By what process do you begin a new work? Does this change depending on the brief?

Each piece is differently approached and at various times I’ve had different preoccupations. Early on, what was crucial to my being able to compose at all was that I could see the shape of the whole right from the beginning, so there could be page after page with very little on it - perhaps a single line of notes incomplete in rhythm - before a section much more fully notated. But the ‘bones’ of the piece were there all along. There was also a period of exploration of harmony and I have notebooks filled with chords I created and felt I wanted to work with including all their transpositions. Another time it was rhythm and different speeds within one section of a piece that occupied my energies. One thing hasn’t changed and that is that I never feel it necessary to start at the beginning; a tiny motif which eventually finds its way into the middle of a work can often be my starting point.

About to be stranded on a desert island, which single work-related tool would you choose to take with you?

Oh pencils, pencils, pencils! I can’t even begin to think without a pencil in my hand, I’ve got hundreds of them. I clearly remember an occasion years ago when I answered a knock at the front door with one pencil in my hand, one gripped in my teeth, and a third stuck in my hair. And if I’m using pencils I must have paper. I can’t use electronic devices very well if at all, and in any case, I can’t see enough of the music on a screen. When I was composing ‘Symphonies of Flocks, Herds and Shoals’; for large orchestra I hung up lots of the pages all around the room so I could walk from one to the next, seeing and hearing in my head quite large sections of the music.

Thinking about performers’ interpretation of your works, to what extent do you feel notated versions should be as accurately performed as possible, and where do you feel there is space for personal interpretation?

I’m a great believer in throwing the babies out of the nest. When a piece is finished it becomes the performers’ work and I absolutely love it if the musicians come to me with their own ideas… I always hope my performers will make it ‘their piece’; and give me something fresh in the music I didn’t necessarily imagine when I wrote it… If it’s not clear from the score how something should go, then I consider it my fault. And I never revise anything - a piece is born and must then fly !

If you hadn’t been a composer, what would you have done?

I think I always wanted to make things so if not pieces of music, then art, sculpture, writings, buildings - I am very interested in beautiful, modern architecture. And as a student when I had holiday jobs working in shops I thought being a window dresser would be a wonderful and creative profession.