Music Room

Music

I began composing music on the piano when I was five … funny little pieces written in pencil on staves that I drew with a ruler. I wrote pieces for the family but feel I only started thinking seriously about the sound world I was creating once I took up the violin aged twelve. When at school, I composed a solo violin sonata that I performed in the chapel at Charterhouse. Perhaps this is the first composition that merits any attention. The original sheet music is in the music room.

Since then, some of my greatest enjoyment has been in playing, performing, conducting and teaching music. When I began teaching klezmer workshops from 1987 onwards, the powerful folk idiom seemed to affect my 'classical' upbringing and led to the other works that lie in the room: the Three Discourses (commissioned by the Performing Rights Society) that I wrote for Ros Hawley (clarinet) and Mike Kahan (violin) and a series of string quartets.

Click on an area of the image above, listed in the key to the right, to learn more…

Composer CV

I was surprised to be asked to provide a CV illustrating my life as a composer as I had never thought of my musical life in terms of a CV. So I started to list my compositions and was surprised at its length. I realise that this has partly been due to my writing for amateur and semi-professional orchestras I conducted or led. But I suspect that it has been mainly as a result of an irrational compulsion to create sound worlds rather than leave them echoing around in my head. Click to read