Readers of NQ might recall a previous Youtube video of mine called “The Cultural Revolution Starts Here”. I have used some of the themes I mentioned in that video in a play I have just completed.

The play is partly inspired by the Tennyson poem, “The Lady of Shalott” (a reading of which I offer in my latest Youtube video). It is about two people trapped in an academic ivory tower, but on a deeper level it is about the way that creativity and general perceptions can be stultified by academic and political fashions.

Here are two extracts from the play:

EXTRACT ONE:

LLOYD: I did hear about it from Helen, about how you believed that academics were by and large less concerned about the truth and more concerned about preserving their theories and their academic territory…
ELLIOTT: Right. Because that is the source of their income, their power and influence.
HELEN: Yes, and you claimed that many were trying to hold onto their power and influence by bludgeoning their students and everyone else into subscribing to their narrow theoretical models.
ELLIOTT: Like the high priests of bygone centuries who used Latin to elevate themselves above the masses and maintain their power.
LLOYD: So you see faculty leaders as the new high priests of society?
ELLIOTT: Mainly the more pretentious of them, who unfortunately are the ones who get most of the attention. Now I know I have thrown out some sweeping generalizations, but the evidence is all there for those who care to look for it. Particularly in the arts and humanities, where so many people remain slaves to theories long after they have proved to be fundamentally flawed. In the music world you have the slaves of Arnold Schonberg, who churn out music nobody wants to hear. In theatre you have the slaves of Stanislavski, with a bit of Marx mixed in, who forget that the primary function of theatre is to entertain rather than to send people out into the streets to start the next revolution. In almost every field you have people latching onto all kinds of shaky theories and trying to build on them as a way of establishing their academic strongholds.

EXTRACT TWO:

ELLIOTT: I’ve recently been writing about the universal trauma of the first and second world wars, and the effect it had on the arts and humanities. How it led to a shutting down of the senses, because people became so afraid of any emotion or sentiment leading to another holocaust. How everything became stripped of passion or embellishment.
HELEN: That sounds interesting.
ELLIOTT: I’ve been looking at the way so-called serious music became largely a mathematical exercise, with some composers actually proclaiming that their music could only be properly appreciated by reading their scores, rather than by listening to them. Imagine that. Music you can only read. Total madness, with an increasingly discordant and meaningless sound track.
HELEN: Yes, I have to agree with you there. I can’t stand most of the music that’s been produced since before Schonberg.
ELLIOTT: And then you had architecture beginning to lose all ornamentation and becoming an exercise in people packaging. In literature you had the stripped down and unsentimental prose of Hemingway being favoured over the poetic richness of Scott Fitzgerald and other writers who brought more flourish and colour into their work. You had style taking precedence over substance.
HELEN: Of course those are generalizations again but I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with your conclusions.
ELLIOTT: What it boiled to in essence was a closing down of all senses and all thought outside of a few purely intellectual and heavily circumscribed exercises.

P.S. See my other recent post, “The soundtrack of our lives.”

I believe that a society’s musical soundtrack is a good indicator of its cultural health. While a lot of good and exciting music can still be heard in some of the better movies, I am depressed by the banality of most of the music being pumped out by radio stations and also on Broadway. Its banality is on a par with Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton with a lot of aggression thrown in. And it’s not just nostalgia for “the good old days” that makes me feel this way. It’s about human values.

Apart from a very few Public Radio stations, you hear very little music from the great composers of the past. “Narrowcasting” in radio means that radio stations stick to a very narrow playlist. Yet when the general public is given the chance to hear the great classics, the results can be amazing. One example of this was during the soccer World Cup in the 1990. British television adopted Luciano Pavarotti’s version of “Nessun Dorma” as their theme for the world cup coverage and it became the most often played football anthem for the next 18 years. It also reached number one on the pop charts.

Which just shows what a little exposure to the classics can do.

