Outside the music department at the University of York is a tall bronze sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. One of my abiding memories of John Paynter is walking in conversation with him through the university campus and seeing him leap towards this sculpture, indignantly (and with some difficulty) removing a woolly hat that had been placed on the top by some disrespectful student. The small things mattered to John – not that he would have seen such irreverence for art as a small thing – and he was always prepared to remedy them himself through direct, practical action. This made him a head of department who always seemed to have time for his students, and he spent hours in dissertation tutorials guiding me slowly and thoughtfully through debates about music education that he must have explored and resolved for himself many years before. I learnt so much from his precision in writing, his critical thinking and his patient mentoring – qualities I now aspire to in an academic career on which I would never have embarked without his insistence that I should do a PhD. John's retirement coincided with the end of my undergraduate degree, and so sadly I was not able to continue doctoral studies with him, though he remained encouraging and interested in all aspects of my work long after I had left York.

Musical and academic standards at York were high – sometimes intimidatingly so – but I had been given confidence by John's induction session for new first years: he had ranted about the new government policy which was changing the status of polytechnics to universities, set us a group composition task which I later discovered was akin to those in Sound and Silence, and reminded us that the breadth of skills required of a musician meant that while the person sitting next to us might be better at one aspect of our future study, we would each have our own strengths, to be nurtured and challenged during our undergraduate years. Teaching, research, music-making and personal development were not easily separated for John, both in his own work and in his attitude towards his students.

At times, John's incredible energy and focus could be exasperatingly pedantic, and I hugely regret that the last conversation I had with him was on the matter of ‘erroneous capitalisation’ in the BJME review of his final book, Thinking and Making: Selections from the Writings of John Paynter on Music in Education. ‘What will people think?’ he asked, indignant again, and I felt sorry that standards were perceived to have slipped from his almost impossible heights. Aiming for the best was characteristic of John's approach: in music education, this meant that all children should have the chance to achieve their full potential, and all teachers should be encouraged to teach with conviction. With these simple but essential premises he contributed enormously to the status and purpose of music in schools, and he leaves a tremendous legacy of inspiring writing and personal influence, to which a great many people owe a great deal.