In my early years as a composer for film and television, I sent cassettes (yes, cassettes...) containing selections of my music to production companies and music libraries. This was around 1994, long before burning your own CDs had become common. One of those cassettes ended up at Watermusic, a Belgian production music library.

Its owner, Robert de Groot, told me he received countless demo tapes and always fast-forwarded to the very last track. He knew that composers usually opened with the music they thought he wanted to hear, saving their most personal work for the end.

That's exactly what he found on mine: a four-part piece for piano, bassoon, clarinet and oboe, with each short movement portraying an animal.

During our very first meeting, Robert simply said: "We're going to make an album: music for children, but not childish music. It's perfectly fine if it has a classical touch." So he gave me complete creative freedom. I could hardly believe it.

Every now and then, you meet someone who changes the course of your career. I already knew I could write this kind of music, but Robert's confidence and carte blanche gave me an enormous creative boost.

The album was created using the tools I had at the time: an Atari computer, a Roland W-30 sampler and a Wersi piano module. The sounds inevitably reflect the technology of the early 1990s, but I can still hear the creative boost Robert's confidence gave me. These small pieces were written with enormous enthusiasm, I'm still very fond of them. Here are a few tracks from that album.