‘Has this been the happiest year of my life?’ I found myself asking recently. It has certainly been topped with the arrival of a third granddaughter last month. (My first, little Sara Maria, died a few years ago.) The birth of Rosie Elisabeth has taken our joy to cosmic levels, but 2023 has been a succession of delights, mainly connected to the concerts I’ve been able to conduct around the globe, from St Louis to Tallinn. After the evils of lockdown, many of us worried that musical life would never return. But it has. I will never, ever take cultural life for granted again.

One highlight this year was the culmination of a huge project at my festival in East Ayrshire, the Cumnock Tryst. ‘Celebration of the Coalfields’ allowed us to work with ten local groups who created their own music and songs, which were subsequently orchestrated for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The groups then joined the orchestra to perform the new music in festival concerts. The local MP Allan Dorans tabled an Early Day Motion at the House of Commons congratulating us, which was a delight.

Sometimes the arts have a more unsettled relationship with politics and ideology, however. A few weeks ago, a new organisation was formed – Freedom in the Arts – which warned that artistic free expression is under attack. Its launching letter to the press (which I signed along with more than 1,000 others) spoke of ‘a new set of moralistic and political attitudes which many institutions and activist groups have adopted as dogma’. A lot of these complex and contested issues – some of which I don’t fully understand yet – seem to revolve around race and sex, and the new body is worried that a large number of arts institutions are discriminating against artists and audiences who do not subscribe to their views.

Yet political interference in culture is not new. A few years ago, Scottish artists were chilled when the SNP’s then culture minister generously decreed: ‘Artists don’t have to be close to government. They just have to have a common understanding of what the country wants.’ Great. Tomorrow I begin work on my new composition, ‘Misfeasance in a Campervan Overture’.

For ‘what the country wants’ read ‘what the political classes and ideological activists want’. This can be different things from place to place and prejudice to prejudice. Politicians should just get out of artists’ faces and stop ‘nudging’ them into the ideologues’ own chosen direction of travel, which is usually issue-driven. Artists have their own ideas of what to express in their work. They don’t need or welcome top-down interference.

I was recently contacted by a German organisation, Artists Against Anti-Semitism, which now sends me its newsletters. There seems to be a huge groundswell around this question in Germany, Austria and France. The newsletters inform me about developments that I never see referenced in British media. Anti-Semitism is on the rise again and AAA keeps me up to speed with news on a Jew-hatred which is sometimes expressed by people in the arts. I was also able to read about the graffiti attack on the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, the cancellation of a Jewish book launch in Vienna ‘for security reasons’, an open letter by German and Austrian filmmakers speaking out against anti-Jewish prejudice in their own industry, a similar initiative undertaken in the German-speaking literary industry, a symposium in Düsseldorf on ‘Answers to Anti-Semitism in Art and Culture’ and an event planned in Esslingen for Youth Against Anti-Semitism involving a lecture, ‘Judenhass Underground’. I wonder if a similar organisation could be established in this country. I would certainly get behind it and I know that many others in the arts here are worried about the way the world’s oldest prejudice is making such an appalling return. Would it attract the same level of support from British artists that it clearly does in Germany and Austria?

A miracle happened to someone close to me earlier this year. Yes, one of those old-fashioned, improbable things one reads about in the lives of the saints or the Bible. And I’ve heard about other similar occurrences in our wider circles of associates. We think it has something to do with Blessed Carlo Acutis, whose intercession had been prayed for. He was the Italian teenager who died of leukaemia in 2006 and was beatified in 2020. His incorrupt body is placed in a glass tomb in the Sanctuary of the Spoliation in Assisi, near to St Francis and St Clare. The official cause for his canonisation is under way at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints at the Vatican.

This miracle has made some people deliriously happy. Is it indecent to feel that way in this year of pogrom, the beheading of children, new wars and international despair? The expression of joy at this time might be the most radical, counter-cultural thing to do, in striking a blow for Good in its eternal war against Evil.