We first met some forty years ago, at the Dartington International Summer School in Devon, England. The place was spectacular. The late fourteenth-century Dartington Hall stands in its own grounds, which include a tiltyard and a walled garden. The Summer School was in those years directed by Sir William Glock (1908–2000), legendary BBC Controller of Music whose passionate advocacy of contemporary composers changed the corporation’s music policy and the profile of the Proms of which he was artistic director.

True to form, the Summer School had several young composers on its staff. It was among a group of them sitting on the lawn that I first caught sight of Birtwistle, John Tavener, and others. Whether Peter Maxwell Davies was with them I can no longer recall: Harry’s and Max’s friendship was crumbling, since they were about to part company as joint heads of the ensemble Pierrot Players (later to be christened the Fires of London).

The first impression one gained of Birtwistle (and this may not have changed since) was of a reserved, unsmiling man who appeared to be pondering ideas which did not seem to be giving him much pleasure. “He is rather dour,” I heard people say.

On closer acquaintance, of course, you realize that he is anything but. A kindhearted and vulnerable man with a warmly resonant, musical voice, Birtwistle is, like any creative person, anxious for his works to find wide acceptance but is just as committed to preserving his integrity. He knows full well that his idiom is not immediately appealing to the uninitiated (“It would be no problem for me to write music easy on the ear,” he told me at the Lucerne Festival where he was featured composer on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2004. He added that he quite consciously stuck nevertheless to the language he felt his own).

We were talking at the end of the interval, about to take our places, to listen to one of his major orchestral compositions, Earth Dances (1985/86). It is a monumental block of primeval power and unless conducted with thorough knowledge of all the score’s intricacies, the music tends to overpower the listener.