For 30 years, Malcolm MacDonald has been one of the leading writers on music in the UK - and one of the most versatile, his knowledge and enthusiasms spanning from the Renaissance to the current work of contemporary composers. Under the journalistic nom-de-plume of Calum MacDonald he is a well-known broadcaster and lecturer on varied aspects of music.

He was for some years Compiler of the internationally-renowned Gramophone Classical Catalogue and is the Editor of Tempo, the independent quarterly review of modern music published in London (www.temporeview.com).

He has written many programme-notes for some of the principal orchestras and performing ensembles in the UK and USA, as well as the liner notes for numerous CDs and countless record, book and concert reviews.

Under his own name he has contributed chapters to several symposia and, among many books, has written the 'Master Musicians' volumes on Brahms and Schoenberg (published by Oxford University Press) and a three-volume study of the 32 symphonies of the British composer Havergal Brian - published by Kahn and Averill, who also publish his study of the British composer John Foulds and are about to publish his latest book on the music of Edgard Varèse, Astronomer in Sound.

His monograph on the composer Ronald Stevenson is published by the National Library of Scotland; Mr MacDonald has also issued catalogues of the music of Luigi Dallapiccola, Dmitri Shostakovich and Antal Dorati - and is the author of a widely-used tourist guide to the city of Edinburgh. He is himself a composer and arranger, and his performing edition of Roberto Gerhard's Catalan ballet Soirées de Barcelone, which involved orchestrating the last quarter of the work, was premiered by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under Matthias Bamert in 1996.