I began my musical life as a drummer when I was very young. Then, when I was around 15 years old, I received a $15 guitar from my father as a stocking stuffer at Christmas, and it captivated me.

I put my drums away and started playing guitar. My great dream was to be a performing jazz guitarist, and I worked very hard at that for quite a few years, studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Still, I never broke through a level of performance. It wasn’t because I didn’t put in the effort, I just didn’t have the combination of everything one needs to be a performance artist; the nervous system, the innate ability and gift. I didn’t have it.

In my early twenties I began to think that maybe music was not meant to be a part of my life – certainly not as a means of making a living. So I walked away from it, and started a silk screen business.

I was then an ordinary citizen, with a total distance from music, and could explore it as a ‘normal’ interest. I got a classical guitar teacher and began again as an absolute beginner at the age of 24. Of course, I had played guitar my whole life, but this was a different guitar, a different literature and a different sensibility.

I also learned with an amazing piano tutor. He gave me a photocopied version of Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony. He taught me four-part counterpoint and put the classical literature in front of me; Bach Inventions, Mozart Piano Sonatas and the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, working through them incredibly slowly.

Writing orchestral music wasn’t another Solar System – it was another universe, because I had always worked with rhythm. Following my first film, I was asked by Steven Spielberg to score a small movie called Fandango. He wanted a large part of it in the style of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony and I was terrified. This was the dream opportunity for me to take the next step in my burgeoning career, but I felt I couldn’t do it. I’d been studying avidly for years, listening to the literature, but it was all in the realm of theory.

A few weeks into writing it, I heard a voice, and it was my voice. It said: ‘you’re never going to have anything other than your sense of taste. If you like the way one note moves to another, that is the only law.’ I put my hand on the piano and played a chord. And then I played a second one. And I said, ‘I like that’ – I wrote it down. And then I went to the next and the next. Something had changed, and suddenly I could do something I never dreamed I’d be able to do. It happened in a flash and just a few months after that Robert Zemeckis asked me to score Back to the Future. That film was only the second time I had ever written for an orchestra.

Recently, I have been sitting at the piano and guitar almost every day, but this is for private consumption only! As this career seemed to take on a life of its own, I started to feel an interesting lack of respect for music – that which has given me this amazing life. So now I sit and play horribly through vast amounts of the literature at a snail’s pace as part of my honour programme – to demand of myself that I learn something about this magnificent thing called music. But it’s very intimidating, to sit and try to understand something about great music. I’m 72 years old and I’m just beginning to be able to listen to a piece of music and enjoy it without this terrible kind of self-judging process psychologically going on.

I’ve also been reading biographies and just finished a spectacular one about Brahms. I love the idea that Brahms carried a string quartet movement in a suitcase around with him for years. I find it helpful to know how much time great composers laboured for. I can relate to the working hard part, and if that’s my connection to them, I’ll take that!

Back to the Future the Musical is running at the Adelphi Theatre, currently booking until July 23, 2023 – for details see: backtothefuturemusical.com

This interview originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of Gramophone. Life is better with great music in it – subscribe to Gramophone today