Harrison Birtwistle is one of the world's greatest living composers as well as the most reticent. He talks revealingly to Fiona Maddocks about music, art and life in this extract from her new book

21 March 2013

Mere, Wiltshire. Heavy skies, Uninterrupted rain, cold east wind. Temperature 5C. In many almanacs, 21 March is the official start of spring. This bitter, grey day feels like midwinter but the Birtwistle house is warm and comfortable. The stone building was once a silk factory, in a narrow street in the middle of the town. It is approached through a grille-like gate up a single flight of iron stairs, recessed from the street. Thus the ground floor of the house is above street level. The deep slope down towards the entrance acted as a loading bay for carts to access the raised floor level directly, when the house was constructed, circa 1800.

Our first conversation, like many subsequent ones, takes place at Harry's kitchen table. The kitchen is well ordered, modern and spotless, surfaces clear and gleaming. Someone comes in to do housework but Harry clears away first anyway. He feels threatened by mess. A long table made of poplar, commissioned from a carpenter in France when the Birtwistles lived there in the 1980s, stretches nearly the length of the room. This is where we sit. The paint colours are those of stone or sky.

Outside, under the sullen sky, the trees look bare and melancholy.

Drawings and watercolours by Harry's oldest son, Adam Birtwistle, hang on the wall behind the sofa. There are works by other artists elsewhere, including some small, delicate watercolours by Harry's late wife, Sheila.

The dominant piece of furniture is a big wooden chest of drawers painted a dark, dusty blue. Two earthenware bowls from Afghanistan, which arrived unsolicited in a consignment from a carpet-seller, sit formally on the table and contain lemons. There are always lemons on the table and if not lemons, limes, or sometimes both.

What are your earliest childhood memories? Set the scene of your first home, your parents, your upbringing.

Sunday afternoons. That's what comes to mind. They were different. We didn't have much room. I remember a big chassis pram pushed under the table. It was my pram, so this might be one of my earliest memories. I had no brothers or sisters. One end of the pram stuck out. When my son Adam was born we had the same kind… And I used to push it under the table, half sticking out, in exactly the same way.

Why were Sundays different?

There was a sort of melancholy. Everything stopped. There was nothing. It was significant even for people who didn't go to church – an idea of "Sunday best" right down to the clothes and the tea service. I remember the cups we had – they were very 1930s, straight "triangular", with green lines round the top. My mother went to the Methodist chapel. Or maybe it was Baptist – one or the other. No one knew the difference. I went to Sunday school. But I didn't go to the chapel until later when I played the hymns. I think my mother was very keen on my having Sunday suits.

Tweed suits, or what?

Tweed suits didn't come until my rebel days. I suppose they were serge or similar, with short trousers for quite a while.

Did both your parents work?

My parents had what was called a confectioner's shop in Accrington [Lancashire], but really it was a bakery. They baked, both of them. I think they had gone to some sort of night school, or done apprenticeships, to learn the skill – how to make bread commercially.

The downstairs had three rooms where most of the other houses in the row – terraced "two-up two-downs" – had just the two. Upstairs we had a bathroom, with a bath and wash-basin. I remember the roll-top and the big straight taps which were fixed so the water ran very close to the edge of the bath. I can see the green-grey limescale mark. It was probably the only bathroom in the street. But the toilet was outside in the back yard like everyone else's.

Harry c.1947, aged about 13, playing clarinet in the uniform of the North East Lancashire military band. Photograph: East Lancashire Concert Band

I remember sitting in a high chair – another of my earliest memories, which is very vivid – and being given lumps of dough to play with. Instinctively I still know how bread should be kneaded and pulled. I can watch someone doing it and know if the result will be any good or not. But that tactile thing of working with dough carried through to my abiding interest in clay and pottery. The idea of turning raw material into something else was part of the appeal.

We had a car, too, which set us apart. My father was quite entrepreneurial. I used to go off with him to the farmers beyond Clitheroe – the Trough of Bowland, as it's known – and get eggs and butter.

Were you close to your father?

We were different kinds of people. Or maybe in fact we were very similar but our paths diverged, and the context of our lives made us seem more different than we really were. I was his only son, his only child. That was important in defining how we were with one another. He was a dreamer, full of ideas and fantasies. He was called Fred. His brother was called Harry.

What was school like?

I'll come back to talking about school… when I know you better. It's difficult stuff.

We'll come back to it, then. What images or sounds dominated at that period?

Clogs. I used to lie in bed early in the morning and at a certain time, maybe around seven am, there'd be a tremendous clattering in the streets, getting louder and louder, and it was the sound of clogs. Workers were on their way to the mill. Half an hour later the same would happen again, maybe for a different shift in another mill. [One of the chief employers in Accrington at that time was Howard & Bullough, makers of textile manufacturers' machinery used in cotton mills.]

