Composer of the month - Bohuslav Martinů - Though the Czech absorbed many influences from his exile abroad, his colourful music was always distinctively his own

The youngest of six, Bohuslav was a sickly child, and his father or older sister often had to carry him the 193 steps up to the tower. He was shy at school, too, though showed an early talent for the violin and gave his first concert at 14. By the following year, the future composer was off to the Prague Conservatoire to take the first, if faltering, steps towards a career in music.

- By Steve Wright

There's a vivid image from Bohuslav Martinů's childhood that seems to unlock the key to understanding his captivating, richly eclectic soundworld. The composer grew up in the small Bohemian town of Polička - more specifically, in the tower of the town's main church, St Jakub. Martinů's father was the church sexton and the town's fire watcher, hence the high-altitude family home from where Martinů senior could keep a wary eye out for blazes, and it's tempting to surmise that this bird's-eye view of the world of both the busy town and the lush Bohemian landscape beyond - may have fed into young Bohuslav's psyche. May, indeed, have helped to form this unique ear that would later delight in an eclectic array of musics-jazz, neoclassicism, Czech folk, French impressionism and more and revel in the sounds of both the modern city and of the countryside.

The youngest of six, Bohuslav was a sickly child, and his father or older sister often had to carry him the 193 steps up to the tower. He was shy at school, too, though showed an early talent for the violin and gave his first concert at 14. By the following year, the future composer was off to the Prague Conservatoire to take the first, if faltering, steps towards a career in music.

Strikingly, apart from a few years of study in Prague - curtailed by his expulsion from the Conservatoire in 1910 - and a decade back home in Polička, the majority of Martinů's adult life would be spent in two adopted homelands: France and the US. And, in their different ways, both these host countries would play major roles in forming his highly distinctive idiom, an eclectic and beguiling mix of sounds drawn from the Jazz Age, the impressionistic explorations of Debussy... and those Czech dance and folk rhythms, always calling him back to a homeland to which he would, in fact, never return.