‘There's absolutely no point in writing a piece of music that doesn't have some sort of strong emotional feeling or intention behind it.’

Christopher Gunning is known well to musician friends of mine and, like them, I’ve long admired his music for film and television. But my main reason for wanting to interview him was the emergence of his concert works from what I suspect he still feels is the shadow of his music for the screen. This is largely the result of a series of studio recordings in which he has conducted five of his seven symphonies (he was composing an eighth as this book went to print).

They confirm what he has always known: that his achievements as a film composer don't encourage him to merely dabble, dilettante-like, in symphonic music. He has explained in a number of other interviews that he could and perhaps should have been writing that kind of music from the beginning of his career, and would have written it then had it not been for his fears about financial security. Some of today's young composers may not have such fears, or may not have them to such a degree, but since all are at some point required to achieve a balance between artistic creativity and financial survival I thought it would be useful to record in this book the views of someone who followed a commercial path and was subsequently sidetracked professionally for nearly thirty years.

I also wanted to talk to him about his more general relationship to contemporary British music, some of which he believes has baffled and alienated concertgoers by its lack of discernible logic. ‘At the same time’, he has written,

So I was pleased that in June 2011 he said he would be delighted to contribute to this book. Three months later I interviewed him at his home, a large, detached Edwardian house up a narrow, leafy lane on the outskirts of Watford, Hertfordshire.