Michael Boyd, the former Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has died at the age of 68. In December 2006, Boyd spoke to Gramophone about the classical music that most inspired him and his productions, which we republish below as a tribute.

My interests in classical music are mostly cannibalistic. I've probably listened to more music looking for inspiration for my work as a theatre director than in almost any other way. As a result I'm particularly moved by music that's quite spare, music that can work with the human voice – piano and cello pieces have been very important. The cello is famous for being quite human in some senses, but in a much cooler way I find the solo piano a close analogy for human expression.

Probably my favourite piece of music that always, always moves me – I've used it twice in two different shows – is Debussy's Des pas sur la neige. It's such a simple piece of music that starts off feeling like it's tentative, almost like it's trying to invent music from nothing, working seemingly unconfidently towards melody and full expression. It starts like something that could have been written an awful lot later than Debussy, something quite fragmented, something quite dissonant. But then I completely contradict myself with another piece – Monteverdi's 1631 Mass of Thanksgiving, to commemorate the passing of the plague in Venice. I did a production of Othello once that started with the Gloria – a very conventional ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ and then suddenly this plummeting into a dissonant ‘Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis’, with not-quite harmonies, that really told about the appalling cost of that plague. It was celebrating all the way through the Mass God's deliverance and then said, ‘but my God it cost us’. That entirely framed the dreadful price of the tragedy to Desdemona and Othello.

If music is in a piece of performance work, it needs to evoke that which words find it very hard to express. New music is particularly good at organising, accelerating and compacting time. It's good at accessing emotional and sense memory throughout our whole body. Words very often get trapped in rationalist thinking, and music is brilliant at getting under the radar. There is something about the ambiguity of music that's really extremely valuable.

Craig Armstrong, a composer who straddles contemporary popular music and classical music, wrote a piece for a production of The Broken Heart by John Ford, the first piece that I did with the RSC. By then I was sufficiently confident about him to say: go away and write this woman's heart breaking. He wrote a piece that was dominated by the oboe, and nobody had hit that note like that, when her heart breaks, for decades at the RSC. It was a glorious piece.

Do I use music to create a specific historic period? Usually not, because that seems to me a bit literalist. What music is so good at is breaking free of the specific into the much deeper and more abstract emotion or thought or aesthetic. Having said that, one of my first love affairs with classical, or if you like court music, was with the work of David Munrow. I remember an album called ‘Ecco la primavera’, and there was something about the rawness of that early Renaissance court music driven by an extraordinarily powerful simple percussion that had a spiritual, metaphysical and great sensual yearning about it. Court music still hadn't completely divorced itself from its folk roots; you could still smell it in there.

Have I ever considered directing opera? Yes I have, but it's just never quite happened, though I'd love to. Janáček is a composer I really admire, and it would be interesting to look at some of the more blowsy 19th-century Romantic operas by Verdi or Donizetti, and see how you can root that in real human behaviour. I completely adore the music of Monteverdi and would love to work on his pieces. And also I'd love to commission someone to write a new opera. Opera needs loads more commissions.

I would like to recommend people to try recordings of singing from the Free Presbyterian Church of the Western Islands of Scotland. It's a singing that is born out of a liturgy that doesn't allow melody because that's sort of idolatry. So there's a quite old form that sounds incredibly modern in its improvisatory character, its freedom from what we consider normal devotional music. And the other astonishing thing is how much it has in common with Islamic choral traditions – way up in the north west of Europe there's a noise coming out of chapels that could almost come out of a Mosque, maybe for similar spiritual, doctrinal reasons. It's a beautiful sound.