Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a composer. This Christmas his music is being heard in concerts

and churches all over the world. He's the most celebrated and commercially successful

composer of Carol's alive today. Inspired and encouraged by his school education,

he became director of music at Claire College,

Cambridge, and then with a string of winning commissions

already behind him moved into full-time composition.

These days he runs his own record label and directs his own choir, the Cambridge singers,

but most of all he composes traditional attractive music firmly established at the center of Christian worship wherever

it's practiced.

I take sounds in the air and use them, he says.

I write music that people will enjoy singing I'm not ashamed of that he is

John Rutter John that the Shepherds pipe Carol has to be your most popular

Carol I think it's your signature tune really wasn't it one of the first you ever wrote?

It was. I think the year was 1966 and the occasion was a concert in Claire College where there was a little gap at the end and I thought I need just a bit more music to pad out the program

So I thought I would write a carol

So you just knocked one off I did yes the night before

Amazing that's your great trick you have a gift for melody which a lot of composers would kill for you just pluck them out of the air do you?

Well I'm a magpie I think composers are divided into two types. There's explorers whose destiny is to

discover new sounds and I think there's those like me who are very happy to use all of these sounds and the ideas that are there

and to make a personal synthesis of them and so I don't think I've trodden any

...