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delivered by 'knowers', scholars, thinkers and arguers working out of a wide range of academic,spiritual and cultural traditions.Serendipitously, as a tool for escapist reading on my summer holiday 2011, I selected the 'bestseller',The Lost Symbol (Brown, 2009). The novel is fanciful and controversial but it doescontains some interesting observations about the state of the human condition at this moment intime. It also provides verifiable accounts of the influence that technology is having on thehuman condition and explores some of the issues tangentially relevant to the present study:things like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, cybernetics and so on. Most intriguingly, itexplores the inter-relationship between ancient wisdom and cutting edge thinking, making thefollowing series of points:"A change is coming. Human beings are poised on the threshold of a new age when theywill begin turning their eyes back to nature and to the old ways... back to the ideas inbooks like the Zohar and other ancient texts from around the world. Powerful truth has itsown gravity and eventually pulls people back to it. There will come a day when modernscience begins in earnest to study the wisdom of the ancients... that will be the day thatmankind begins to find answers to the big questions that still elude him." (Brown, 2009 p.92)Prior to going on holiday, I was privileged to be at the 'Proms' premiere of the Concerto forTurntables and Orchestra, written by Gabriel Prokoviev (Grandson of Sergie) and performed byDJ Switch 22 with the National Youth Orchestra (NYO), (Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 3rdAugust 2011). This a radical fusion of traditional Western orchestral music and so-calledpopular culture. A year previously the NYO had performed works by the 20th Centurycomposer, Edgar Varese, who had experimented then with electronically-derived soundsinfluencing, in the process, more populist musicians like Frank Zappa. At one after-show party,22 A whole essay could be written about the way in which DJSwitch was using a computer interactively with histurntables to re-create the sounds of the orchestra while the acoustic instruments were playing 'call and response'with him. This was pre-figured by the artist Moby on his seminal album 'Play' in 2002 where he too used moderntechnology to re-create the sounds of traditional instruments. I wrote about this phenomenon at the time andpresented the idea at a staff conference in Canterbury in 2003. As reinforcement of that point and others made here,DJSwitch, read his score for the piece from a Macbook Pro eschewing the traditional music stand.86Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)