Jonny Greenwood on BBC Radio 5

Jonny Greenwood talks to Nihal Arthanayake about Octatonic, the label he set up for contemporary classical music by soloists and small ensembles, with some of his own writing among it.

Asked how the politics of the moment affect his work, he treats music as a retreat, and argues that people should listen to music and do nothing else while they do it. Music, he says, needs rescuing from being the thing playing in the corner of a room.

Orchestral work has a strange shape. A composer holes up in a room for nine months, at the end of which the piece exists only on paper, then hears it for the first time at the same moment as everyone else, and then it is over.

Everything he has done since school has lasted three or four minutes, and the hardest part of writing at length has been resisting the temptation to line up seven short ideas and call it a piece.

He also talks about the etiquette that keeps people out of concert halls, the silence where applause would go among it, and cites a letter of Mozart's as a reminder that audiences once reacted out loud in the middle of the music.