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I cannot begin to imagine life without music. If I have the sadness of going deaf in my old age, I will pore over music scores and watch performances on electronic media - and, of course, live with the vivid memories of performances in which I've taken part or attended.

A child brought up in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral, as I was, has every opportunity to participate in the world of music. Added to that, my parents were both musical - piano and song - and we children between us played the piano at home, and French Horn, cello, clarinet, bassoon, violin and tuba at school.

Both at home and at school I learnt a wide repertoire of traditional British folk-songs and nursery-rhymes. At Salisbury Cathedral School I was first taught to sing.

I was not a chorister at Salisbury (my elder brother Tim was) but at Sherborne School (my father was Bishop of Sherborne in Dorset) I was soon in the Chapel Choir, the Madrigal Choir, the school orchestra and the Army Cadet Force Military Band (where I ended up as the Company Sergeant Major!). In 1962 I won a Choral Exhibition as a Tenor to Clare College, Cambridge (worth a place at the College plus £45 a year!) where I enjoyed a wonderful musical life under our successive Organ Scholars - the talented Nigerian Ayo Bankole (later organist at Lagos Cathedral), and the superb choir director David Grant. Both died tragically young.

At Cambridge I sang daily Chapel Services, and in great choral concerts under Sir David Willcox (The Cambridge University Musical Society), Sir Raymond Leppard (The University Madrigal Society) and Sir John Elliot Gardiner. The latter founded the Monteverdi Choir while we were both undergraduates at Cambridge - and I continued to sing with them even after I had been elected to the House. Tenors were in short supply at Cambridge, so I also regularly filled in at other college concerts. At that time John Rutter was starting to write his hugely successful and popular church music - and many an evening was spent trying out harmonies and settings around his piano on the Musicians' Staircase at Clare. I sang in John's first commercial recording of "Carols from Cambridge" which included his early classic The Shepherds' Pipe Carol - which was in fact recorded in a freezing cold Ely Cathedral.

When I left Cambridge my first teaching job was in Edinburgh. I soon joined the choir of St Giles' Cathedral and I was a founder member of the Scottish Chamber Choir under Brian Head. My second teaching job took me back to London at Harrow School. I caught up with many old friends, some now professional musicians (in The Kings Singers and The Swingle Singers, for example) and considered seriously - but not for long - whether I might sing professionally (that had been my father's ambition, and he ended up a Bishop!). I was right to stick to teaching.

On the London musical circuit in the 1970s I sang with the Saltarello Choir, the Thomas Tallis Society in Greenwich under Philip Simms, did a tour a tour of the United States with the London Bach Society under Prof. Paul Steinitz, and continued to sing and make recordings with the Monteverdi Choir. I also did some freelance oratorio work.

In about 1975 I was asked to audition for the newly formed chorus of the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The conductor was Sir Neville Marriner, and the Chorus Master was the innovative and charming Hungarian Laszlo Heltay. It was a joy and a privilege to sing with them for over 15 years in London, on tour in Europe, in a large number of recordings, and on the soundtrack of the film "Amadeus". For some years I was also a Director of the Academy's controlling company.

It was as a tenor with the Academy that I really experienced the extremes of human emotion and passion that music can evoke. I met my future wife - a viola player - through music at Cambridge and I think it is no coincidence that in these fulfilling years we created our lovely family, who are all musically talented, between them playing the violin, viola, cello, piano, saxophone - and of course, singing.

In Salisbury, in my early days as MP, I was fortunate enough to join the local Farrant Singers - a select and talented choir. Sadly, working in London mid-week did not mix with essential rehearsals, so I now support the increasingly successful choir from the outside. For many years I have been privileged to be a patron of the Salisbury Festival, supporting its varied, sparkling and wholly exceptional Directors. My musical taste and experience has followed the great Western classical tradition - always from the perspective of a performer. So, my music has always been intensely personal - but a performer is but the medium of communication between the composer and the listener. Great music is popular music - Mozart knew all about that, and I never forgot it when as a Culture Minister I watched the old Covent Garden Opera House swallowing up millions in subsidy while regional opera and performing arts starved. The performances of a parish church choir or a school band are just as important to me as the grandest of operas and concerts. I bite my tongue sometimes as I listen to "experts" on TV and radio pontificating about music when I happen to know they cannot sing a note or play a tune!

My happiest time as a Government Minister was my period helping to create and run the Department of National Heritage (now the Department of Culture, Media and Sport). It was a huge privilege and great fun to have responsibility for something I actually knew about and loved so much.

So, what are my musical tastes?

