Composer John Rutter: 'If there are people you love, for goodness' sake tell them'
As he celebrates his 80th birthday, Britain’s greatest-living composer reflects on an incredible life in music, which started with the creation of a Christmas classic aged just 16
Sir John Rutter was born in London in September 1945. He studied music at Clare College, Cambridge, where he first came to notice as a composer of church music and other choral pieces including Christmas carols. In 1975 he returned to the college as director of music and since 1979 has divided his time between composition and conducting.
Today his compositions, including such concert-length works as Requiem, Magnificat, Mass of the Children, The Gift of Life, and Visions are performed around the world. In 1983 he formed his own choir the Cambridge Singers, with whom he has made numerous recordings, and he appears regularly in several countries as guest conductor and choral ambassador. He holds a Lambeth Doctorate in Music, and in 2007 was awarded a CBE for services to music. In September 2023, he received the Ivors Academy Fellowship, and was knighted in the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours.
In his Letter to My Younger Self, Sir John Rutter looks back at childhood shyness, his relationship with his parents and his life in music.
My 16-year-old self wasn’t confident. I wasn’t sure of myself. I was quite a quiet child, and I’d been an only child until I was 10, when my sister came along. And so I was used to my own company. But I was never lonely, because I always had music. If you’d met me, I was the sort that might have got bullied in the playground. But most of the boys at our school were actually very nice, and music was considered quite cool.
I was terribly shy with girls, because I’d been to a boys’ school, and you didn’t meet many girls in those days if you were at a boys’ school. Perhaps that’s something to do with why I didn’t get married until my mid-30s. But it was the best thing.
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At the age of 16, I knew that I wanted to be a composer, and I didn’t really know how to set about it. But I was at a very good school, and I was encouraged. I started composing much earlier than that, but my first published composition was written when I was exactly 16. It was a Christmas carol called Nativity Carol, and I was encouraged to write it and put it in for a competition. It was being sponsored by The Bach Choir in London and adjudicated by the legendary David Willcocks, who was conductor of The Bach Choir, and so I wrote this little carol, and I sent it in. And you know what, it didn’t win. But it did get published, so it was my first published composition, and it did surprisingly well. It gave me an encouraging start, and I think it probably strengthened my resolve to go and study music properly at university.
Neither of my parents were musical. My father was fond of music, and he could play the piano by ear a little bit, but music didn’t loom large in either of their lives. It came out of nowhere for me. But from when I was four or five years old, my happiest hours were spent doodling at the old upright piano that sat in the corner in my parents’ flat in London. And also singing at school, because every school day started with morning assembly – you’ve got to picture me joining in very lustily with “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and all the children’s hymns. That was really when it first became clear that I did have a great love of music.
A musician friend of my parents visited when I was playing the piano, not very well. I was only six or something at the time, but I think the friend told my parents that I was actually playing the signature tune of a radio show, and I was picking out the tune, probably with one finger. And this friend said he should have piano lessons, because he’s obviously got a gift for it. They sent me along to a piano teacher, a lovely lady called Mrs Melville, who could tell that I was never going to be a good pianist. But she did encourage my singing, and she encouraged my little efforts at composition.
My parents had the very good sense to send me to a school where there was a strong musical tradition. This was Highgate School in North London. It was a boys’ school, and it had a school chapel, and so there was a school chapel choir. My best mate there in the senior school was John Tavener who, of course, was destined for fame and fortune as a composer, and we also had Andrew Lloyd Webber’s orchestrator, David Cullen.
The good thing about having two parents who weren’t professional musicians was that they didn’t know what a difficult profession music can be, and so they never tried to stop me. They just accepted it – great, you want to do music? OK. And of course, a lot of musician parents would say, it’s a very hard life, and you might starve, and it’s very competitive and you have to put up with a lot of disappointments and setbacks and maybe bad reviews and all of that. Nobody ever told me any of that. I don’t think it would have stopped me though because I was fairly goal-directed.
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I got on well with my parents but it was cut off because they died young. My poor parents died in their 60s, shortly after they both retired. In fact, they were both only 67 and they led busy lives with their work until they retired. They both looked forward to having time for each other, and I think time for me and my sister. And then, unfortunately, they both got the same awful illness. They both got pancreatic cancer, and it took them away. They did live long enough to see me become successful and established in my career, which I think was a great joy to them.
I think the fact that I didn’t get too many bruises in my early years, not too many disappointments or setbacks, probably made me more confident and outgoing. My teenage self would be amazed that I managed to become a composer that was earning a living. I never thought that could happen. I remember thinking, well, I know I want to do music, but of course, music can mean anything, from being Paul McCartney to being somebody who plays the flute in the shopping mall with a hat in front. I absolutely didn’t know how it worked in terms of a career path. And to this day, I don’t really know. But I’m very happy to stay I’ve never starved. I’ve always got a plan B up my sleeve, in case I can’t do music anymore, and I have always thought that I could retrain as a plumber.
2025: John Rutter being made a Knight Bachelor by King Charles for services to music. Image: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
My regret is that I would like to have spent more time with my family. The problem with composition is that it’s a seven-days-a-week job, and it’s not something where you can just kind of knock off at 5.30 in the afternoon and then forget it until nine o’clock the next morning. There are quite long periods where you have to work, that may mean that you are away from your family sometimes for weeks on end. I accepted a lot of the offers that came my way when the children were small. And with hindsight, I regret that because it didn’t give me the chance for me to enjoy them.
The other thing is that musicians are quite passionate people, and sometimes we can be quite short-tempered. If I could go back and say to all the people that I might have accidentally hurt just by shouting at them, I’d just say sorry to all of them.
I’m 79 [turning 80 on 24 September]. The good thing about the work that I do is that you don’t have to give it up because you’ve got too old. As long as you can hold a pencil in your hand and you’ve got some ideas in your head, you can compose. And classical composers don’t retire. Pop composers do because the kind of inspiration you get to write a good pop song tends to dry up as you get older. There are not very many elderly, successful pop song writers. As a classical composer, you’re not writing music that goes in and out of fashion.
What I would actually observe, but I can’t prove this by any scientific surveys, is that musicians rarely get any form of dementia. I’ve known hundreds of musicians in my career, I can only think of a handful whose lives have ended with dementia. There seems to be something about music that keeps the brain healthy. Composers, unlike sports heroes, can go until we drop.
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If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be my oldest son, who was killed in a road accident when he was 19. More than anything, I would like to be able to say sorry for the times I didn’t treat him as well as I should have. Or to express the love that I felt. This is the thing I would say to anybody. If there are people you love, for goodness’ sake, tell them. Don’t keep it to yourself, because you may not have the chance to express it. You just don’t know when time may run out.
Reflections by Sir John Rutter is out now on Decca Classics.