There were people called "cloggers" who mended, like cobblers. There was a repair shop for clogs. You didn't leave them there. Instead you sat, in your socks, on a long bench with other people waiting while they had your clogs redone. They had metal strips, like horseshoes, that needed replacing. I remember sitting there holding my clogs.

I started at the church school in Accrington when I was approaching my fourth birthday. So, at the age of three, I remember my first proper shoes were a pair of clogs. And they rubbed the skin in deep gouges off my heels, so badly that the teacher had to cut the flapping skin off.

Tell me about your mother.

My mother – Margaret, always called Madge – was maybe five years younger than my father. I know they lost one or more children, miscarriages I think. I knew some of my mother's brothers. There was a problem to do with the break-up of the family business. I never knew much about it. But I was aware of tensions. Tom and Edgar, two of them, ran the place and lived either end of the building, which we thought of as the "kingdom". Edgar brought this chest of drawers – which I painted blue – to the house.

Here in your own kitchen it actually looks quite French?

No. The table is French. The armoire is French. But the drawers were from Accrington, from Uncle Edgar! I think I was nearly called Edgar.

Portrait of the composer as a young man. Photograph: courtesy of the Birtwistle family

So not Edgar, but why were you called Harrison? Isn't there a mystery about your name?

I don't know if I was registered on my birth certificate as Harrison or Harry. Harrison was my mother's maiden name. No one ever calls me Harrison except, when I was a child, to be posh – or unless they don't know me. But in some reference books my name is down as Harrison Paul, which it isn't, and never has been. I don't have a second name.

Was there any music at this stage? What do you remember?

In Accrington there was a military band – the East Lancashire military band, which I played in. That was very unusual. There were many brass bands but none in the area with woodwind except ours. One of the players lived in the next street and taught clarinet. So when I was seven, I started on the C clarinet. It has a sweet, mellow sound. It was easier to play because it was smaller. Haydn wrote for the C clarinet… Music came into my life.

Did you hear music as well as play it?

My father had a radiogram – a radio with built-in gramophone. I remember Richard Tauber singing Schubert. I remember one of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words. And the Donkey Serenade. I never forgot the lines: "There's a song in the air/ But the fair señorita doesn't seem to care/ For the song in the air."

Did you take to the clarinet quickly?

I don't think, with hindsight, I was a natural as an instrumentalist or, really, as a musician. I was the only one doing it. It's what I did. Whether or not I had talent didn't really come into it. The thing about practice making perfect is misunderstood. Practice can help the untalented or the mediocre improve. But those who are naturals never practise. That's how it seems anyway. Alan Hacker never practised [the clarinet], nor John Ogdon [the piano].

But I did. I worked hard at the clarinet, and soon after we got a piano too. And I think it was a sort of ambition of my parents that music would be a route I'd take. It was seen as something to aspire to. And coming from that sort of society, they thought it was a form of education too, and that you didn't really need any other sort of studying.

Harry (top left) at Manchester University in the 1950s with fellow students including Elgar Howarth (back right, half-hidden), Alexander Goehr (bottom left), John Ogdon (glasses) and Peter Maxwell Davies (second right). Photograph: courtesy of Peter Maxwell Davies

Were you writing music at this stage?

In retrospect, I can see that as I learned to read music and to understand about notation, so there was a sort of creativity at work – I made efforts to write my own music. It sounded like nothing. I wrote single lines and I've been doing it ever since!

17 August 2013

Wiltshire. High summer downpours interrupted by sharp sunlight. Temperature 19C.

The plums, now heavy and ripe, are pulling down a bough of the tree. Harry has collected a large bowlful of the dusky purple fruit and is wondering what to cook…

The Moth Requiem Prom, for 12 female voices – the BBC Singers – three harps and alto flute, has taken place. How did it sound in Cadogan Hall compared with the premiere in Holland last October – better, worse, different?

I didn't think, when I was listening to it, I wrote the piece I wanted to write. But to a degree I feel that with every piece I write. Lost opportunities, ideas I could have developed – hard to say what exactly. You hear things that happened as if by accident, that could have turned out differently. I wrote it under extremely difficult circumstances – Sheila was actually dying during that period. Moths are the metaphor…

Harry with his wife Sheila at home in France, early 1980s. Photograph: C Lienhard

For life changing, for Sheila, for yourself too, for old age…

Yes. Yes. It's about all those. It's about things that are no longer there. I'm nearing the end of my life, at least statistically. But I didn't want to write something indulgent and poetic. Robin Blaser, whose The Moth Poem I set, had died in 2009. You know about him and the moth?

