James Naughtie uncovers the roots of our music. His journey reveals how composers and performers, princes and patrons, and the chance happenings of history built a classical tradition that is the soundtrack to our history and tells a glittering and inspiring story.

Listen to Jim talk about his life in music from his eccenntric music teacher to listening to Opera in London.

• Early musical life
• Jim's music instruments
• Expressing the inexpressible

The career of one of the BBC's most respected journalists

James Naughtie presents Today on Radio 4 and is one of the BBC's best-known journalists and broadcasters. As well as his work in news - he has written many documentaries, presented The World At One before joining Today and has reported for Radio 4 from around the world - he has introduced programmes on music on BBC radio and television for many years.

From the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall to opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and from theatres and concert halls across Europe, he has brought music alive. He also presents Radio 4's monthly Bookclub and a variety of live events, including election specials at home and from the United States.

His journalistic career began in Aberdeen, in his native North-east Scotland, and he was chief political correspondent of The Scotsman and The Guardian before joining the BBC in 1988. He was Laurence M. Stern Fellow on The Washington Post and Sony Radio Personality of the Year.

Among his books are two acclaimed accounts of the Blair years, The Rivals and The Accidental American.

James Naughtie talks about The Making of Music

'The history of classical music is inextricably linked with the places where it was written, its purposes and patrons - and with politics, war and social change. From the earliest music of the monasteries through the court and church music of the Renaissance and Reformation and into the age of democracy, composers were lifted up by times of change, just as they had to cope with restraints imposed by religion or the state, even as they responded to new ways of thinking, the opportunities of new instruments, the impact of artistic revolutions.

Their music speaks of their time as well as their individualism. Bach and Handel were contemporaries, both German by birth, but the settings in which they worked were strikingly different; Haydn and Mozart relied on rich patrons from whom their musical successors would be soon be able to break free and live different lives.

The influence of the French Revolution on Beethoven and others changed the role of the composer dramatically; the Romantics bred the big symphony and the conductor, and then the virtuosi like Liszt, Chopin and Paganini; Italy consummated a love-affair with opera which was entwined with its national story; amateur music-making in the nineteenth century helped to create a mass audience that embraced the European tradition and carried it forward.

All of it is part of an uplifting story of our musical inheritance - how it came about, how it both reveals and decorates our history, and how it got the strength to thrive in our own time.'