It is unlikely that the young Culshaw ever gave more than three minutes’ thought to antipodean residence. Yet lo and behold, the 1970s found him doing consultancy work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and even giving lectures at the University of Western Australia.

To Erik Satie’s freshness of outlook, Milhaud added a technique beyond Satie’s most sanguine hopes. Like any virtuoso, he relished surmounting near-impossible challenges, none greater than the cantata which he based on the 1961 encyclical Pacem in Terris. Confronted with bromidic Vatican prose that most other composers would view as utterly impervious to musical treatment—a sample from which reads: “A further consequence of man’s personal dignity is his right to engage in economic activities suited to his degree of responsibility”—Milhaud somehow turned such bureaucratic waffle into a dignified, periodically exalted score.

As American critic Ted Gioia puts it, 'For the first time in 500 years, people listen to music, and don’t even know the name of the artist or song. This is not by chance, but is an intentional move driven by powerful interests -- with the goal of shifting control from artists who create to technocrats who merely aggregate … Musicians now make only pennies where previously they made dollars'

Given that he was excoriated by Joseph Goebbels as an 'atonal musician' whose work debased German womanhood, it is hardly surprising the noted composer and violinist found the general artistic climate in the Third Reich increasingly uncongenial. While his talents were greatly appreciated during the resulting sojourn in Turkey, where he was Kemal Atatürk's chosen instrument to modernise Turkish music, his was hardly an uneventful life

Try as we will, we couldn’t not be organists. Prospects of glittering financial rewards seldom motivate us and our incomes would be greeted by plumbers and electricians with derisive mirth. We lack even the spiritual benefits that come from being actively resented, like cops or tax collectors. Rather, truth be told, we become organists not because we can, but because we must

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