No, not really. It’s probably best described as a frustrated musical family. I believe my father wished all his life that he had stuck at the piano as a boy. My mother also played the piano as a child, but she took it up again in middle age and found it a great source of enjoyment and comfort. Music was an obsession of my father’s and he used to go to many concerts before World War II, during which he was a prisoner of war in Germany. The camp had a large library of recordings that he explored and after the war he set up on his own as a record dealer. So I used to hear a lot of music as a kid, although much of it went in one ear and out of the other. In that respect it was a musical environment and I remember even as a small child preferring baroque music. One of the first records I ever had was an arrangement for organ of the Trumpet Voluntary. That quite captivated me. I also had some Vivaldi very early, I think the original I Musici recording of The Four Seasons, and Nadia Boulanger’s 78s of Monteverdi, which I still have and continue to find magical. Without realising it, I was therefore gravitating toward early music from the start.

Did those early experiences make you decide on a musical career?

No, because I went to a rather philistine school, where a musical career was not considered to be ‘proper’. From there I went to Durham University to read English. In my first week there, I underwent a crisis of direction in my life and realised that I didn’t want to spend my entire life doing English literature criticism, which is one of the more arid areas of endeavour. Coincidentally, I met Arthur Hutchings, who was Professor of Music at Durham, and knew for certain what I wanted to do. He was fantastic, and although I had no musical qualifications at all at that time, he arranged for me to transfer across the university to the music department. I’d never done any harmony and Durham was highly harmony and counterpoint oriented, so not surprisingly at the end of the first year I came bottom in those examinations, but top in musical history. We realised there would be a lot of catching up to do, so Hutchings suggested I went down to London, where Thurston Dart had just started a new degree course which only involved one year of harmony. So, I was incredibly lucky because they only took about eight students and Dart had someone who had just dropped out.

Presumably, it was this move that started you on musicology?

Yes, I already admired Dart greatly and had become interested in English music, particularly that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I remain largely self-taught as far as harmony is concerned and probably none the worse for that, because I believe that traditional harmony teaching is an arid discipline, always telling you what not to do rather than what to do.