There was a sound, in a room, every evening. No one knew what it was. Turned out there was a moth in the piano and it had set the strings vibrating in its attempt to escape.

I was feeling sorry for moths. Poor moths. There's a lot of prejudice. Some people see a moth and immediately want to kill it.

People have quite serious phobias about them.

It's the fluttering. And the fact that they're creatures of the night… And they eat your cashmere. But in fact there are only two kinds that eat clothes… For what it's worth I enjoyed it more. It's not to do with the quality of the performance. Both were very good.

Aside from the question of mortality and extinction, you have always had a fascination with moths anyway, since childhood.

Yes, I've always thought that if I had more time – one of those things you always think – I'd have found out more about them, but I've never succeeded. I've just read about them as an amateur.

I told you what happened when I was a child?

Not about moths.

There used to be a thing on children's radio, a natural history programme. I can't remember what the form was. The entomologist was someone called L Hugh Newman, an old-style naturalist. He had a butterfly farm in Bexley, Kent. I remember writing to him, aged about 12, and got a funny typewritten answer. Then I got a catalogue, and you could buy all the butterfly and moth equipment. I got a butterfly net, and a thing called a relaxant tray which is a tin box with some sort of jelly in the bottom. Once they were killed they would be "relaxed" and you could set them on a cork board. I did all that. It was mostly moths. There weren't many butterflies around that area of the north at that time.

Not enough flowers?

I don't know. You'd see the usual cabbage white, red admiral, tortoiseshell. But moths you could get with molasses and beer and paint it on the bark of trees. That attracts them.

Anyway, the cheapest thing – I had no money – to buy in the catalogue were silkworm eggs. Cost nothing. I sent off for them and they arrived. They looked as if they'd been laid on cardboard. You know they're these huge moths – they're called worms but in fact they're moths. I kept them for a while. I put them in a drawer. Nothing happened for ages, God knows how long. And one morning I woke up and the whole wall was covered in these caterpillars, making their way – well I don't know where they thought they were going…

Wasn't your mother horrified at all these caterpillars crawling round your room?

No, not really.

And the Moth Requiem?

I used 12 Latin names – and 12 singers split into two six-part choirs, and multilayered. Robin's poem is interspersed. You can't really hear it as such. You're not meant to. But it's there…

You know I don't feel too well… I think I've taken the wrong pills…

Let's stop.

18 September 2013

Wiltshire. The day is a mix of grey and gold. Temperature 17C. The season is on the turn.

Through the window, the garden begins to look tired: the ancient, towering beech trees are still a rich green but the silver birch has shed its leaves on to the gravel path to Harry's studio. "The quinces will be ripe in a few weeks," says Harry. "Then I'll bake some… "

You've got yet another different kind of tea?

[He is busy unwrapping a foil bag which, like all his other teas purchased on a recent trip to Japan, has an element of lucky dip and gadgetry: he retrieves a flat, scoop-like plastic spoon to measure the twiggy-looking leaves.] Yes. I don't know what it is. It's roasted, this one. Smell.

[It smells of musty woods.]

Harry at work in his garden studio. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

You'd better update me on the piano concerto…

My relationship with this piece is very different from usual. I don't know what I'm doing or what it's going to turn out like. I'm being serious. Many more ups and downs. Yesterday I was feeling quite depressed. In the depths of despair, really. Today I'm euphoric.

But I wasn't when I got up this morning. Then I went to get some cash out of a hole in the wall and suddenly I saw a way forward. It's as if you are in a room with many locked doors and then you find that one opens and the sun's streaming in. Then the journey ahead looks clear. At least for a bit. It's quite interesting really…

The next day Harry rings me from London to say he has been thinking about the psychological aspects of writing this piano piece. "It's quite simple, yet quite manic. It's hot and cold. Sometimes I see the way forward, almost every detail of the journey. At the beginning of the week I knew exactly where I was going. But yesterday I couldn't see what I was doing at all. When I'm away I can see it. When I'm close I get stuck and question its validity." I ask if it is worse with this composition than with any others. "It's probably always like this. And it's much harder than when, as with opera, there's a narrative. It should be easier but there are endless choices. Have I said this before? Am I making any sense? I want to get back home and get on with it."

This is an edited extract from Harrison Birtwistle: Wild Tracks – A Conversation Diary With Fiona Maddocks, published by Faber & Faber on 15 May, £22.50. To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p, call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk

As part of the Barbican's Birtwistle at 80 season, Harrison Birtwistle will be in conversation with Fiona Maddocks at the Barbican on Sunday 25 May, 5.20pm

The Moth Requiem, released on Signum, has been shortlisted for an RPS music award, being announced 13 May

• This article was amended on 4 May to correct the Manchester caption.