Two totally bonkers composers together at last...
When I was a child having not long turned four, my family moved to a new suburb on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Walk to the end of our street and you were right on the edge of the Scottish countryside. Continue through a field and you would eventually find yourself in a pine forest, through which a very pretty stream, or 'burn', flowed. On the other side of that forest there were army barracks.
Although I never made it that far I knew they were there, because on a good day I could stand in the front garden of our house and hear drifting tantalisingly in and out on the breeze, the sound of the massed pipes and drums of the military band being put through their paces. To this day it remains the most wonderful sound I have ever heard.
At the time, having developed an early love for the music of Mozart, of Haydn and Dvořák and funnily enough Copland, I had already decided to become a composer, if and when I ever grew up. But it was this experience, the experience of trying to grab these haunting melodies delivered by nature, out of the air as they drifted past, that gave me my creative voice and to this day that voice remains fundamentally unchanged.
The biographies of composers, indeed of classical musicians in general, invariably begin with the words (insert name) 'studied with'… and so forth, continuing in a similar vein as if it is this kind of information, the ability to demonstrate 'official sanction', that first defines us as artists. So I thought I'd try something new by not adhering to a template that after all, as is so often observed, makes for rather dull reading. I hope that's OK.