George Palmer

It sort of outed me as a composer and people started to ask me to write music, to commission me to write music.

An opera singer, a former opera singer came to me and said...

You would be the perfect person to form a board of a company, a not-for-profit company, for the encouragement and development of young opera singers, which I did, Pacific Opera.

So it all started to take off.

Absolutely.

It means I've had a very busy day because, you know, I was getting up very early in the morning to write some music.

Then I was going off to do some rigorous exercise and going into court, doing the full day's work, working after hours to write judgments, then coming home, dealing with the family's issues such as, will you tell those kids to get to bed or, you know, that sort of stuff, and then writing some music later on.

It was a pretty full-on time.

Of course, I was brought up a Catholic.

And the liturgical music of the church is very, very familiar to me.

And I'd previously written a mass.

I'd been commissioned to write a mass for Christmas, which was recorded by the ABC, one of the recordings that they did of my music.

So writing a mass was not a completely new experience for me, but this was on a huge scale.

Oh, this was a very contentious issue.

The directive came from Rome.

There has to be as much Latin in the Mass as possible.

Now, this is from Benedict, the Pope, who was conservative.

Now, we had had, ever since 1965, the liturgy in English.

And there were very many, many people in the church who did not want to see the reintroduction of Latin because that signaled a return to stricter control from Rome.

Well, yes, it was.