I am now glad to say that I have become the center of an international initiative that aims to bring the music of the great classical composers to a wider audience through a series of stage musicals designed to appeal to a wide demographic. I have been working closely with Opera Manhattan in New York and the theater department at Ashland Community and Technical College in Kentucky in developing four new shows that feature the music of Mozart, Beethoven and many other classical composers, as well as Gilbert and Sullivan. These works are also being promoted in England, Ireland, Australia, Germany and Japan.

“Snow White and The vil Queen”, which I have just finished recording in Kentucky (scenes from which are in the accompanying video) has generated a lot of interest and it was great to see the enthusiasm with which this cross-section of the community (ranging in age from 14 to over 60) embraced the music.

“The show is hilarious, creepy, brilliant, with great characters and great lyrics. Beethoven’s music works so well with the libretto,” says Lindsay Saltsman Taylor (no relation) who sings the role of Malexandria (the Evil Queen) on the CD recording of the show.

The show will open with a production by Opera Manhattan near Times Square in New York in February and my German agent is hiring the country’s top opera translator to do the German translation (see http://att-agentur.de/_temp/_pages/newsletter.php).

The musicals are all based on well known stories and are sung in English.Three of four new works have so far been completed – “The Marsh King’s Daughter”, based on the Hans Christian Anderson story with music by Mozart, “Snow White and The Evil Queen” with music by Beethoven, and “The Corporate Pirate of Penzance”, a modern story based on the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.

I am now half-way through a fourth new musical, based on the Cinderella story and featuring works by a variety of classical composers as well as songs, with input from Professor Edward Figgins, Associate Professor of Theatre and Communications and Director of Theater at Ashland.

Each show has a totally revamped story. For example, the Snow White musical borrows elements from different traditional fairy tales – including The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Briar Rose” – and gives a bigger role to he Evil Queen, who steals the show with her villainous ways and songs like “So Insipid” and “Snow White Must Die!”. Instead of a “Mirror Mirror on the wall”, she has a personal stylist, Cedric the Hairdresser, who acts as her vanity mirror.

In the Cinderella story, the fairy godmother is replaced by a talent scout who gives Cinderella a makeover for a reality show. She is then taken to a ball where she meets Prince Nicholas, who is smitten by her. But Cinderella is disturbed by his obsession with a glass slipper and she ends up with a courtier who rescues her after she is sold by her stepmother to slave traders.

My inspiration for these shows arises partly from the fact that while I love a lot of operatic music, I have never been a great fan of opera in general. Half of the reason is that they are usually based on obscure stories and are sung in languages I don’t understand. For example, take Mozart’s most popular opera, the Magic Flute. It’s based on an obscure story rooted in 18th Century German Masonic mythology. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to relate to 18th Century German Masonic mythology. Particularly if I don’t understand the language.

The other half of the reason is that opera in general tends to have one or two good numbers while the rest of the music is not all that inspiring. Particularly recitative. I have always hated recitative – where they sing dialogue in a very mannered and, to me, rather boring way.

I have long thought how wonderful it would be to have an opera packed with some of the great composers’ most beautiful and memorable pieces, so I decided to have a go at it myself. I was then greatly encouraged by the reactions I got from Opera Manhattan, Professor Figgins and my British publisher Stagescripts UK (who will be promoting the works in Britain and Ireland) and my German and Australian agents.

First, let me wish NQ readers a happy Fourth of July, or whatever it is you wish Americans at this time. Personally, I think Americans may have missed out on a lot of things by breaking away from British rule (like being able to sing “Rule Britannia” at the Last Night of The Proms, but I may be a little biased.

But I digress. My latest video on my Youtube channel discusses my newest creation – a musical called Snow White and the Evil Qeen. While I have always been fascinated by strong women (like Margaret Thatcher and Hilary Clinton), I have been equally fascinated by evil women (though I don’t like them to win).

