I remember when I first became a composer. I was about seven years old, and had been having piano lessons for a year or two. Like many school children I also played the recorder. From the beginning I had been frustrated by the banal nature of the musical exercises given to beginners, and particularly their jolly jolly nature and had become fixated with a piece by Schumann, a piece of real music, in a sad minor key, at the end of the book. I couldn’t possibly play it, though I worked at it, against my piano teachers advice, for months. One afternoon, when my parents were having their afternoon sleep (it must have been a Sunday) I sat at the piano and worked out my own tragic piece in a minor key, one that I could play. It was a very simple string of arpeggios with a harmonic melody over the top. Not a very good piece, but I can remember it clearly to this day. What happened next was more important. When my father got up I played it to him and, though I think he was quite impressed, he suggested I change the last note of each phrase to one that wasn’t part of the chord (a B against an A minor chord, an F against a G major chord etc) and suddenly the music became much more interesting. And this is what started me off. A combination of impatience at not being able to play the music I wanted, and a fascination with how music works. Two motivations that I think will always be with me. Why did those non-harmonic notes add so much charge to the music, bringing out of simple chords an unresolved questioning flavour that I was far to young to intend, but could appreciate musically? From then on I resolved to be a composer, with all the romantic self-delusions that that entails. Before long I had written numerous odd little dances in minor keys, which I performed in school assemblies, and was dressing like a cross between Beethoven and Dr Who – a habit I am only just growing out of.

One of my earliest memories dates back to 1974, when I was five. My father, a television director at the time, was making a TV series on ancient music, with David Munrow, and for two weeks the front room of our Golders Green house was filled with copies of ancient instruments, working props for the show. Of course I wasn’t allowed in there, but at weekends, when he was home, he would take me in there and demonstrate the instruments. To me it was like entering a treasure cave, full of fantastical looking objects, of gigantic proportions (to a five year old). I particularly remember the ancient Egyptian harp, modelled on pictures found in tombs. I have spent much of my life trying to recreate this room, and my obsession with ethnic instruments I am sure started there, together with the set of bagpipes my father made from an old car inner tube and some drilled metal piping, an unlikely scenario which I was to unconsciously emulate years later.

For better or worse, the music you are exposed to at Junior school stays with you for many years. We had a diet of nursery rhymes, Beatles songs (mainly the ones written or sung by Ringo Star), children’s classical standards and bizarre assemblies where the headmistress would play Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony we would sit cross-legged on the floor and try to look up her petticoat as she wandered past a little too close for comfort. I think my appreciation of this piece was tarnished for many years by this experience.

I wrote my first and only modernist piece (by this I mean a piece where the method of construction is of far greater importance than the resulting sound) when I was nine, though of course I had no idea at the time. It was the natural result of two of my obsessions: an interest in the relationship between written scores and heard music, and a romantic image of past artists as expressed though owning a fountain pen for the first time. Many children get exited by their first fountain pen, the similarity with archaic quills, reminiscent of all those images of poets and composers of the past, scrawled manuscripts and treasure maps burnt around the edges, and the potential for a glorious mess. The ink splatter, currently the trademark of artist Ralph Steadman, has always, I am sure, been a favourite amongst children. So what could be more natural than to splatter ink over a page of manuscript paper, and then, having a musical education, joining together the dots into musical notation. For me the trickiest bit was drawing the staves, as I had no manuscript paper to hand. I didn’t at any point think it was music, but I was curious to hear what it sounded like and my far-sighted school music teacher agreed to play it to me. This was probably the first time anyone else played a score I had written. And much to my surprise it didn’t sound too bad, not like real music, but not too bad. It is a lesson I have relearnt many times that a good musician can make anything sound good if they put their own artistry into it. When she tried to explain to me that sixty years earlier serious artists had been doing similar things and calling it Dada I thought she was pulling my leg. The idea was obviously ridiculous.

It was around this time that I made my first failed attempt at the violin. My earliest remembered dream was all about going to a shop and being given a violin, (or was it the one about being chased by bees), and I was very exited when the school offered violin lessons. However this excitement soon waned when I met our sadistic new violin teacher. It seems at that time there were many sadistic violin teachers as many people have tales to tell, such as being made to stand supporting your instrument with your chin alone for fifteen minutes at a time, and being whacked with a bow if it fell, (a big chunk of a half hour lesson) and within three months everyone had given up. This teacher’s severe image was compounded by his disfigured and bright red hand. This in itself was not unusual to us as our headmaster also had a disfigured bright red hand, (and was equally scary), but it added to our fear, and probably his bitterness. I was the second last to stop and moved on to the cello, for a year or so. The teacher was much more friendly and the instrument was so much more comfortable.

