Outside the music department at the University of York is a tall bronze sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. One of my abiding memories of John Paynter is walking in conversation with him through the university campus and seeing him leap towards this sculpture, indignantly (and with some difficulty) removing a woolly hat that had been placed on the top by some disrespectful student. The small things mattered to John – not that he would have seen such irreverence for art as a small thing – and he was always prepared to remedy them himself through direct, practical action. This made him a head of department who always seemed to have time for his students, and he spent hours in dissertation tutorials guiding me slowly and thoughtfully through debates about music education that he must have explored and resolved for himself many years before. I learnt so much from his precision in writing, his critical thinking and his patient mentoring – qualities I now aspire to in an academic career on which I would never have embarked without his insistence that I should do a PhD. John's retirement coincided with the end of my undergraduate degree, and so sadly I was not able to continue doctoral studies with him, though he remained encouraging and interested in all aspects of my work long after I had left York.