Like many others I know, I was always interested more in the evil queen in the Snow White story than by Snow White herself, and in my new musical I give more prominence to the evil queen and combine he story with other traditional fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and others. In this video I also speak/sing one of the evil queen’s songs, a number called SO INSIPID. Here are the lyrics:

MALEXANDRIA
Snow White’s so insipid she barely exists
You’ll never find her name on my party lists
She’s so inane
With her airs and her graces
She drives me insane
She’s such a pain
And that is plain
She’s such a drip,
That when there’s rain
She just dissolves into a stain
She has all the smarts
Of a three year old tot
She’s so sickly sweet
She will make your teeth rot
Oh yes she will
That’s who she is
She has no style and no fizz
She has no charm
She lacks a brain
And she’s becoming a pain in my side
It cannot be denied
Yes, she’s becoming a burden to me
Some day I’ll fix her, just wait and see
She’s my sister’s child
Always so mild
Never wild
Just like her mother
When she too was a child
She makes me want to gag
She’s just so boring she puts me to sleep
She’s so insipid I could weep 
With tears of woe
I hate her so
Much more than she could know
Her mother was cast in much the same vein
Oh yes, she was also a pain
I never was charmed by her smarmy ways
While my parents just spoiled her so much
And Snow White’s the same
She’s spoiled to the core
No wonder she’s so out of touch
She’s dull as water
She has no flavor
She’s so insipid nothing can save her
She seems to be stuck with an infantile heart
The slightest misfortune just tears her apart
She is just too soft
She lacks all art
That’s just the way it seems to be
And I will gain ascendancy
For she’s too weak to challenge me
She cannot win; she’s just too nice
I’ll eat her up with greens and spice
I’ll cut out her heart;
That is what I want most
I’ll fry it with garlic
And serve it on toast
Oh yes I will
I’ll eat her heart out!
Snow White is as bland as a bar of white soap
She’s no fun at all and there’s really no hope
Her time is up
Her days are numbered

As I say in this video, my latest project – another attempt to spread culture among the masses and save western civilization – has been a real labour of love. As regular viewers of my Youtube channel will know, I regard Mozart as the greatest composer ever. But while I love a lot of his operatic music, I have never been a great fan of his operas in general. In fact I have never been a great fan of opera in general whether by Mozart or not, even though many operatic pieces rank among my top favorites.

Half of the reason is that they are usually based on obscure stories and are sung in languages I don’t understand. For example, take Mozart’s most popular opera, the Magic Flute. It’s based on an obscure story rooted in 18th Century German Masonic mythology. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to relate to 18th Century German Masonic mythology. Particularly if I don’t understand the language.

The other half of the reason is that they tend to have one or two good numbers while the rest of the music is not all that inspiring. Particularly recitative. I have always hated recitative – where they sing dialogue in a very mannered and, to me, rather tedious way.

So I have long thought how wonderful it would be to have an opera packed with some of Mozart’s most beautiful and memorable pieces. I was just waiting for the right story to put his music to. I wanted it to be based on a fairy tale, though not one of the more overdone ones like Cinderella or snow White. I wanted it to reach as wide an audience as possible, and hopefully introduce more people to the wonderful music of Mozart.

On first reading, Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the Marsh King’s daughter did not inspire me. The story didn’t hang together very well and there were great gaps in the narrative which left a lot of things unexplained. But I found that my imagination began to fill in the gaps and expand on the story in a way that really excited me, and I became consumed by a fever of creativity as I found myself totally absorbed by the project. I almost didn’t have to think about it. Everything just seem to come together almost effortlessly, as if I had Mozart and Hans Christian Andersen looking over my shoulder and dictating the whole thing.

Some might mutter aloofly about my audacity in daring to tamper with Mozart’s music. But somehow I am convinced that Mozart himself would not feel that way. I am sure he would welcome any efforts to broaden the appeal of his music.

And I have to confess that I have taken some liberties with his music. For example, there is of course a wedding scene. I could have chosen Mozart’s well known bridesmaid’s chorus for this, but it did not really sit comfortably within the story. So I considered a number of pieces before choosing part of the mid section of his concerto for flute and harp and reshaping it until I was satisfied.

But overall I know I have stayed true to the spirit of his music and to the great composer himself. In the process I have made the music more accessible to singers who have not been operatically trained and who are more used to singing in modern musicals.