I have my preferences and prejudices but I believe I am still open-minded. After all, wonderful new music is being created every day. On a recent visit to Texas, Sue and went to see the film "American Beauty" which has an outstanding soundtrack. I was spellbound by a particular piece and at the end I rushed across the mall to a music store to buy the CD. It was an old Beatles number - and as a child of the Sixties I should have recognized "Because of you..." My student life was full of vinyl LPs of the Beatles, Francoise Hardy - and yes, Frank Sinatra, too!

I'll let you into a secret - the selection of CDs I took on holiday recently. Lots of jazz - Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan live at the Berlin Philharmonie, Ella Fitzgerald, The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Bix Biederbeck, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Then in less serious vein, Mary Cleese Haran and Richard Rodney Bennett's "The Memory of All That" (mostly Gershwin), plus "The World of Jeeves and Wooster" and the Pasadena Roof Orchestra.

Singing in Spain with the Academy, I acquired a passion for flamenca and Spanish guitar music. So my CD pack included a great RCA Classical Navigator compilation of the music of Alebeniz, Granados and Rodrigo, Julian Bream's Ultimate Guitar Collection, Pepe Romero's "Flamenco!", Pepe and Celin Romero's Guitar Solos and Duos from Nimbus and The Art of Paco Pena (a regular visitor to the Salisbury Festival, incidentally).

Also burning the covers of the wallet was Eduardo Fernandez' "World of the Spanish Guitar", John Williams' "Latin American Guitar Music" and Manuel Barrueco's "Cuba!" Moving on, I took "Jacaras!" - C18th Spanish Baroque Guitar Music of Santiago de Murcia. Than came Sophie Yates' "Tombeau" collection of German C17th. harpsichord music and Cecilia Bartoli's Italian songs of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. Wow! What a feast.

On through Philip Ledger's rendering of the Vivaldi Magnificat, Dixit Dominus and Beatus Vir and Nathalie Stutzmann singing Handel opera arias to Neville Marriner's Rossini "Messa di Gloria" (of happy memories!).

I couldn't leave Mahler 5 at home nor Rachmaninov's Vespers and then came some hot favourites. The incomparable German singer Ute Lemper is so much more than the sexy, fishnet-stockinged West End star we serenade. She is a very serious musician with a quite beguiling voice of supreme technical achievement and style. Do you remember when Helen Marriage brought Ute to the Festival in 1998? I took with me her "Illusions" album and the newer (in every sense) "Punishing Kiss".

Maybe its because I'm an Englishman, but I believe Henry Purcell is simply the best, the simplest and the sexiest of them all. So he was represented on hols by a French recording of "Odes a Sainte Cecile" and a recently acquired CD of his "Ayers for the Theatre" (primarily to listen to his Chacony in G minor.

I also took the quite extraordinary British Library sound archive CD of the C20th in sound and the haunting Salisbury Cathedral Choir and Organ Archive Recordings, 1927-1965.

Politico's "Great Speeches in Parliament 1989-99 reassured me that we still have some wits , wags and orators in the House. By tradition I took the 1991 Salisbury Cathedral Royal Gala Concert for the spire appeal, which includes great favorites by Ofra Harnoy, Peter Donahoe, Jessye Norman, Phil Collins, Kenneth Branagh, Placido Domingo - and Charlton Heston with his magical reading of Benet's poem, "American Names".

To round it all off I had a privately recorded CD of Music from Canford School in Dorset, featuring our then schoolboy son Adam and his amazing string quartet - young talent now dispersed by the four winds, as is so often the case with musicians.

To those who love music there is nothing more important than to keep music live (and music teachers solvent) for without that there would be no CDs, no concerts, no film scores, operas, ballets, no church choirs, no barber-shop quartets, no music hall sing-alongs, no rugby songs, jazz nor even pop. Our souls would surely shrivel up.

Music is not wallpaper - but try telling that to those who compel us to endure canned music in shops, hotels, restaurants, airports - even in some hospitals and on some streets. It is far too personal to be treated like that. Now, politically I'm not in favour of politicians telling other people what is good for them and what is not. However in March 2000, I decided to introduce a little Bill into Parliament which would outlaw the broadcasting of recorded music in certain public places. I had an astonishing response from literally all over the world from people who agreed with me - including an e-mail to the BBC about it from Outer Mongolia! Inevitably, my Bill fell - but I'd made the point.

I know I've hardly mentioned contemporary pop music. Like everyone else I'm exposed to vast quantities of it. Most is ephemeral - that is its nature. A tiny fraction I truly enjoy - and much of it is fun. But I fear that electronics and technology, marketing and image-making is taking over everyday music (much of which isn't truly popular) and if I must be exposed to music so blastingly loud I'm supposed to feel it rather than hear it, then please make the amplification good and pure - and don't be offended if I don't stay long. Quality not quantity remains a golden rule, a concept not understood by those who think it isn't music if it isn't amplified.

Is any music better than no music? I don't think so. The best and greatest musical performances are made by moments of silence - for silence is golden, too.

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