‘I really write for the players, not for the audience.’

I’d met Thea Musgrave once before, in Nottingham in January 2000, when I photographed her after a rehearsal of one of her pieces. She liked the results and explained that she looked relaxed in the photos because while I’d been pointing my camera at her she was still jetlagged (she has lived in the USA since marrying the American violist, conductor and opera administrator Peter Mark in 1971). When I read that she was going to be in London in February 2014 for a BBC ‘Total Immersion’ day of her music, I hoped that there would be a chance to meet her again and interview her for this book.

‘Sure! I’d be glad to meet up’, she e-mailed me. ‘It's going to be a little crazy but we will find a time!’ A few weeks later came another message: ‘Andrew, I LOST your list of questions. Grrrrr! I am doing too many things all at once.’ Her schedule in London was indeed a little crazy because of preparations for three concerts of her music – given by students from the Guildhall School of Music, the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins – and, on the same day (a Saturday), two talks about the works that were programmed. The second of these was an onstage conversation with Tom Service, who also interviewed her for BBC Radio 3.

A few days after this Total Immersion I went to interview her at the hotel in Earls Court where she and her husband were staying. We’d agreed to meet in the small bar at the front of the building, and she walked in with the demeanour of someone much younger than eighty-five. This was partly because she no longer wears the spectacles that for decades were such a strong feature of her appearance but which seemed to age her prematurely.

This being a Thursday morning, the hotel was deserted apart from staff, and so we stayed in the bar and chatted there for nearly an hour. The only intrusion was the persistent and piercing chirrup of a caged bird, which eventually gave up and became silent again.