This time there is no video involved, however. This is a special preview for NQ readers only. It is a scene from “Pirates in Pinafores: A Gilbert and Sullivan Pastiche”, which features the most popular G&S music (mainly with new lyrics from me) from seven of their shows, all wrapped up in a semi-modern story about love, duty and corporate intrigue. It was partly the reception I got here on NQ and on Youtube to “Modern Intellectual” that inspired me to do a whole show. The final show has 25 songs and two reprises that most people will recognize.

(One of the reasons I haven’t been doing much on NQ or Youtube lately is because I have been too busy with this project and dealing with new interest in my other stage musicals.)

The song in the scene I am printing below is sung by three accountants who work for the Pieman of Penzance (also known as the Franchise King), who has built up a huge fortune with his pie franchise.

SONG 4: AN ACCOUNTANT’S LIFE IS NOT A LOT OF FUN
to the tune of “A Policeman’s Lot Is Not a Happy One” from “Pirates of Penzance”)

ACCOUNTANT 1:
I am Alistair McDuff the chief accountant

CHORUS
Number cruncher

ACCOUNTANTS 2 and 3
And we are his assistants, Keith and Ron

CHORUS
Keith and Ron

ACCOUNTANTS
It’s our job to take good care of all finances

CHORUS
All finances

ACCOUNTANTS
And make sure our number crunching’s never wrong

CHORUS
God forbid

ACCOUNTANTS
But there’s no joy in being an accountant

CHORUS
No excitement

ACCOUNTANTS
For nobody ever thinks of us as fun

CHORUS
Dull as dirt
(ALL YAWN)

ACCOUNTANTS
No-one ever thinks of us as hot and sexy

CHORUS
Never sexy!

ACCOUNTANTS
We always seem so dull to ev’ryone

ALL
It’s not nice when ev’rybody thinks you’re dull
and no fun
An accountant’s lot is not a jolly one
Not a jot

ACCOUNTANTS
But you’ll find in private life we’re quite eccentric

CHORUS:
You? Eccentric?

ACCOUNTANTS
If you knew what we got up to you would say
That you never would have thought that an accountant
Could behave in such a nonconformist way

CHORUS
There’s no way

ACCOUNTANT 1:
In my private life I am an outlaw biker

CHORUS
Who’d have thought it?

ACCOUNTANT 1
At weekends I wear leather ev’ry day

CHORUS
Ev’ry day?

ACCOUNTANT
I ride my Harley with such wild abandon
I scare the pants off all who come my way

ACCOUNTANT 2
At weekends I become a secret nudist

CHORUS
The mind boggles

ACCOUNTANT 2
I strut around as naked as can be

CHORUS
T.M.I.

ACCOUNTANT 2
So never knock upon my door at weekends

CHORUS
We’ll avoid it

ACCOUNTANT 2
Unless you want to see the naked me

CHORUS
No, not me

ACCOUNTANT 3
At weekends I dress up in women’s clothing

CHORUS
No surprise there

ACCOUNTANT 3
I have a diff’rent dress to wear each day

CHORUS
Come what may

ACCOUNTANT 3
I’ve lots and lots and lots of pretty outfits

CHORUS
Bet that cost you!

ACCOUNTANT 3
But though I’m a crossdresser I’m not gay

CHORUS
Gay? No way!

ALL
Oh, when there is number crunching to be done,
to be done
An accountant’s job is not a lot of fun
Not much fun

PS I am now putting Mozart’s music to a Hans Christian Andersen tale. See what you started?

This video explains why I haven’t uploaded many videos lately. It is the first in a three-part series that tells of a musical I have been working on, which I hope will at least provide some entertainment for my friends on No Quater and on my Youtube channel.

If you enjoy musicals, you might enjoy this affectionate parody of musicals in general and some of the great classic musicals like West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Damn Yankees, Singing In The Rain, a Chorus Line, Hello Dolly, How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying), and a number of others.

Two more videos are to follow (unless everyone hates the first one!)`

Naturally, my prejudices are evident in the video, even if it is about something as seemingly innocuous as musicals. Political correctness is one of them.

