'From Mozart to Villa-Lobos and South African pop, Dodd brings out Walker's gift for illumination; best of all, these conversations have you searching out new-found fare as well as hearing familiar and forgotten music anew'. -- William Dart 'A wide-ranging and catholic view of the music-listening experience for our time - Walker is an ideally active listener, with Dodd an equally ideal interlocutor'. -- Martin Lodge Born and educated in Scotland, Marshall Walker lectured in English and American literature at Glasgow University from 1965 to 1980 after a spell at Rhodes University in South Africa. From 1981 until 2006 he was Professor of English at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. As Dean of Humanities he initiated and oversaw the establishment of Music at the University. An occasional broadcaster on music and literature, he introduced, for Radio New Zealand and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, concerts of the 2005 Sydney Sibelius Festival in which Sibelius's symphonies were performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. He lives in Hamilton, New Zealand, with his wife, the Brazilian writer, Claudia Pacce.
Senior Music Producer for Radio New Zealand Concert, Tim Dodd was born and raised in Dunedin, New Zealand. His degree is in Physics but his primary passion was always for music. He landed his dream job at Radio New Zealand in 1990 and he's been there ever since, overseeing the broadcast and recording of live concerts and producing countless spoken features about music. Included among these are many interviews he has conducted with New Zealand and international musicians such as the pianist and writer Charles Rosen, violinists Shlomo Mintz and James Ehnes, American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, cellist Raphael Wallfisch, jazz bass player Dave Holland and Brazilian guitarist and composer Egberto Gismonti. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with his wife and children. For over twenty years the two friends have been talking to each other about music. Tim Dodd produced Walker's award-winning Letters to Sibelius for Radio New Zealand Concert, the programmes reaching listeners in Australia and Scotland as well as New Zealand and forming the basis of Walker's book, Dear Sibelius: Letter from a Junky published by Kennedy and Boyd in 2008.
The Music for Life conversations that followed were broadcast by Radio New Zealand in December 2009, but the talk went on. This book presents the ongoing conversations in the hope that readers will like to join in.