I had great difficulties learning to play initially because I could not think rhythmically properly, although it's an even-paced rhythm, I was not phrasing properly, I was too Western. It took me a while to learn to think in needed form, and the only way I could learn was just by ear.

It never occurred to me that there was anything odd about writing my own music, and so I used to just jot down little ditties and things like that. And it was only in later years I suppose when I was about nine or so, that I realised there was this thing called composing.

I use music as something from which I obtain some form of - I hate to use the word spiritual - guidance, an awareness of something more than the day-to-day or the petty. I am not reading Emanuel Kant to try to embark on a task of seeing if I can understand myself, what the aesthetic experience is. But I wholeheartedly believe in it, even though I think not too many do nowadays.

I was composing before I realised I was a composer. It came more or less naturally. There were a couple of old ladies lived next door to me, and I frequented their house more than I did my own, because it had all those marvellous things in that that old ladies do have. And they had a piano, and I used to play around with that; they showed me how to read music and I used to play to them.

I had great difficulties learning to play initially because I could not think rhythmically properly, although it's an even-paced rhythm, I was not phrasing properly, I was too Western. It took me a while to learn to think in needed form, and the only way I could learn was just by ear.

In studying music, you're dealing with a person, not just what comes to you on a piece of paper, and it's important to get hold of what it is that lies between that person as a person, and the things which they're producing on the paper. I don't know whether I see things in too complex a fashion, but often people will do things which are not actually their nature, but will do things because they think that's what they should do.

I was composing before I realised I was a composer. I mean it came more or less naturally.