My undergraduate and postgraduate studies in music were at the University of York where my teachers were David Blake and Roger Marsh. David and Roger nourished my interest in and commitment to musical modernism, David of the Second Viennese School and Roger of the post-war avant-garde. But York in the late 80s also saw the foundation of the ensemble, Icebreaker, who championed the brutal minimalism of Louis Andriessen and his pupils Steve Martland and Michael Gordon. I joined Icebreaker as a pianist in 1989 and reconciling their rhythmically driven style with the avant-garde music they set themselves against became the main business of the DPhil in Composition I undertook in the early 90s supervised by Roger Marsh.