As well as writing music, I write poetry, and it seems to me that when one of these arts is not the one to express what I particularly want to express at the time, then I turn to the other. Each satisfies me a means of expression. Sometimes I have used my own poetry for song writing, not necessarily at the same time. In a couple of cases, I have in fact written the words and music quite simultaneously, but this is rather the exception.
The category in which I have written most, and this is not surprising, is piano music. I dearly love the keyboard and have written a number of shortish works, some of which have been published, and fairly recently. I’ve written a number of works in trains, in hospital, all over the place, well away from an instrument. They exist, of course, quite completely in my mind.
I have been interested in music all my life. My mother was a professional pianist, a very fine pianist with a large repertoire, and it was her practising in the evenings, I’m sure, that inculcated in me the great love of music. I can hardly remember the time when I was not trying to compose music. Firstly, of course, it would be just by picking out a melody on a piano, long before I could write it down, and my mother used to write, bar by bar, some of my earliest compositions as I played them from memory, bit by bit, at the piano. I do remember to this day a little tune that I wrote for a poem which began, ‘Apples, mellow apples, high above my head’, and I remember thinking of that tune, singing it spontaneously to those words one day when my mother was tidying out her work basket.
