Finding himself in Birmingham one Sunday in October 1955, William Alwyn, approaching fifty and still one of the most prolific and experienced British film composers, listened to the “church bells ringing their tumbling changes across the city - a liquid stream of uneven sound which drifts close then away again as the breeze takes and the ear attends”. He went on,

These few words in a diary reveal much: an insight into metre and the rhythm of language, an aptitude for the harmony of imagery, and a flair for counterpointing imagery, information, and ideas. One could probably guess that this man had leanings towards poetry, and one would not be surprised to find that he is a composer too.

The words reveal an intense sensitivity towards imagery : one may be unsurprised by a composer's pleasure at the sound of bells, but here is Alwyn the composer painting an intense verbal picture - uncovering through his words the musician who became a collector of art, a painter, and a skilled film technician. They also reveal Alwyn's curiosity: his observation of the behaviour of the bells, the recollection of the worn and cold stile…. Alwyn the boy again, and excited still by the “foreign land” in the next field. A curiosity so concentrated as to be remembered years afterwards could end in the pursuit of perfection. Alwyn was proud of his technical professionalism in both the concert hall and the cinema. He was driven to know how and why sound and picture worked together, and he tried to the point of exhaustion to make them an artistic whole in his films, indivisible like the workings of a clock.