Obituary: Joyce Woodhead, pianist and lecturer

Joyce Woodhead was an exceptional pianist, who performed around the world and whose tuition and master classes inspired generations of musicians.

In addition to accompanying a wealth of international singers and musicians, she was also an examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and had been a lecturer at the Birmingham Conservatoire for the best part of 20 years.

Despite spending two-thirds of her life in Birmingham, she remained a Scot at heart, particularly proud of her Aberdeenshire roots in Huntly where her Fife-born father, Jimmy Finlay, owned the main garage.

More significantly, he also had his own dance band in which her mother Peggy played piano and her father and young Joyce played accordion. Her brother Bruce would go on to become a professional drummer with the 1960s freakbeat band The Sorrows.

Already a promising pianist as a youngster, she received lessons from the celebrated Scottish composer Ronald Center, who also lived in Huntly, and began winning competitions in Aberdeen. Having been educated at the Gordon Schools, Huntly, she was 17 when she arrived at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where her contemporaries included Hannah Gordon and Moira Anderson.

At the end of her final year The Scotsman's music critic J Ward put her name forward for a Caird Travelling Scholarship and paid for her to go to London to see if the concert pianist Cyril Smith would teach her. He did, not only improving her technique but entering the 21-year-old in the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition.

She was up against 35 pianists and got through to the final only to have to withdraw through illness, apparently caused by the stress of having to learn the virtuoso's masterpiece, the Piano Sonata, to compete against her fellow musicians including the legendary John Ogdon, who went on to win.

She kept the cutting, announcing the win and his 150 prize, which also commented on "the Huntly girl's disappointment".

Returning to Glasgow, she obtained a teaching qualification as a safety net and moved to Birmingham where her then fianc, a trumpeter, was joining the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Although they later split up, the relationship provided a link to a secondary school headteacher, Bill Barnett, who was looking for a head of music.She took the job and began teaching music at Stockland Green School in a Birmingham suburb.

Within a couple of years, she was married to the school's head of geography, Alan Williams, and they went on to have two boys, Neil and Andrew.

In 1966, when Barnett was chosen to open a new comprehensive school in Castle Vale, Joyce Williams was the first teacher he appointed, followed a couple of years later by Alan who, with his wife, produced numerous Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at their various schools over ten years.

Alan died of cancer, aged 41, in 1977 and the following year his widow remarried, to the school's head of English, David Woodhead, the pair having been subjected to the matchmaking abilities of senior pupils they were escorting during a trip to London to see Romeo and Juliet.

She left the school in 1979 and began two part-time jobs - at the Birmingham School of Music and Camp Hill School for Girls - as well as teaching pupils at home, which she continued to do for 30 years, rarely having fewer than ten pupils.

She also took up a suggestion that she should apply to the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music as an examiner. Between 1984 and 2011 she worked at home and abroad for the board, travelling to such diverse locations as Eton, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

She was a lecturer and accompanist at the Birmingham Conservatoire between 1979 and 1997, a lecturer at Birmingham University from 1997 to 2011 and was an honorary fellow of Birmingham City University.

During her playing career she had performed in master classes for violinist Edith Peinemann, American trumpeter Allen Vizzutti, internationally-renowned concert cellist Stephen Isserlis, horn player David Pyatt - who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year aged just 14 - and soprano Jane Manning as well as in concerts for clarinettist Jack Brymer and trombonist John Marcellus, plus many others.

She also played full concerts with Australian soprano Margaret Field and oboeist Richard Weigall, among others and had made a recording with euphonium soloist Steven Mead.

In addition she played for the English Concert Singers in Finland, Russia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania and France, as well as in South Africa and Britain and was an accompanist at the National and European Youth Orchestra auditions.

Other notable occasions included television appearances on Blue Peter, along with a child trumpet player, and two consecutive Young Musician of the Year finals.

Woodhead, who had a holiday home at Lower Largo underneath the statue of Robinson Crusoe, had been due to undertake more foreign examination tours and was booked to play for rehearsals for Elijah in Solihull, for accompaniments at Warwick University and for Suzuki violin sessions - all requiring the sort of professional sight-reading abilities that put her in a class of her own.

Never one to blow her own trumpet as far as her own skills were concerned, if a National Trust house curator noticed her gazing at a piano and offered to let her play it she would always decline. But there was one opportunity she couldn't turn down. Having earlier heard her play, the curator of the Dvorak's Museum in Prague invited her to play the great composer's piano and she accepted.

However, her greatest pleasure in the last 12 years was her grandchildren, who include a flautist and pianist, a violinist and a cellist.

She is survived by her husband David, her sons Neil and Andrew, grandchildren and her brother Bruce and sister Beryl.