Here’s one for the feminists. It’s another tongue-in-cheek song from my musical $ucce$$! (now seeking a Broadway home). The song is sung by an Irish-Latino character named Juanita Fitzgerald. The lyrics are as follows:

JUANITA:
Don’t trust a man or you’ll be sorry
Men just cause worry

CHORUS:
They’ll make a fool of you

JUANITA:
They only bring anxiety
Just take it from me!

CHORUS:
Men will just leave you blue

JUANITA:
Don’t trust a man
He’ll only hurt you
He’ll only make a fool of you
He’ll take what he can
And then desert you
That’s men for you
They’ll leave you blue
There’s nothing much a girl can do

CHORUS:
He will hurt you
Then desert you

JUANITA:
All men are swine as you’ll discover
You won’t recover

CHORUS:
They’re evil through and through

JUANITA:
They’ll promise you the earth and sky
Then leave you to cry

CHORUS:
That’s what a man will do

JUANITA:
You always hope there’s one exception
One who will make your dreams come true
But all you get is lies, deception
That’s men for you; I know it’s true
All men are rotten through and through

CHORUS:
Love is just a misconception

JUANITA:
Men have a single function, namely
They just exist to plug the gap
Most of them do it rather lamely

CHORUS:
Let’s wipe ‘em off the map!

JUANITA:
I think it’s clear that we don’t need ‘em
So we won’t breed ‘em

CHORUS:
Then there’ll be none at large

JUANITA:
We just won’t bear their progeny
That’s how it will be

CHORUS:
Then women can take charge

JUANITA:
We don’t need them as pollinators
Test tubes will do their work instead
Then they’ll have no chance to frustrate us
They’ve had their day; that’s what I say
I can’t see any other way

CHORUS:
We don’t need ‘em
We won’t breed ‘em

JUANITA:
A man was born to cause us sorrow
Sure as tomorrow

CHORUS:
That’s all a man is for

JUANITA:
All those I’ve known turned out to be
A burden to me

CHORUS:
Let’s show ‘em all the door

JUANITA:
A man will always try to use you
Then he’ll abuse you

CHORUS:
We just can’t take no more

JUANITA:
I think that we can do without it
No doubt about it
We’ll have no more

CHORUS:
Give ‘em what for
We’ll show ‘em all the door
Clear the floor
Clear them out
Till there’s no more

JUANITA:
We’ll have no more

CHORUS:
When there are none at large
We’ll take charge
When they’re gone
We’ll carry on

JUANITA:
We’ll soldier on

ALL:
And then we’ll all be free
Free to be anything we want to be

I wrote the song in this video for a musical called “SUCCESS!” (which I recently revised and which is currently looking for a Broadway home). It occurred to me that the observations in this song could be applied to a lot of the people and situations discussed here since the start of the elections.

Part of the lyrics are as follows:

Take an ordinary guy with a couple of dimples
You slap on some make-up to cover the pimples
A little bit of gloss and the kid could go far
And before you know it you’ve created a star
Cause it’s not what you sell
It’s the way that you sell it
It’s not the story
It’s the way that you tell it
If you’ve got no talent
That’s no cause for shame
‘Cause we can fix it all
In the marketing game….

With my marketing skills there is no chance of failure
Your name will be known from Maine to Australia
With my expertise you just simply can’t lose
I can help you be anything that you choose…

Now who does that remind you of? (Actually a number of people spring to mind).

The show is basically a pastiche/parody of classic movie musicals, including West Side Story, My Fair Lady, A Chrorus Line, The Producers, Singing In The Rain, Damn Yankee, Hello Dolly and others. If you want to hear some of the other songs and see them in the context of some of the movies they affectionately parody, you can find them on this Youtube playlist.

As I say in the video, it seems to me that many, if not most people tend to live their lives on the surface, hiding their true natures from the world so as to present a facade of normality, whatever the concept of normality happens to be at the time and in the circumstances of their lives.

The characters in Iris Murdoch’s novels, however, are different. The people in her books, drawn mainly from the British upper classes and aristocracy, tend to live their inner lives on the outside, revealing all kinds of behavior and inclinations that most people try to hide from the world.