When I moved to secondary school my status as the top musician in the school was shattered and, being now amongst the youngest of around two thousand students, I had to start to make an impression over again. The school had excellent music facilities and offered many opportunities. In the first year I was chosen, among eight or so others, to play the children’s roles in the English National Opera production of Boris Godunov, my first experience of professional theatre. My main memories of this are being surrounded by old men in heavy makeup who were a little too friendly, and sitting in the dressing room with boys a year older than me talking about sex. It was all speculation as none of us knew anything about it. Our pianist and vocal coach was a man named Paul Daniel, now a famous opera conductor in his own right. He was a quiet man, totally unable to control a room full of children intent on mischief and cheekiness and we were repeatedly dragged out by our official chaperone, a retired old-school music teacher who threatened us with all sorts in an attempt to regain control. This same retired teacher would often come to the school in search of talented young musicians to play mini concerts in local old peoples homes. I volunteered a number of times and it was after one such performance, of my own works for piano, that he took me to one side and said I wouldn’t bother writing music if I were you, there’s enough bad music in the world already! That was the first time I encountered this attitude and I was a little shocked. I have since discovered that it is very common among classical musicians.

After seven years of composing without any technical tuition beyond grade five theory, and being the only self-styled composer I knew of, my horizons were about to expand. It was my uncle who suggested I write to Alexander Goehr, composer and Professor of Music at Cambridge University. I hadn’t heard of him but I knew he was famous (within the contemporary music scene anyway). So I wrote him a letter explaining that I was a young composer and nobody I knew could teach me as they claimed to know nothing about composition, etc etc, and enclosed a couple of scores, probably piano pieces. I recall writing and posting the package as I was in the unlikely setting of a BBC studio control room watching an over-sized naturalist clamber enthusiastically over blue scenery, to be projected into a microscopic jungle on the screens around me. I sent it through the BBC postal service and two weeks later I was a little surprised to receive a reply. In his letter he suggested I get in touch with a composer and teacher called Melanie Daiken who ran a composition course at Morley College. He gave me her phone number and said I should mention his name, so I called her, sent her some scores and was accepted onto the course, the youngest person ever by about fifteen years (this, I am sure, is more a reflection of the times that my own abilities). And so began my first encounter with the topsy-turvy world of contemporary composers.

This class was a microcosm of all the composer types I have met since. In age it ranged from me, at fourteen, to a man of seventy two, and the styles and approaches were as varied. We had our arch-modernists, both in their thirties, one more conceptual, one more constructed (serial) whose scores were immaculate, each note carefully shaped by repeated strokes first of a pencil, later inked in in biro. I didn’t recognise anything like music in their work, but put this down to my lack of experience and education, and thought in time I would understand it. At the other extreme, the old man wrote elegant careful music, with every note in place and accountable, to the extent that he was regularly criticised for producing little more than a third year harmony exercise. There was an English choral composer, a man obsessed with Michael Tippett, and an old school romantic composer in the German style. What there wasn’t, was anyone writing anything that could be remotely commercial or popular. I was somewhere in the middle, employing some dissonance and atonality, but still in the tradition of old music; basically twisted classical songs and dances, and always with a plaintive minor key flavour.

The remarkable woman who held all this together was Melanie Daiken. A student of Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, she came across as both formidable and scatterbrained. You would have to follow her train of thought laterally, springing from one musical illustration to another not necessarily related by anything other than a tiny detail in her mind. Her knowledge of repertoire was immense and she could sight-read her way through anything, though perhaps a little heavily for my taste. Her greatest asset as a teacher was her incredible energy and enthusiasm. Years later I was to choose her as my personal tutor at the Royal Academy for just these reasons.

The classes fell into two parts. First we would have a talk about a specific piece of music, looking at its construction and maybe be set exercises related to the workings of the piece. Then a brief interval in the student bar, very exiting for a fourteen year old! On our return we would gather around the piano and any new pieces would be played though, by Melanie at the piano, and a discussion would ensue. This could get quite dirty, with many sulking composers by the end. Finally these aesthetic disagreements would often find their way to a local pub after class and it wasn’t unknown for me to totter home secretly a bit tipsy on these Friday evenings....