My mother was a pianist and I studied music with her from the age of three so I could enter the conservatoire [in Ghent, Herreweghe’s birthplace], which it was possible to do at eight years of age. So by the time I was fifteen I had a diploma in piano, and had also studied harmony and all the traditional conservatoire subjects. By then I had contact with music on the one hand at the conservatoire, which is of course a professional school for professional musicians, but at the same time my normal school was a Jesuit school. We had to go to church every day with the school choir, which was of good quality and in the charge of a Jesuit priest who had received conservatoire training. There we sang Schütz, Palestrina, Bach... Very soon I was playing the organ, conducting the choir and I also wrote music for the choir. When I was fifteen or sixteen my interests were therefore very much inclined toward early music, but I was interested in many things, as indeed I still am. I therefore decided to study medicine and psychiatry because I could imagine myself being a psychiatrist and conducting Bach for pleasure, as so many people did at that time. In Belgium early music was then largely in the hands of amateurs, not professionals. So I went to university to study medicine and then psychiatry, but even while still there I founded Collegium Vocale Gent, which formed contacts with Gustav Leonhardt and Harnoncourt. That was at the beginning of the baroque renaissance. By the end of my medical studies, when I was about 24 or 25, my work with Collegium Vocale had become professional—we were making recordings and travelling all over Europe. I therefore decided to make music my profession, and until I was about forty that was mainly early music, like so many others who developed along similar lines. Then I was invited to found a kind of second Collegium Vocale in Paris, La Chapelle Royale, to concentrate on French baroque music. Since then I have lived in Paris.

That’s a very comprehensive résumé! I wonder to what degree, if any, would you say your musical development was influenced by your medical studies, particularly in the instance of psychiatry?