Murdoch is considered by many to be one of the most intelligent as well as one of the most compelling novelists of the 20th Century. As a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, she was certainly one of the most educated writers. But there is no academic stuffiness in her novels.

I look on her and her novels as forces for the best kind of liberalism – representing a freedom of the spirit and a wide ranging and intelligent mind that is not afraid to confront a host of issues that most people might prefer to sweep under the carpet.

It is interesting to note that her final novel, which was written in the advancing stages of Alzheimers, and was very disjointed and confused, was praised by academics and literary critics as one of her best.

This recording was apparently unearthed in Australia. Written in 1915, with words by Thomas Hoier and music by Jimmie Morgan, it was recorded in 1929, the year that saw the start of the Great Depression.

It raises some interesting questions, particularly for someone like me who arrived on these shores rather late in life. One of the questions is: Just when is it okay for an immigrant to point out some of the things he or she might not like about this country – the great melting pot of immigrants who arrived here from all over the world?

And what is the difference between constructive criticism and destructive criticism?

I admire America more than any other country for its hard working citizens, its open-heartedness and the core values enshrined in the Constitution (something that Britain still does not have). I believe it remains the freest and most democratic country in the world.

But, as in any society, there are inevitably aspects that can be improved. And as someone who perhaps takes a slightly more objective view of the situation than someone who was born and raised in America, should I be pointing out the faults I see?

Am I biting the hand that feeds me if I say, for example, that in my view Congress is a very sick entity, led by inept people like Nancy Pelosi and corrupt people like Barney Frank?

It would be interesting to get some perspectives from NQ readers and writers on the whole subject of criticizing America, along with the views of different individuals about what’s right and what’s wrong in America right now (apart from the new government).

Just as the world can be divided into those who prefer Mozart to Bach and those who don’t, so the world can be divided into those who prefer F. Scott Fitzgerald over Ernest Hemingway and those who don’t.

In my series on the great composers, I found that some of those who preferred Bach over Mozart tended to be very rude and hostile in their dismissal of Mozart (and of my series). These people screamed that after all Bach had done for counterpoint and in his development of the fugue, anyone who thought Mozart was the greater composer was an imbecile. It reminded me of the abuse I attracted for daring to question Obama’s credentials for being President.

I love many pieces by Bach, and ranked him third in the list, but I always felt he lacked the originality, the poetic soul and the expressive range of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven (or even Brahms, Prokofiev and many others). It’s the same thing I feel in comparing Hemingway with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway, in my opinion, lacked the poetic soul and the expressive range of a great writer like Fitzgerald.

I remember a literary critic I once worked with on a newspaper praising the “lean, sparse prose” of Hemingway. I asked him to give me an example, and he read me the following passage:

“He had a beer. It was good. He had another.”

I was totally unimpressed, but with Hemingway so highly recommended by this literary critic (who had a degree in English literature, which I didn’t), I felt I should give him a chance and tried to familiarize myself with his work. I read some of his most well known novels, but never experienced the same feeling of involvement, of going on a journey of discovery, that I did with Fitzgerald and other writers I came to love and admire.

I also found that those who preferred Hemingway tended to be hostile and insultingly dismissive of me for regarding Fitzgerald as more deserving of the title of “Great American Writer” than Hemingway, who in my opinion was nowhere near as brave or as eloquent as Fitzgerald in baring his soul and capturing both the darkness and the humor of life.

I see the same kind of attitudes behind this, and behind the reactions to my composer series, playing out in many areas of political and social life.

Naked hostility and insults are always a sign of people who are on flimsy ground and therefore feel the need to defend their elitist positions with sneering dismissal of those who don’t agree with them.

Now who does that remind you of?

In my new video I look at the way the Emperor’s Clothing Syndrome has dominated the arts and humanities over the past half century, with the help of academic practitioners looking for theories to build on, trying to carve out some academic territory for themselves and becoming the high priests or priestesses of their chosen domains. In music, it ended with meaningless and very irritating noise.

Now I make some sweeping generalizations in this video, and may be overstating my case for effect, but that does not necessarily dilute the reality of what I am saying.

