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I began working with live composition or improvisation spontaneously at a very young age, as have many people. But in my case, unlike most others, my improvisation continued even while I trained as a classical musician, and I came to reflect what I loved most about other composers in my own music.

After working for some years in London's contemporary music scene as a composer, I realised that my path as improviser had become more important to me than my status as composer of written works, and I decided to leave England and explore other aspects of practical musical life in an effort to understand what my own gifts might be revealing to me.

I ended up moving southwards (as my mother's father had almost 90 years before * see article), and eventually established my life in Lisbon, where my path has been greatly enriched by contact with the Portuguese people and culture, and also with the German community (through my wife Irmgard and our four children). Here I have worked with ballet and opera, accompanying singers and instrumentalists, composing, researching and editing (also for Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Charles Mackerras and others), playing as organist and pianist in concerts and recordings with the Gulbenkian Choir and Orchestra, making music for silent films and theatre productions, and so on. I teach a number of subjects, including improvisation, at the Escola Superior de M*sica de Lisboa.

Music is essentially a form of communication, and I think that a fundamental part of the joy it arouses in us resides in the fact that it is a shared experience. Music brings us together; it flows between us and within us, and we expand and cease to feel isolated. But music lives in time, and any desire to fix it, or to define too closely its identity, will tend to interfere in some way with this aspect of sharing and communication. I believe this happened in the world of Classical music, in part because of the way music is written down; and if we are looking for a more creative musical life I think it is important for us to shake off some of our inherited attitudes, and find new ways of describing music and musical activity which serve us better.

There was a place and a time * the German-speaking states in the final decade of the eighteenth century * where it became important to give the (usually German) composer the highest honours, as an unfettered creator of new and greater worlds. The propaganda thus generated around the figures of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn and the living Beethoven was so intense that it eventually swept almost all their contemporaries into oblivion.

The desire to demonstrate the *free* nature of genius led in the long run to an astonishing ignorance of anything that was not directly connected to one of these *Gods*, and a scandalous loss of appreciation of the role of the performer or the public, or anyone other than the figure of the Composer, in the ongoing development of musical styles.

The Early Music movement has, I believe, done much to redress the balance, and has revolutionised music-making in terms of the relationships between performers, their shared sense of creativity, and a new spontaneity available * at least potentially * for application to the musical score.

Such spontaneity is essentially the remit of the performer, and can never truly be induced just by the composer, however hard he may try. This is one reason why I always viewed the Early Music movement as a kind of alternative Avant-garde, having an important role to play in the development of music-making.

In the context of Early Music improvisation has, at least to some extent, regained its pivotal role. But the parallel desire to recreate exactly what was done centuries ago is one way in which old *fixed* attitudes towards creativity, and towards the public, continue to be maintained. It is clear that the modern public is very different, which means that no other part of the musical performance can be the same either, since its destination and final shaping will surely be in the imagination of the listener.

Actually, the performance of improvisation tends to show up the passivity into which modern ears have often been forced, as audiences, fed on a diet of programme notes, can find it extremely difficult to listen to a piece that may have neither a title nor a definite length until they have heard it to the end. This same piece, once safely given a title and placed on CD, can give the same people great pleasure, even when it provoked uncertainty in the live context.

By contrast, is it not striking that almost all of the *Gods* mentioned above gained their public reputations as much through their skill in improvisation as through anything else? What is it, in our attitude, which has so changed?