THE WOODEN HORSE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 20, 14 April 1927, Page 12

THE WOODEN HORSE

AN OCCASIONAL COLUMN And with great lies about his wooden horse Set the crew laughing and forgot his course. —J. E. Flecker. Written for THE SUN. THE Wellington Competitions Society has published a list of vocal and elocutionary items which it .h; not permit competitors at its 1927 Festival to shoot off. It is a curious list. Good popular things and bad popular things are banned with fine impartiality, of course on the ground that all these things have been done so often that everybody is sick of them. Everybody is sick of the bad and brummagem things, certainly; but the good ones are just as good as ever they were, and if people are sick of them it is only because they have been done so badly, as well as so often. The more popular a good thing is the **asier it is to score some kind of success with it, the harder to re-create its beauty, fresh, sweet, and entire; the oftener it is parroted, the more restless, irritable, and dissatisfied become the hearers, not because they are weary of it, but because they grow more hungry for they know not what; and that is the revelation to them of their inexpressible inner sense of what it means and is.

So when the Wellington Competitions Society will not allow anybody this year to sing “Ye Banks and Braes,” it is really telling the competitors that they are not good enough to sing it. No doubt experience has shown that this is so. It is perhaps not quite fair to use the last sentence as ground for asking whether compe-

titions have in fact, as in theory they are supposed to, done anything to raise standards of performance and standards of taste; for they might very well have done so without discovering or producing singers capable of singing "Ye Banks and Braes.” But it is a question which can fairly be asked on quite general grounds, so that the unfair connection of ideas does not matter. There seems to be not much, if any, evidence that competitions improve the musical and literary taste either of those who compete or of those who attend as listeners, and as judges of the judge. It would be interesting to know what help the musical societies. for instance, get from the semiprofessional and other competitors, and to learn from such competitors what profit, apart from trophies, medals and publicity, they consider themselves to have drawn from competitions: what artistic gain, that is, they have derived from competitions and could not otherwise have derived. One damaging piece of evidence against the literary influence of competitions is the list of barred elocut’onary items. Most of them are rubbish; but they are not barred as rubbish—they are barred because of too frequent repetition. It is true that they represent competitors’ “own selection”; but their popularity tells a tale of bad taste different only in degree from the bad taste very often shown in the official selections. The Dominion is often charged with its bad taste in music. Why does nobody kick us savagely for our bad taste in literature? If the two lists jAfford any indication, it is that our literary taste is much inferior to our musical taste, bad as that may be. Perhaps it is not so very bad. Any fool who can read and speak can also get up on a platform and help to debase' literary standards. The ability to discQurse sweet music, especially by means of some twangling instrument or other, is harder to come by, and even a little discipline is enough to choke off the worst kind of fool, the lazy fool. Music is therefore administered to us by persons who have passed the selective and improving test of a training of some kind. Bi*t whether this is much more than an alleviating mercy I should not care t 0 S&y -