Andrew Carter honestly didn’t want any fuss for his 75th birthday. “A lot of fuss over nothing,” he tells CHARLES HUTCHINSON. But the composer’s smile suggeSts he is happier than he wants to admit...

YORK composer and choral director Andrew Carter is too modest to acknowledge his achievements as he reflects on his approaching 75th birthday.

The full house that gathered for the Chanticleer Singers' concert of his music at St Chad on the Knavesmire Parish Church last Saturday would beg to differ, but Andrew says, "I think it's a lot of fuss over nothing," although his smile conveys his inner delight.

"I was embarrassed about it at first, but it's a nice embarrassment. I would have postponed it to my funeral if I could, but it's a particular thrill that a York choir has honoured me with this anniversary concert to mark this modest milestone and that they, not me, have invited my daughter Elinor [professional mezzo soprano Elinor Carter] to sing tonight, as she's a fine musician in her own right."

Music runs in the family. Born in Leicester, Andrew recalls his amateur pianist mother gathering the children around the piano to sing Teddy Bears' Picnic. "My sister was tone deaf... or so it seemed to me, who could sing in tune," he says, remembering the days when he sang as a treble in his school carol service.

"My first instrument was the hand bell, played four in hand, because all my family were hand-bell ringers, and I still have those bells."

Move the story forward several years, taking in an inspirational music teacher at Leicester Grammar School and music studies at Leeds University, and hand bells were to play their role in Andrew's long association with the Chapter House Choir, the choir he founded at York Minster in 1965 and conducted for 17 years.

"The jingle of the hand bell," he says, conjuring the sound in his head. "I just thought it would be good to introduce hand bells into the Carols by Candlelight concerts in the Chapter House, and we've since had several generations of very good hand bell ringers in the choir."

Andrew had studied piano and organ at Leeds University, but always retained his interest in singing, leading to his appointment as bass songman at York Minster in 1962.

"York Minster is the only cathedral in England that refers to this post as a songman, rather than a lay clerk," he says. "The role involved singing in the Minster every day of the week, apart from Wednesday afternoons.

"In those days, the Minster had its own education department, and my mornings tended to involve teaching among the Roman Catholics at the Bar Convent, then bicycling down to the Anglicans at the Minster, and then I married a Quaker [Sylvia]."

Andrew took his first steps as a conductor with the Chapter House Choir, a choir that went on to win the BBC's Let The Peoples Sing competition. Among the many fine singers he conducted was a young soprano, Lynne Dawson.

"She was working as a translator at the Rowntree factory at the time, and she auditioned in this very room," he says, seated in his sitting room. "She brought Mozart's Queen Of The Night aria from The Magic Flute as her audition piece and went straight up to top F."

Just as Andrew's conducting skills have been in demand, so too have his writing skills, as an arranger and a composer. "I think I did have a calling to write music; I can show you my first surviving composition, which was written when I was 15," he says.

His tutor for his composition studies at university gave him a flea in his ear on more than one occasion over his orchestration abilities, but subsequently Andrew proved him wrong. His writing flourished, initially writing for the Bar Convent choir on the hoof as he bicycled to brief rehearsals for the 8.15 morning service. In 1971, Banks Music in York became his first publisher; the Oxford University Press followed in 1978.

Serendipity played its part too. A Maiden Most Gentle, a piece Andrew first wrote for the Bar Convent, was spotted on the publisher's desk by Philip Ledger, director of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and it was duly performed in the Christmas Eve service of carols broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

"It proved to be a fantastic shop window for me; it was such a turning point," says Andrew. "That little arrangement has been sung around the world and still is."

So much music has flowed from Andrew since then, be it Badgers And Hedgehogs, sung by children, or his wife Sylvia's favourite piece, Benedicite, or his 1997commission for the tercentenary of St Paul's Cathedral in London, Missa Sancti Pauli, among his plethora of choral miniatures and larger-scale concert works for chorus and orchestra.

"This music lark has got me round the place; a great privilege really," he says, after his travels as a composer and conductor in the United States, Australia and Europe.

May this music lark continue to take Andrew Carter round plenty more places yet .