A Discovery

Reaching the biblical age of 70, I've been trying to organise my "archive", aka the IKEA shelving in the loft, which now bulges with music manuscript and other paper. In the decades when I started composing, it was unavoidable to write music by hand, and over that long period it's proved useful to have the original pages close by. And "in my day", you had to put business letters and papers in physical files and keep them; I've realised that we were the last generation of composers whose lives were lived "on paper".

One era hitherto missing has been my compositions written in Glasgow in the early 1980s, a surprising number of which are still performed today. I presumed the manuscripts no longer existed; during the 40+ years since then, I'd moved house and cities numerous times, there had been publisher takeovers, and those companies too had often reorganised their storage.

Cue the brilliant team from Wise Music's Hire Library in Bury St Edmunds (pictured above) whom I visited this month for the first time . Quite miraculously, they'd sourced and dug out a sizeable pile of 1980s manuscripts which looked surprisingly clean, fresh, sparkling - not at all as I remember life itself in those years. What an outstanding example of "composing as time travel" to see and handle these pages again. Thank you Librarians, everywhere.

PICTURED - the portrait I'm holding is by Jason Nunn (second left) created especially for my visit. A particular honour, considering the number of composers lining the shelves behind us !