My earliest experience of recorded music, as a little boy, was my father’s collection of 78s and what must even then have been a lo-fi wind-up gramophone. I was mesmerized by these discs—the only one I recall now was “Anitra’s Dance” from Peer Gynt—particularly the way you could scratch spirals into the label with the stylus as the disc rotated.

My parents were late developers in acquiring a proper record player and, in my mid teens, I beat them to it. I was soon devouring discs from my local library, and early favorites were Karajan’s 1958 Bruckner 8 and Stockhausen’s Hymnen.

Once I had a good disposable income, I spent a lot of it on acquiring records, often guided by the reviews in Gramophone. In this way I developed a substantial awareness of, and liking for, contemporary music and the symphonic tradition in particular. Recorded music—and the equipment on which to play it—has been a big interest ever since.

In the 1990s, I decided to have a midlife crisis (my first) and became a part-time composer. Since then, my pitifully small collection of completed works has focused on piano and choral music, and I was lucky to co-produce the recording of my arrangement of Philip Glass’s Songs from Liquid Days.

I particularly enjoyed working with living composers producing, using Sibelius, materials for performance—sometimes at crazily short notice.

In fact, apart from a few singing lessons when I sang in a choir, I am entirely self-taught in music. A Londoner, I graduated in 1974 with a degree in mathematics, and had a career in IT before becoming a business consultant and now a coach and trainer.

Now, having moved to the Cotswolds, an outstandingly beautiful part of England, I attempt to combine a career as a specialist in the application of emotional intelligence in the workplace with a parallel one in music. To be honest, the first of these is dominating at the moment. However, I found time last year to edit the vocal score of Havergal Brian’s vast Gothic symphony, and this year I have turned my attention to his partsongs.

I’m looking forward to repaying some of the benefit I received from those reviews long ago in my contributions to Fanfare.