MUSICIANS FROM THE WAR

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 264, 4 August 1919, Page 8

MUSICIANS FROM THE WAR

ENGLISH PIANIST AND ITS EFFECTS ON HIS MIND. Mr.T. P. Fielden, the English pianist discussed in a recont interview the effects .on a musician's • mind of years of war. Mr. Fielden who had made his name as a pianist before tho tot, joined the artillery in the early days and served with an 18-poundor battery in the Ist Division until wounded in the Messines Ridgo attack. "Musicians who have been through the war of course, have to doplora so many precious years 'gone west,' just like other folks, he said. "But thoro was some Bain after all in all those tremendous experiences. Musicians ordinarily livo m a little world of their own, and the •war threw one into a perfect whirl of mixed humanity. Some people hated tho .promificuousness of army life, but I feel that many profited by it. "Spirituality —can you use that word without seeming cantish? That's tho only word, anyhow, I know, to suggest what I feel may have been gained bv those years. Professional musicians have nowadays to work so hard technically that thoy often 'can't see tho music for the notes.' That is the German proverbial phrase, and it just expresses what German musicians in particular suffer from. "Being cut off from music so long was an awful privation, but, coming back to it after such long abstinence, ono gets, I think, a clearer view through and beyond the mcro notes into the spirituality ivhich surely is tho be-all and end-all of' music. One finds that somo music that technically was interesting, now fails in spirituality—and one has no use for it. Can I define this'spirituality'? No— that is precisely what music does and words can't do. "But the clearest example of it in my mind nro the Studies and Preludes of Chopin, in classical music; and, in that of our own day, Elgar—in Elgar to a supremo degree, placing him among the great musicians of all'time and far above any other contemporary."

"Here in London and. tho great cities of England the middle class, once tho "backbone of England,' tho most powerful of all the classes in tae nineteenth century, is menaced with doom. Wo. can $ee it before our eyes."—Harold Spencer, in the "Daily Chronicle."