Winning the SOUNZ Contemporary Award for his piano concerto at the recent APRA Silver Scrolls has capped off a year for John Psathas that can only be described as outstanding.

Not only did John achieve the 'double', also taking the Tui for best Classical Album ('Fragments' Trust CDs MMT2047) at the NZ Music Awards a month earlier, he is also being celebrated as the first New Zealand composer to number his listeners in the millions, if not billions.

John was commissioned to write and arrange the music used in the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2004 Athens Olympics.

"It was an extraordinary gig," says John, "and yet musically, it was at quite a tangent to what I have been doing for most of my career. To be honest I look forward to getting back to smaller, more intimate works for a while.

"People can have such different ideas about whether a piece is 'successful'‚ or not. For myself, I think a piece is a success if even one person wants to listen to the composition over and over again. I believe that music is a very personal thing - person to person - which is why the Olympic gig was such a new experience for me. But thinking about the recent developments of my career, I can see that I've been inexorably gravitating toward the mainstream; a journey which has just culminated in the Athens ceremonies."

A brief consideration of John's recent compositional biography supports this view. He has won both the Tui and SOUNZ Awards before - the former in 2000 for his CD 'Rhythm Spike' (Rattle - RAT D008) and the latter in 2002 for the aptly, if not prophetically named 'View From Olympus'. Then in 2003, with considerable prescience, the Arts Foundation awarded John an Arts Laureate.

Yes - the outstanding achievements of 2004, the Tui, SOUNZ Award and Olympics, take on a veneer of inevitability.

John was born in Wellington, the son of Greek immigrants. The family moved to Taumaranui when he was one year old, and a few years later to Napier for schooling. Life with an immigrant family had an indelible effect on John, and allowed his natural empathy with music to flourish in specific directions.

"My parents needed music and they would frequently play 45s - Greek music or current pop songs - on an old record player. At age three years I started putting them on myself - Dad rigged up a battery pack so that I wouldn't electrocute myself!

"From as far back as I can remember I experienced the power that music had for my parents and their Greek friends. They would cry, laugh or be uplifted and sing and dance - I constantly witnessed the effect of music as a powerful cultural stimulant, something that I now strive for in my own work."

Tania, John's older sister, took piano lessons from the time she was five so there was always an instrument in the house.

"I recall that there came a time when I would go to the piano and improvise, sometimes for hours. To be honest, I had no prodigious talent. In fact it must have been quite tedious for the rest of the household - but eventually Mum decided that I should start taking lessons on the piano.

"I was a very bad piano student - always more interested in making things up rather than practising what was there. However, when it came to exams I managed to pass them despite the fact that I was always badly under-rehearsed."

It was around the time that John started piano lessons when he was 12-years-old that he experienced an epiphany, confirming his musical vocation.

"Being Greek, my family was in the food and hospitality business. Tania and I would help out in the Carillon restaurant on Clive Square, Napier and I would come home at 2am, too wide-awake to sleep. I started listening to music on headphones late at night. I remember two albums in particular: Keith Jarrett's solo improvisations and Daniel Barenboim playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I listened to them hundreds of times. I loved the spontaneous expressionism of the first album and the way in which music became a conduit for something much bigger in the second. They were powerful experiences and were a huge influence on my life.

"I formed the notion that to be the creator of the thing that could generate that strength of response in another person would be fantastic. I guess it was right then that I decided to be a composer."

John decided to do a Music Degree at Victoria University, initially in piano performance.

"I took composition classes as an extra interest with David Farquhar, Ross Harris and Jack Body - three very different composers and teachers. Victoria - then as now, I believe - has a 'hands-off' approach to teaching composition - particularly in terms of style. Students are forced to look 'outside-the-box' and to discover their own 'voice'."

John claims that he has been "fortunate" as a composer. From very early on his works have been picked up and performed by players of high regard both here and internationally. Most would suggest that it has more to do with talent than good fortune. It is his ability to write works with vitality and depth that demand commitment from performers that has contributed to his stellar status today.

Highlights of his compositional career to date have included such works as Matre's Dance, Drum Dances, Rhythm Spike, Calenture for electric guitar and two pianos, Abhisheka, and Fanfare for Te Papa, for performers including Dan Poynton, Evelyn Glennie, the New Zealand String Quartet and NZSO.

John cheerfully describes his earlier works as "ultra-caffeinated, fast, full of notes, and murder on performers", but as he has matured as a composer, his works have gained far greater range, depth and power. In 2000 his Saxophone Concerto was performed in an 8000 seat open-air venue in Bologna. The work stunningly combined the formal musical element of a symphony orchestra with the improvisatory genius of saxophone soloist Michael Brecker.

Then came 'View From Olympus', commissioned by Evelyn Glennie, and performed at the Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games. And, of course, the Laureate, the Olympics and the 2004 Tui and SOUNZ Awards.

John has just been made Associate Professor of composition at Victoria University. With the combination of Victoria and Massey Music Departments into the single entity: New Zealand School of Music from next year he is taking the opportunity to teach for six months and compose full-time for the other half year.

"I love teaching, and working with the students, but I am feeling the effects of some intense and extensive projects. With a wife, an eight-year old son and four-year old daughter, I have enough commitments. It is not a case of juggling all these strands in my life. I don't separate them: composer, father, teacher - they are all part of who I am. And ultimately, family is everything."

We wait in eager anticipation for what is to come. In some ways it is a long way from being 12 and listening to Keith Jarrett and Beethoven. Then again the real distance between pieces of music is almost never a straight line, and seldom as far as we might think.

Many of John's works are available in published form through Promethean Editions (www.promethean-editions.co.nz). As with most Kiwi composers, SOUNZ: The Centre for NZ Music in Wellington (www.sounz.org.nz) can be of considerable help.

www.johnpsathas.com