After three years of studies abroad, the composer Norma Beecroft returned to Canada in 1962 with high enthusiasm and heady ideas about mixed-media music. Exposure to the avant garde in Darmstadt, Germany, had been “quite a shocker” to her. In particular, a live performance of Stockhausen’s Kontakte for four-channel tape and live percussion hit her like a thunderbolt.

“It was the combination of technology and instruments,” she said later. “I thought, ‘That’s where I’m going – that’s what I want to do.’”

Her notions on combining electronic sounds on tape with live acoustic instruments weren’t always embraced by the establishment in her home country. Walter Susskind, music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, asked her to write a piece but backed off when she presented him with a plan to place loudspeakers around Massey Hall for the performance.

“I think he thought it a simple matter,” Ms. Beecroft said in a presentation at the University of Toronto in 2009. “Put a tape recorder on the stage and push a button.”

Undeterred, she pursued the piece in a much larger concept and requested a leave of absence from her job at the CBC to go to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (today, the Computer Music Center) to realize her ambitions. The resulting significant work for orchestra, choir, narrator, solo soprano and three-channel tape was the 16-minute From Dreams of Brass.

“She was a creator for the modern age, before there was any idea of what that was going to require,” said Tom Allen, host of CBC Music’s About Time. “She was someone who very early on understood that sonic art could include instruments of the 19th century along with electronic music and narrative, which was a very 21st-century approach.”

Ms. Beecroft, a force in adventurous music and part of a generation of electronic-music pioneers in Canada, died of complications from a blood disorder on Oct. 19, at Extendicare Guildwood in Toronto. She was 90.

In addition to composing, she was a producer of CBC Radio programs specializing in “serious music,” as the national broadcaster designated the genre in the 1960s. The shows included Organists in Recital, RSVP and From the Age of Elegance. She also interviewed fellow composers as host of Music of Today.

In 1971, she and composer-flutist Robert Aitken co-founded Toronto’s New Music Concerts (NMC), a still-active presenter of innovative contemporary sounds. A passionate advocate for contemporary Canadian composers, she was NMC president in 1976 when the organization embarked on a tour of Europe that exposed the country’s creators to the world. According to NMC artistic director Brian Current, the undertaking was a “daring feat of intricate logistics, tight budgets and transporting instruments for unfamiliar works.”

Among her own favourite pieces were 1985′s Jeu II (for flute, viola, tape and live digital processing) and From Dreams of Brass, which featured the poetry of her sister, Jane Beecroft, and was recorded by the CBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with actor Barry Morse and soprano Mary Morrison.

Her two-part composition Elegy and Two Went to Sleep from 1967 was inspired by Leonard Cohen poems. It was recently performed at the Heroines of Sound Festival in Berlin.

Ms. Beecroft followed in the footsteps of Canadian composers Barbara Pentland, Violet Archer and Jean Coulthard. Speaking to The Globe and Mail’s Barbara Frum in 1967, Ms. Beecroft paid tribute to the trio.

“It’s a fairly recent, fairly rough field for a woman to be in,” she said. “But thanks to them, women are almost accepted and I at least get the respect of my colleagues.”

The native of Oshawa, Ont., twice won the Canada Council’s Lynch-Staunton Award for composition. Her documentary The Computer in Music received the U.S.-based Major Armstrong Award for excellence in FM broadcasting in 1976.

Over her career, which subsided in the 1990s, she was commissioned to write works for such organizations as the CBC, the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the National Ballet of Canada, the Quebec Contemporary Music Society and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

She also produced electronic music scores for Stratford Festival productions of Macbeth (1982) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1983).

“The fact that she was a woman in a man’s world cannot be overstated,” Mr. Allen said. “She was very bright, uninhibited creator at a time when that was not expected of a woman.”

Ms. Beecroft earned her own living since she was 16 years old, first as an insurance clerk, then as a fashion model. A salesman in Toronto’s fashion district tipped her to John Weinzweig, an important composer and educator who taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music.

In addition to studying piano at the Conservatory, Ms. Beecroft privately took theory and composition lessons with Mr. Weinzweig. She made the 90-minute trip on public transit to and from the home he shared with his wife in north Toronto every Thursday night beginning in 1952.

“She was the kind of human being that when she came down the street to our house, all the windows opened to watch her,” novelist Helen Weinzweig recalled in the audio documentary Canadian Composer Portraits. “She had an air about her of certainty, and around the Ossington and Eglinton area nobody had any certainty.”

In 1954, while working as a script assistant on music programs at CBC Television, the 20-year-old Ms. Beecroft met Harry Somers, a dashing composer nine years her senior. In Brian Cherney’s new book Between Composers: The Letters of Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers, the former described the latter as a “very attractive male, with a lanky frame like that of a tennis player, which indeed he was, and a handsome head with a very high forehead and deeply inset probing eyes.”

