looking back it's a fascinating
development of events and coincidences and I'm very grateful that I found my
destiny as a composer took me a long while to realize it and it began with
being asked by the head of English at my first school to write incidental music
for King Lear which I did and I found very easy and much to my surprise people
kept complimenting me on it and a BBC producer was at the production one night
and insinuated that I should be composing more and that that if I were
to the BBC might be interested in using some of my music it's all natural to me
to be it creative and I found myself at saying well yes but cut other people do
this you know I thought it was just a part of being a musician somehow some
parents commissioned me to write a new work for the school choral society a
core Society of about hundred singers I should think and it was a setting of the
wedding at Cana Christ's first miracle and my brother to whom I'm very close it
was also very creative with words he is a priest
he's just retired as a priest actually but thought that this first miracle from
Saint John's Gospel would make a brilliant text and lo and behold we
perform this work and various things kind of happened then I found it very
difficult to assign the label composer and at this point I suppose I was
thinking it's just something I'm dabbling with and it's good fun and I'll
go back to teaching but there was a huge response to the wedding at Cana and as a
result of that I was asked to be resident composer at Charterhouse after
seven years at Charterhouse I knew that the point had come for me to take that
very big important decision that a lot of creative people have to take most
creative people whether you're a novelist
a painter whatever and you you sacrifice things for your are so I sacrificed a
full-time salary anyway I took this step at the age of 37 I thought if I'm going
to do it I've got to do it before I'm 40 that followed too frugal years when I
was quite depressed struggled financially be very open about this but
came through that and I put everything I had materially mentally creatively into
a project called blue in blue within a year by the end of 2002 I had written
the Bluebird variations and conceived a whole album thematically related not
musically but more dramatically to the to the Bluebird by Stanford and I loved
the I loved the words towards the end of the poem of the Bluebird way talks of
the the blue of the sky in the blue of the lake and the blue of the bird itself
and that moment that image where all the Blues come together and I form my own
choir I went round the Royal College of Music and the Academy in the guild hall
and I put notices on the Student Union board saying I was going to form my
quiet people interested come on audition and I formed my own choir called
convince us then came the phone call late January
2004 Classic FM we've heard this album we'd love to make it our CD of the week
are you okay with that and I said yes I'm okay with that
and suddenly I went from having no audience or an audience of friends and
family and ex-pupil --zz to having an audience of 6 million and that made all
the difference in my life and without that radio station I don't think I would
be here now talking about my music and then they made me their resident
composer for two years and then my career was up and running and it had
paid off having faith in whatever gift I'd been
given paid off it took me thirty nine years to realize I've been given the
gift okay that's long enough I built I know you give me a gift I used to worry
it would disappear but my brother who was a priest said if you give a gift you
want it back I said no he says well you've been given a gift nobody's gonna
want it back it's it was very important for me and God doesn't give a gift and
you say thank you for the gift but I wish it could have been better it's like
a kid opening a Christmas present I know that must have been quite a lot but you
know in terms have been given a creative gift you give him the creative gift it
couldn't be better
you