Jonny Greenwood on BBC Radio 4

The Today programme visits the music room of Jonny Greenwood's Oxfordshire house ahead of his Proms debut as a composer. He shows the interviewer a tanpura he will be playing, one among dozens of instruments, and apologises for its tuning.

The Prom he curated put music by Steve Reich and Penderecki beside the premiere of his own piece for 68 strings. Its handwritten score runs to seven movements and several hundred parts, and each movement takes its idea from a different way of making artificial reverb, one of them a 1980s delay unit behind some very famous textures.

He always seems to be writing music about the instruments themselves, he admits, and calls the habit horribly self-referential. He grew up learning the violin and still finds it an endlessly interesting way to make sound.

Told he has set the bar high, he says he is used to the feeling of a first rehearsal, a sweaty 20 minutes of ticking and crossing things out, because he hears the music for the first time alongside everyone else, the day before the premiere. He compares it to a firework display, where everything is set up and then all anyone can do is hope.