This episode grapples with the perennial potent power of nationalism in politics. How do nations get created, even invented, we ask. Multiple theories on the construction of nations are explored such as that of "the invention of tradition" and the "imagination of community." Musically we listen to hymns, tone poems and folk based anthems, by composers like Verdi, Sibelius and Smetana. We explore the musical imagination of nationalism as it is drawn to landscape, nature and history buried deep in the past.

Modernity is universally acknowledged as a time of disruptive change and energies hard to tame. At times overlooked is the central role obsession over women played in the anxieties of the European fin-de-siecle. Almost every breakthrough work of "modern" music, whether Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," or Strauss' "Salome" had at its center a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Out of these anxieties emerged a whole new science of the mind, psychoanalysis that helped frame and develop what had originally been viewed as feminized illness into the generalised state of being modern.

In this episode we explore the knowledge/power construct of "Orientalism" as elaborated by Palestinian Scholar Edward Said and how it may be discerned via music of the age of Imperialism. A construct of the Other that fuses the exotic, the erotic and the eternal, from the Sahara to the Steppes, composers like Borodin and Verdi dramatised this encounter between the "West" and "East" in ways that went beyond ornament directly impacting power relations and the means to reckon with global difference.