team with her sister, Valerie, and Benjamin's best-known work, the Jamaican Rumba, was written for their debut concert in 1938.
She studied composition under Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams, winning the Cobbett Prize for her Phantasy Trio in 1940, and being commissioned by the BBC in 1943 for Erin go Bragh, a rhapsody for brass band.
Although the outbreak of war restricted her performing career, the Trimbles made their Proms debut in 1943, playing Mozart's Two-Piano Concerto.
In the 1950s she wrote an opera for television, Blind Raftery. The nightmarish circumstances of its composition (with her doctor husband's telephone on the piano) and 1957 BBC broadcast (live, with the orchestra in one studio and the singers in another), coupled with the burdens of teaching and performing, help explain the long compositional silence which followed.
She returned to Ireland in 1977, taking care of her invalid husband, Dr Jack Gant, and working as managing director of the Impartial Reporter. She was still chairman at the time of her death.
There has been a renewal of interest in her work of late, and the first CD devoted to her music appeared this year on the Marco Polo label.
In person, she was generous of spirit, and modest. Her interest in music was unflagging and her meticulously detailed memory of works and performances, not to mention the major musical figures she had encountered during her life, was remarkable.
Her husband, several of whose stories were broadcast by the BBC, died just two weeks before she did. They are survived by daughters Caroline and Joanna and son Nicholas.
