A WORD FROM THE WISE

Unlike many alumni stories you'll read here, this one says ‘don’t be like me’. I was, and arguably still am, an underachiever, probably because I was ‘pretty good’ at so many things. I’m also quite good at being happy with very little – hardly the attribute of a successful businessman. Greed, we are told, is the spur, with jobs and prosperity following in its wake.

In 1970, I became one of the BBC’s panel of freelance composer-arrangers, working for Norrie Paramor, and contributing around 50 full orchestral scores. I also belonged to, and wrote for, many of the excellent jazz orchestras that are still blowing in the greater Birmingham area. I was a member of many brass bands playing trombone, bass trombone, baritone horn and euphonium and became first-call ‘dep’ for a championship band on bass trombone. My band arrangements have sold all over the world.

I wrote the music for many theatre shows, including one which celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Cancer Research Organisation, staged at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington. Our own orchestra was augmented by a choir of 100 and the Band of the Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards.

My book ‘The Composer/Arranger’ is highly acclaimed and is available as a paperback and as an ebook with playable MP3 examples and hyperlinked contents and text references. It has sold to some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the world. My interest in American cars resulted in two of my complete renovations being featured in magazines.

Oh, and by the way, I was classicallytrained as an artist. I was student of the year in 1958, receiving my prize from Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman.

At 80 years of age I still work at my Digital Audio Workstation writing, arranging and mixing music which I submit to production hire companies. Most of them are accepted, whereas a success rate of 50% is considered to be OK. One of them was recently used on TV in the USA. They don’t tell you where.

So, as people keep telling me, I haven’t exactly been a failure but if people could see my circumstances today they would inevitably ask themselves ‘what went wrong?'

I know what went wrong. In an increasingly competitive world it is more important than ever not to spread resources too thinly. That is the essence of this message; ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’. As human knowledge expands, it becomes increasingly sub-divided into specialised compartments, so that it no longer helps us to say that Leonardo Da Vinci, for example, was artist, inventor, engineer, and so on. The rate of progress in all areas is exponential. Before a new product is even launched, companies are already hard at work on its replacement.

I was dismayed to read that John Anthony (Jasper) Stocks had passed to the common room on high. He always seemed to recognise some worth deep inside me, for which I am still, even after all these years, so very grateful.

In his final report as my fourth form master he commented that I showed flashes of marked intelligence.

Hmm…

John Morton (WGS 1951-1956)