MARCH TONES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 October 1941, Page 7

MARCH TONES

APPEAL TO THE PUBLIC. One of the questions asked at a recent meeting of the British Broadcasting Corporation Brains Trust related to the playing of march tunes. “Why,” the questioner asked, “do people feel a thrill when they hear a march well played?” Several answers were given. Professor Huxley said the thrill was due to certain types of glands and muscles being called into action. Commander Campbell surmised that rhythm had a lot to do with it, the kind of rhythm that caused you to lift up your feet and presumably your heart. Mr Harold Nicholson went further and suggested that a march imparted a sense of continuous efficiency such as ordinary independent work does not give; people felt that' something was moving forward in a definite direction, with a planned order and also at considerable speed, so that they wanted to take a share in what was going on. Finally, Mr Douglas Woodruff spoke of human. life being basically a journey. “I believe,” he said, “that all- great books in the world are stories of journeys and that the ordinary private person lives with a perpetual sense of not getting anywhere in particular, and the idea of a march is the collective moving forward to something—no matter what.”