Anthony Edward Payne (2 August 1936 – 30 April 2021) was an English composer, music critic and musicologist. He is best known for his acclaimed completion of Edward Elgar's third symphony, which gained wide acceptance into Elgar's oeuvre. Payne is particularly noted for his chamber music, much of which was written for his wife, the soprano Jane Manning, and the couple's new music ensemble Jane's Minstrels. Initially an unrelenting proponent of modernist music, by the 1980s his compositions had embraced aspects of the late English romanticism, described by his colleague Susan Bradshaw as "modernized nostalgia".

Born in London, Payne first seriously studied music at Durham University. His professional career began around 1969 with his first major work, the staunchly modernist Phoenix Mass for choir and brass band. He continued to write choral and vocal works, almost exclusively to British poets. From his 1981 chamber work A Day in the Life of a Mayfly on, he synthesised modernism with the English romanticism of Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams. Two orchestral commissions for The Proms, The Spirit's Harvest (1985) and Time's Arrow (1990) were well received. After his successful completion of Elgar's unfinished third symphony, Payne became unsure of his musical identity. He found difficulty in subsequent composition until a series of orchestral works for the Proms, Visions and Journeys (2002), The Period of Cosmographie (2010) and Of Land, Sea and Sky (2016).

Payne held academic posts at various institutions throughout his career, including Mills College, the London College of Music, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the University of Western Australia and the University of East Anglia. Despite regular commissions from a variety of English ensembles, he was not a particularly mainstream composer and was forced to supplement his income with writings. A noted critic, he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and Country Life. Other writings include publications on a variety of musical topics, notably Schoenberg (1968)—a study on the composer Arnold Schoenberg—and numerous works on the music of Frank Bridge, to whom he was particularly devoted.

Anthony Edward Payne was born in London on 2 August 1936 to Edward and Muriel (née Stroud) Payne; his father was a civil servant. Not from a particularly musical background, at the age of 10 Payne went to see relatives in Godalming and first experienced classical music from a radio broadcast of Brahms's Symphony No. 1. Recalling the significance of the moment in a 2013 interview with Time Out, he said he "was absolutely translated" and "hooked like a fish". A recording he was given the next year of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 solidified his interest; he began composing at around age 11. From 1947 to 1955, Payne attended Dulwich College where he mainly studied the classics, though he still found time to engage in music. Besides private study with Stanley Wilson, he worked on an orchestral suite and piano sonata and regularly played clarinet with Alan Hacker. Payne began further exploration of Western Classical repertoire, particularly Mozart and Haydn of the classical period and the Romantics Dvořák and Sibelius. However, his principal compositional inspirations were the late English Romantics Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams, influences which are increasingly prominent in various early works: two—in addition to the earlier one—piano sonatas, a clarinet sonata, and the Polyphonic suite.

After a brief stint in the Royal Corps of Signals (1955–1957), Payne read music at the Durham University Department of Music in St Cuthbert's Society, Durham University (1958–1961). During this time, studying Palestrinian counterpoint and working with the musicologist Peter Evans assisted the growth of his musical maturity. Around his graduation, he had a nervous breakdown and largely stopped composing for four years. He spent his hiatus primarily as a freelance music critic and musicologist. Before his halting of composition, in 1959 Payne had drafted parts of the symphonic poem It Happened Once, and returning to it in 1964 under the name of Liebestod, he began to discover a newly personal style of composition.

Payne's new compositional style was first fully realised in the Phoenix Mass for SATB choir and brass, which he began in 1965 and finished by 1969. Commentators note that the 'Phoenix' of the title is both metaphorical and literal, because it is, in the words of music critic Barry Millington, "a symbolic revivification of his compositional ambitions with a newly fashioned method of structural organisation." Characterised by the use of harmonic intervals for specific themes and movements, Payne declared the work to be his first major composition. Payne married the soprano Jane Manning in 1966.

Paraphrases and Cadenzas (1969), his next work, was a 14-minute piece for viola, clarinet and piano, that shared much of the harmonic language of the Phoenix Mass. Payne later revised both the Phoenix Mass and Paraphrases and Cadenzas in 1972 and 1978 respectively. Commissioned and premiered by the Baccholian Singers of London in 1970, his Two Songs without Words for five unaccompanied male voices shifted focus from intervallic organization to music based on numerology. Payne's Sonatas and Ricercars premiered the next year; the nine-movement work featured four full ensemble movements and five movements of solos for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn. Later in 1971 Payne wrote Paean for solo piano, in which a synthesis of the aria and toccata forms is dominated by numerology and tone clusters. Throughout 1972 and early 1973, various writing commissions halted his music composition. By 1970 Payne and Manning had moved to a house in Islington, where they lived until the end of their lives.

In the Spring of 1973 Payne returned to Liebestod, but quickly set it aside to work on the unaccompanied vocal piece A Little Passiontide Cant to an anonymous text from 14th-century England, and later his Concerto for Orchestra (1974) commissioned by Richard Bradshaw and the New London Ensemble. The latter was his largest-scale work to date, featuring ritornellos and—like the Sonatas and Ricercars—rotating instrumental solos. For 16 voices and text by Thomas Hardy, Payne won the Radcliffe Award for another unaccompanied vocal piece, First Sight of Her and After (1975). Though now he planned to finish Liebestod, he was commissioned by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band and Elgar Howarth so instead wrote a tone poem-funeral ode inspired by Beowulf, Fire on Whaleness (1975–1976), for brass band. Throughout 1976 to 1979, Payne embarked on four more choral pieces, three of which were by British figures: The World's Winter (1976, text by Alfred, Lord Tennyson); The Sea of Glass (1977, text from the Book of Revelation); A Little Ascension Cant (1977, text attributed to Cynewulf); and A Little Whitsuntide Cant (1977, text by Emily Brontë). He was commissioned by the BBC Proms for The Stones and Lonely Places Sing (1979), a tone poem that has a numerology-based structure and evokes "the bleak coastline of western Britain and Ireland".