THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 157, 26 June 1942, Page 2

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

HOSE who take an interest in the work of local artists should find the evening programme from 1YA on July 1 deserving of their attention. The Auckland String Players, a small chamber group conducted by Owen Jensen, will be heard, with Dora Judson as solo pianist, playing a Haydn Concerto, and on the same programme Gwenda Weir (soprano), with string accompaniment, will sing four new songs. These, to words by Shakespeare, Herrick and Swinburne, were composed by Thomas Rive, who, before he joined the Army, was programme organiser at 1YX. Originally scored for voice and piano, the songs, if they show any influence at all, reflect that of Vaughan Williams, for whom Rive has a great admiration, but they have been described by one Auckland musician as strikingly underivative. The composer, he said, reveals a distinctive and original harmonic vocabulary and obviously has a feeling for modern idiom. Rive, who had nearly completed his Mus. Bac. course when he was called up, admits that he prefers orchestral to chamber music and his‘ambition at the moment is to have the chance of studying under Vaughan Williams once the business of the war is satisfactorily despatched. Wi’ 1914-1918 Pipers an ‘a’ an’ a’ Scottish listeners will find a speaker and a subject completely to their taste if they tune in to 1YA on Sunday afternoon next when A, J. Sinclair will talk about "The Pipers of 1914-18". And when one recalls the words of Percy Scholes, that "the use of the Highland pipes in war has for centuries been very important" and "more pipers were certainly employed in the Great War of

1914-18 than in any preceding war’’, it will be admitted that the subject is one worthy of the speaker. The present war has not dealt altogether kindly with the Scots. Since even the omnipotent Army could not take the breeks off a Highlander, they took the kilts off him instead and put him into battledress. But

the pipes remain inviolate, which is just as well for the United Nations. The Scots might otherwise have retired to their craggy fastnesses and left the English, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Dutch, and the Free French, to muddle along as best they could.

| Spy "An Enemy Within" is the title of the next "Health in the Home" talk to be heard from 1YA next Tuesday, June 30. This is not to be confused with the ZB serial of similar title, and listeners must not therefore be misled into expecting five minutes of breath-taking action in which Heil Hitlers and automatic pistols explode with equal fury. But we should not be surprised to find references to Fifth Columns in the health talk, for its title suggests that it may deal with the harm resulting from the introduction of foreign bodies. WHAT! No Trees? Turning for a moment from her favourite occupation of boosting bull-dogs

and pomeranians and cheering on the canines generally, Mrs. A. M. Spence Clark gives her attention during the coming week (3YA, Wednesday, 11.0 a.m.) to garden walls and rockeries. If she can tell. us what to do about the chink in the wall which the neighbours blink through, she will not have talked in vain. But the association of walls and rockeries suggests that she will be more concerned with what goes on than over the garden wall. "Randie Gangrel Bodies" Lengthening of faces often comes with lengthening of purses, for, from the time of the king who searched his kingdom for the shirt of a happy man and then found that the only really happy man was a shirtless beggar, gipsies, tinkers, fiddlers, and vagrants of all sorts have had a reputation for carefree jollity. Perhaps this is no longer true, for tinkers no longer mend pots, people dance to the radio instead of to fiddlers’ reels, and beggars are told to apply for Social Security. But the vagrants of 1785 were still jolly, and Bobby Burns, stopping in. at the Possie Nancie for a " quick one," was inspired by "the merrie core o’ randie, gangrel bodies" to write one

of the gayest and most dramatic of his poems. The Jolly Beggars of this poem will be brought to life once more under the more sober rafters of 2YA, where on Wednesday, July 1, they will " staggering and swaggering, roar their ditties up." It will be a studio presentation for soloists, chorus and narrator.