As I said at the beginning of the top ten composer series, we saw the Emperor’s Clothing Syndrome ( a tendency to pretend to see or believe something out of fear of being thought of out of step with others, or out of fear that you might be attacked or ridiculed if you show your true feelings) running rampant during the elections.

“It’s the kind of pseudo-liberal academic milieu that produces people like the Beast with No Name, who is a Rhodes scholar and yet one of the most narrow-minded and bigoted people you can find. One of the problems is that lot of people who excel academically are people who are able to absorb and reflect back what their tutors want them to,” I wrote then.

“They are the kind of people who try to impose their narrow and very theoretical world view on others and become blinkered in their focus, doing their best to beat down anyone who doesn’t agree with them. (Now what does that remind you of?).”

Academia can provide you with the tools and techniques of art, but the academic process cannot make you an artist, or even an art critic.

From a broader perspective, Academia can provide you with a framework for examining things, but to get close to the true nature of anything you have to examine it through a number of different frameworks from a number of different angles. If you keep using the same theoretical frameworks, they become blinkers.

Many branches of academia, particularly in the field of arts and humanities, strive to create a single framework or model of things and academics fight to have their models adopted as the only ones that are valid. That is what gives them power.

Art and life in general cannot be confined by academic theories or opinion. The essence of art is that it must be transcendant, and to be transcendant it has to be organic. It has to be able to grow beyond prescribed boundaries to achieve new perspectives.

As in art, so in life.

That was in 1798 (more than two centuries ago), when he published the first edition of his economic treatise – An Essay on the Principle of Population – pointing out that population growth generally preceded expansion of the population’s resources, in particular the primary resource of food.

In all societies,” he wrote, “even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition.”

What Malthus didn’t take into account was the fact that his prophecies were self-defeating, because increasing awareness of the problem led to greater efforts to make sure his prophecies were not realized. This was accompanied by great technological progress, which increased exponentially after the industrial revolution in Britain.

Since Malthus there have been many subsequent cries of alarm from others about the earth’s resources being unable to support the population growth, but every time these cries of alarm turned out to be self-defeating prophecies.

We have now entered a period where the Malthus mindset has once again taken root about resources and the prospects for economic growth. While it will almost certainly prove yet again to be a self-defeating prophesy, this phenomenon is unfortunately often accompanied (at least in the short term) by self-fulfilling prophesies of economic doom and gloom.

If enough people think that the economy is going to get worse, it makes it certain that the economy WILL get worse, because the belief itself fans the flames of economic disintegration. People stop spending, so the economy slows down. Because the economy slows down, productivity drops. Thus pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling outlook.

The fact, however, is that technological progress continues to accelerate in leaps and bounds, and many of the problems in terms of availability of resources can be overcome through the application of new technology and new ideas to energy, food, infrastructure and economic activity itself.

There is every reason to be optimistic about the longer term future, provided people are able to see the possibilities ahead of them and not get stuck in the Malthusian mindset that now prevails.

(The accompanying video, below, has nothing to do with Malthus, but is a kind of tribute to industry.)

In my last video – the penultimate in the composer series – I look at some of the other composers who were considered for the list of the top ten composers who ever lived, but who didn’t make it – and why.

Among those featured are Mendelsohnn, Brahms, Aaron Copland, Sergei Prokofiev, Carl Orff and Stravinsky, with mentons of Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Puccini, Liszt and Chopin. Can you handle the truth?

There are excerpts from Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Brahms’ 3rd Symphony, Carmina Burana, Mendelsohnn’s Hebrides suite and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

Next week I will be looking at the “Emperor’s Clothing Syndrome” in music, arts and society in general and hopefully puncturing some pretentious balloons.

Finally we come to the number one spot in the series on the greatest composers of all time. There will be seven additional videos on this composer presented on my Youtube channel over the next two weeks – six devoted to his “Greatest Hits” and one to his Requiem.

Next week I will be looking at some other composers who were considered for the top ten, but didn’t quite make it. Finally, there will be a video that looks at the Emperor’s Clothing Syndrome in music, the arts and society in general.