present job. He is Headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School, home to boy choristers singing in both the cathedral and Worcester College choirs. Martin was himself a chorister at London’s All Saints, Margaret Street, and at Winchester Cathedral. As an adult, he went on to become a professional singer, before turning to teaching.

“I made a stern resolve that I would never, ever, become a teacher,” he told me when we met. “I was a feckless student, got to the end of my third year, and wondered what I was going to do. I thought I’d get a job at a school while I looked around — no teacher training in those days. After a couple of years I decided to try my arm as a professional singer. I made a living at it, but not a great living. There were people around me who had better voices, who still hadn’t made it. I did not want to be one of those. I thought: ‘Now’s the time to be sensible. Go back into teaching, make that what earns your bread, and keep music as something that you love doing.’”

You only have to talk to Martin for a few minutes to be swept up by his lifelong, undimmed enthusiasm for music.

“I had driven my mother wild by always singing around the house. I shared a bedroom with my sister, and I used to drive her round the bend as well, because I would lie in bed at night, apparently, tossing my head backwards and forwards, and singing — often stuff that I’d been playing on my father’s gramophone.”

Martin’s musical enthusiasm also extends to composing — something else that started early.

“Even as a nine-year-old, I tried to imitate Palestrina, but didn’t manage it. Herbert Howells came to Winchester when I was 11, and I got the chance to explain to him that I was writing. He offered me a few words of kindly encouragement, and although I only met him briefly, I loved his music. His influence on what I write is very obvious.”

Now Voces Urbanae, a young choir drawing on professional singers from both London and Oxford, has released a CD of Martin Bruce’s compositions. It is titled De Profundis (Herald HAVPCD355). Texts range from the Psalms, through G. K. Chesterton, to Martin’s own words. Do you first of all find some words, I asked him, then think: ‘I could do something with this’?

“The words start it, and very often a little musical idea then kicks off. I walk into work every day, and I often find that those musical nuggets seem to take on a bit of a life of their own, just as you walk. Quite a lot of what I write tends to have a walking pace metre!”

As a member of the choir, Martin sings his own music on the CD, while Christopher Watson conducts — an arrangement which, Martin admitted, “was very enjoyable for me, but probably not the wisest thing to have done”. He certainly sets the singers some challenges.

“There’s nothing worse than a piece that doesn’t give the singer any challenges. I think they are most noticeable in The Collar, a setting of words by George Herbert, which receives its first performance on the CD. That was a difficult piece to record, without a doubt! On the other hand, I hate stuff which I regard as being unsingable. I remember doing a piece that was based on Sri Lankan monkey chants, or something like that. Without tuning forks or perfect pitch, the thing was not performable. I do try and write lines that can be sung.”

Talking to Martin, you get the feeling of a man who celebrates life with an abundant sense of humour, yet is also a deeply serious composer with a love of the traditional conformities of musical structures like canons and fugues. As a headmaster, I asked him, does he like to see conformity in his pupils?

‘Ah ha, that’s a very good question!” he laughed. “I place a value on ways of behaving, and on the ways people treat each other, and I would like people to conform to those. But I think any decent head has a secret place in his or her affections for the rogues and the ne’er-do-wells. They are the characters: they may cause you grief now, but boy, they’re going to go on in life and do something, aren’t they?”