MUSIC HO!

Evening Star, Issue 23695, 1 October 1940, Page 4

MUSIC HO!

The Students’ Club which Mr O. W. Johnstone, as president of the Music Teachers’ Association, addressed, at its inaugural meeting on Saturday night, quite plainly is a movement in the right direction. The music teachers show a spirit which is to be commended when they are not content to be merely professionals working for their own advantage, but, being in charge of a good thing in which they believe, are desirous of seeing it spread as widely as possible for everyone’s benefit. The students who have formed a club will meet to play and sing in one another’s homes, for their own pleasure and that of any who may bo invited to hear them, and they will bold regular larger meetings in a salon that has been placed at their disposal. By the first part of- their programme they will work to revive a habit that was universal at an earlier time, when entertainments were less numerous than they are at present. As the president put it, they will “ bring back real music to tho place it never should have loft.” The old musical evenings, when everyone was supposed to bo musical, contained a good deal, no doubt, that was hardly music and was only indifferently performed, f-ven so it may be questioned whether they did not give more pleasure, to right hearers and right executants, than a number of tho substitutes which make some people complain that life would bo tolerable if it were not for its amusements. These new performers will have a musical organisation behind them, and musical standards have advanced, if the habit of music, made and not merely hoard, has not, in tho last score of years. People—or a minority of people—hear more good music, thanks to the radio and gramophone recordings, than they over did before, but they hear it with the most incongruous admixtures, and hearing is something different from performing. The new movement fits in well with the admirable work that is being done for music now in tho schools; as to the need for it, that return which it indicates to “ a more leisurely gait” in pleasure, “quiet meditation and a peace that is not stagnation ” in exchange for “ mcchanican speed and noise,” Mr Johnstone s eloquence did not exaggerate one iota.