When my rationalisation was completed, what remained of the firm was a publishing division, producing purple-backed low-priced study scores for amateur and professional use. In less than a year, I had made Simmonds (Symphonic Scores and Concerts) Ltd profitable and risk-proof, reducing its operations to the point where they would never demand of me the sacrifice that my father had so willingly offered.

My shortcomings would be exposed in time, though not emphatically enough to dent my sage-like reputation. What I did not know at twenty-one years old is that risk elimination is bad for business. You have to take chances to have a shot at winning but I, unfamiliar with life, applied the dusty theorems of Cambridge economists and the jerky responses of a traumatised mind.

Before very long, one of the composers I had sold off wrote a million-dollar theme song for a Hollywood movie; another had an opera staged in fifteen German cities. My father’s favourite, Vladimir Kuznetsov, was found hanged from a light-fitting in a Dalston bed-sitting room. His ‘nephew’ and room-mate, a costermonger called Steve, assured me that the poor chap’s death had nothing to do with losing his publisher, but was the result of an auto-erotic experiment taken to an unfortunate extreme. Smitten with regret, I endowed a Kuznetsov Prize in the wretched creature’s memory.

Simmonds’ family concerts continued as cheerily as before under new ownership, enticing ordinary people to hear the music they loved and new artists to test their mettle away from critical ears and cultural commissars. My withdrawal made my competitors rich.

As for publishing, the bedrock of our business, I failed to anticipate a collapse in the demand for printed music. Radio and recordings – tapped, like water, with the touch of a finger – destroyed domestic music-making and fostered musical illiteracy on a scale so vast that, when people now talk of ‘playing’ music, what they mean is shoving a tape into the car dashboard. Few wrestle with a reed for the joy of hearing its wail and fewer still consult a pocket score during the course of a concert. Schools have stopped teaching children to play anything more elevated than penny whistles and dustbin lids. The ‘popular score’ has become a contradiction in terms.

Demand for printed music persists only in those parts where a semblance of Victorian values somehow prevails. In churches that keep up a trained chorus for Sunday worship and community halls where brass bands come together of a Wednesday night to practise early-industrial traditions. Towns and scrubland villages where tots can blow a tune before they read or write and teens discover sex in the coffee breaks of choir rehearsal. Often as not, these are the most derelict and violent corners of the kingdom: Ulster streets where the pipes play in sectarian bombings, Welsh hill-farms where counterpoint and lonely alcoholism are common-law co-habitants, Humber fishing ports where the cod has been fished out but the trawlermen’s songs live on.