Veale sketched out his first symphony during the war while serving in the Army's Education Corps. After demobilisation he returned to Corpus Christi for more composition lessons with Wellesz and counterpoint and harmony with Thomas Armstrong. While there he began composing incidental music for Oxford University Dramatic Society productions, in which Kenneth Tynan and Lindsay Anderson were involved. Between 1949 and 1951 he won a scholarship to study in California with Roger Sessions and Roy Harris (the latter's only English pupil).[3] He composed Panorama as an orchestral tribute to San Francisco.
Veale had married Diana Taylor in August 1944. In September 1951 came the death of their four-year-old daughter Jane. The Elegy for flute, harp and strings was written in her memory, and was adopted and recorded by the Boyd Neel Orchestra the following year, with soloists Richard Adeney and Maria Korchinska.[4]
From 1954 film scores took up most of his time, The Purple Plain being the first. From that score he derived his choral work Kubla Khan, effectively evoking the atmosphere of the East.[3] Eight film scores followed, ending with Clash by Night in 1963. The following year he composed the Symphony No. 2, his largest purely orchestral work.[3]
Unable to support himself and his family through composition work, Veale joined the Oxford Mail as film correspondent and sometimes music critic between 1966 and 1980, and also worked as copy editor at Oxford University Press (1968–1987).[2] From 1965 until he began work on the Violin Concerto in the early 1980s he stopped composing altogether, and even stopped listening to music.[4]
After 15 years of silence, Veale returned to composition with the Violin Concerto, which was broadcast by the BBC in 1986 with soloist Erich Gruenberg and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Edward Downes.[6] There followed (among other scores) the massive choral and orchestral work Apocalypse (which remains unperformed) and the Symphony No. 3, completed in 2003, which received its broadcast premiere in the year of his death. The Chandos recording of the Violin Concerto with soloist Lydia Mordkovitch, issued in 2001, resulted in a further revival of interest in his music.[7]
Veale wrote in a tonal idiom and felt that his early work suffered neglect in the 1960s and 1970s under the avant garde musical regime at the BBC and its Director of Music William Glock. He died in Bromley, (a south-eastern suburb of London) on 16 November 2006 after a struggle with prostate cancer.[2]
There are also some chamber music recordings, including the String Quartet.[11]
Panorama, the Metropolis Overture and the Symphony No. 1 were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2002 by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Porcelijn to mark the composer's 80th birthday.[12]
