Richard Gill's final public appearance was at the City Recital Hall in Sydney on 10th July. Up on stage in front of a thousand singers, he led Sydney's Flash Mob through the Beatles' 'When I'm Sixty-Four'.

In order to be there, he had discharged himself from the hospital where he was receiving treatment for colorectal and peritoneal cancer, returning to his ward after the event. The following morning, apparently energised by the outing and, doubtless, the adulation of the singers, he was on the phone, telling me about the Sydney Chamber Choir's forthcoming concert for Ross Edwards's 75th birthday. This time he wouldn't be able to conduct, but as usual his enthusiasm knew no bounds.

“You must have him on The Music Show! Of course, please tell me if I'm out of line.”

As if I'd have dared!

Richard Gill was a conductor and an educator, but an educator first. Even when he was conducting, he was educating. Whether talking to an audience in the concert hall, or to an orchestra in rehearsal, he was at pains to convey his understanding of the music at hand. Gill believed that music was capable of playing a centrally important role in our lives, if only we had ears to hear it and—crucially—the best set of skills to appreciate it. He wanted his listeners involved. Everyone could sing, he insisted, and anyone could compose.

Gill began his working life as a school teacher, and the classroom manner and tone of voice never left him. As a boy in Gill's class at Sydney's Marsden High School, Kim Williams, the future CEO of Foxtel and News Corp Australia, found himself inspired.

“Learning from Richard was always an adventure with a sense of discovery and often true revelation,” he said. “He never patronised and always had confidence in the inherent creativity in his students. He was never severe but always persistent; and he had real standards.

“He was the rarest teacher I ever had the pleasure to learn and work with. At times it was just magic.”

Gill and Williams became best friends.

Gill's abilities as a teacher led to his working in a variety of educational settings, from training teachers to conducting babies' proms, from working as Dean of the West Australian Conservatorium of Music to presenting Discovery concerts for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Ears Wide Open series with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He could hold the attention of preschool children as easily as that of seasoned concert-goers.

It helped that he enjoyed the limelight. His semi-regular appearances as a panelist on ABC TV's Spicks and Specks made him into the face of classical music for viewers who had never attended even one of his concerts.

Gill was in his element with singers and, in 1990, became chorus master at Opera Australia (or Australian Opera, as it then was), remaining for six years and conducting main stage productions of operas by Verdi and Puccini. In 1995, he oversaw the world premiere of Alan John's The Eighth Wonder.

Other premieres conducted by Gill included Moya Henderson's Lindy (Opera Australia), Jonathan Mills's The Ghost Wife (Melbourne Festival) and The Eternity Man (Sydney Festival) and, for Victorian Opera, Richard Mills's The Love of the Nightingale, Alan John's Through the Looking Glass and my own Rembrandt's Wife.

Gill's teaching instincts carried over into his work with composers. Perhaps it was simply that Gill was a composer manqué, but he liked to change details of scores he was working on. A dynamic here, a note there. Chords might be revoiced, and there might even be cuts; sometimes a couple of bars, sometimes a lot more.

Every composer whose music Gill conducted could tell you a story, and not every composer was sanguine about such interventions. Lindy remained a bone of contention between the conductor and its composer, Henderson insisting that the cuts to her score had distorted the work, while Gill believed he had saved it.

Like any good teacher, Gill was a catalyst. He was a driving force behind Oz Opera, for which he became artistic director in the mid 1990s; ten years later, he was the founder and first artistic director of Victorian Opera; with violinist Rachael Beasley and clarinettist Nicole van Bruggen he created the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra; most recently he instigated the National Music Teacher Mentoring Program, a scheme particularly close to his heart and backed by Federal Government funding, designed to bring specialist music teaching to primary schools.

All these enterprises survive him. Long may they thrive.

Andrew Ford is a composer, writer and broadcaster and has won awards in all three capacities. Andrew's music is written principally for the concert hall and has been performed in more than 40 countries. He has been composer-in-residence with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, held the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composer Fellowship and was awarded the Paul Lowin Award for his song cycle, Learning to Howl. He has also won the Geraldine Pascall Prize for critical writing.