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New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 78, 20 December 1940, Page 4

Sir,-Modern music should neither be dismissed because it is, unfamiliar in style and sound, nor championed for the sole reason that it is up-to-date and excruciating for the most part. Most of your correspondents take one or other of these extreme lines, charge each other with being out of date or lovers of the hideous, and so become futile. There is a better test than this to try modern music by, that of Caliban-or rather, of Shakespeare himself: " Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises: Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." J

In Shakespeare and the older poets, music is invariably "sounds‘and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." What a beautiful and rational ideal of music, and how very different from that of many present-day composers! There is a further Shakespeare test-that of Lucentio on the purpose of music: " Preposterous ass! that never read so far, To know the cause why music was ordained! Was it not to refresh the mind of man After his studies or his usual pain?" Music then-to be music-must give delight, must hurt not, and must refresh us after study and tribulation. How much ultra-modern music will stand

this test? A very large amount of contemporary music has apparently been written, not to sell, not to please, but in order to perpetrate sour, uncouth, rough and unwillingly ugly sounds-the uglier the better from the composer’s point of view. It is great names that I have in mind-men like Sibelius, Mahler, Bax, Bliss, Ravel, Walton, and Stravinsky. The worser half of the music of these composers cannot well have been written to sell, it being so unenticing. It has no beauty at all to my ear, though I have tried hard to get acclimatised to it. It is rough, relentless, extraordinarily intricate and difficult to perform. Half an hour of a composer not out to shock his grandmother is worth many evenings of Bliss and Walton, so far as I am concerned. I would not have you banish modern style music from the air, but since you arrange our programmes for us cn the majority-taste system, it is but right that we should get less of the moderns than we now do. Whole unrelieved modern programmes now occur too frequently by far, whether we reckon by the standard of beauty or of majority likes and dislikes. Modern music dates itself very badly, quite as badly as did Stainer, Sullivan, Barnby, Dykes, and the Victorians.

F. K.

TUCKER

(Christchurch).