Their romantic relationship began in 1955. In 1959, Ms. Beecroft left for Rome to pursue graduate studies in composition with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Subsisting on a small inheritance from an uncle and, later, a scholarship from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she also studied flute with Severino Gazzelloni, and attended the lectures of Bruno Maderna in Germany and England.

“She was very determined to somehow succeed and better herself,” Mr. Cherney told The Globe. “Going to Europe was a striking thing for a woman at that time to do.”

Toward the end of her stay in Italy, she nearly died of agranulocytosis, an acute condition caused by a common painkiller (prescribed for her migraines) that attacked her white blood cells. The Canadian embassy called on Vincenzo Marcolongo, a fashionable Rome doctor who had interned in Canada.

His treatment of blood transfusions, antibiotics and vitamins saved her life. The experience led to Dr. Marcolongo establishing the International Association for Medical Assistance to Travellers.

“I know I fought very hard to stay alive,” Ms. Beecroft said in 2003. “That was the vivid part of my experience, the fight to prevent yourself from going to sleep. I guess that has been part of my character ever since.”

She returned to Canada in 1962 to resume work at the CBC and to study electronic-music classes under Myron Schaeffer at the University of Toronto’s cutting-edge Electronic Music Studio at the Faculty of Music.

Ms. Beecroft was a prominent but not prolific composer. As time went on, fewer commissions came her way. She created Norma’s Edible Flowers and Herbs in 1996, which allowed her to combine her passions for gardening and cooking to augment her income.

“She created products to sell but the enterprise was initially capital-intensive and labour-heavy,” said her brother, Stuart Beecroft. “That took its toll on her health.”

Withdrawing from Toronto’s new music scene, she moved to several places in Ontario in search of a garden and proper kitchen space before settling in her hometown of Oshawa in 2014. She was not a particularly active composer during that time.

“I’m not trained to sit down and write just for the sake of writing,” she explained in the documentary Canadian Composer Portraits. “I said what I said when I had to say it.”

Norma Marian Beecroft was born in Oshawa, Ont., on April 11, 1934. She was the second of five children. Her mother was Eleanor Beecroft (née Norton), a well-known actor whose last performance, at the age of 93, was an Alan Bennett monologue titled A Cream Cracker Under the Settee, a solo tragicomedy about an old woman who had fallen and was faced with the possibility of dying alone on the floor. She lived to be 102 years old.

The father was Julian Beecroft, a dazzling pianist whose career was literally cut short when a woodworking accident left him with two and a half fingers less than a full set. He would go on to build and operate early wire and tape voice recorders in the late 1920s. As a machinist during the Second World War, he managed shops that produced parts for the Mosquito combat aircraft.

Norma’s parents separated in 1947.

As a child growing up in Whitby, Ont., she was popular and blessed with good looks. At the age of 15, she beat out hundreds of local contestants to win the title of Miss Get Together. Although she was exposed early on to the music of her father’s favourite composer, George Gershwin, her musical aesthetic was more influenced by the work of Claude Debussy.

She and her sister would regularly listen to the French composer’s music on a late-hour radio program. “We ate it up,” she recalled. “I still love seventh and ninth chords.”

The studies with Mr. Weinzweig began in her late teens and lasted nearly five years. “She was totally committed to being trained as a composer, and I was going to be the means,” he said in the episode of Canadian Composer Portraits dedicated to Ms. Beecroft.

According to Ms. Beecroft, the relationship with her lover and mentor Mr. Somers further spurred her growth as a tenderfoot composer. She said in the book Between the Composers that the two spent happy hours listening to and dissecting other composers’ music. They were particularly drawn to the work of Bartok.

In Rome, she rented a piano and lived frugally in a small apartment overlooking a piazza. It was a seemingly cinematic adventure, but the young composition student grew lonely at times. She overcame it.

“That was a strength she had,” Mr. Cherney said. “She had an ability to get out of her own little world and reach out to other people.”

In a letter to Mr. Somers early in her stay, she wrote that Canada seemed “backward in its interest in contemporary music” compared with Europe, and that Canadians were “so content to sit and wait for leadership from elsewhere.”

Their relationship ended after a tempestuous visit by Mr. Somers to Rome in early 1960. She later married twice, with no children. She leaves her brother, Stuart Beecroft; she was predeceased by sisters Jane and Carolyn and brother Eric.

In 2015, Ms. Beecroft released her book Conversations with Post World War II Pioneers of Electronic Music. In 2019, her new work for digital soundtracks and solo Carrillo piano (an instrument with 96 notes to the octave) premiered at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal.

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