In 1979, having seen a newspaper advertisement offering a position as deputy director of publications at Boosey & Hawkes in London, I called David Drew to ask whether the job was associated with his own. “Well,” he said, “I'm director of publications, so the answer is ‘yes.’” I had come to admire David greatly both through his contributions as a sleeve-note writer for a contemporary music series when I was working at EMI and for his superb chapter on French music in the book European Music in the Twentieth Century, edited by Howard Hartog. So I replied that in that case I hoped he wouldn't mind if I applied for the job. I was duly appointed, and spent a very satisfying five years at Boosey.

Contact with David's brilliant mind was one prime source of satisfaction, even though I discovered fairly quickly that it was also a mind of somewhat Byzantine complexity. When David said to you, “That's a very interesting point of view,” what he really meant was, “Oh, come on—you can't possibly be so stupid as to think that!” But if I was bothered by such concerns, David's sheer breadth and depth of knowledge provided ample compensation, and there were, moreover, aspects of his administrative style that were to have a very positive effect on my own subsequent methods. Crucially, he would never countenance the use of such words as “crisis” or “panic”—and indeed, I quickly realized that if instead you call a problem merely a problem, the solution to it becomes much easier to find. In deciding whether to go and work for a music publishing house, the most important question is: who are the composers it publishes? In 1979, when I joined the staff of B&H at its London head office, another firm such as Universal Edition would not have been for me a viable alternative. UE was before all else the house associated with the Second Viennese School— with the music of Schoenberg and his pupils and followers—and in view of my lack of sympathy for Teutonic expressionism, that was not music of a kind I could happily have worked with. Boosey's extensive catalogue, by contrast, was full of my kind of music.