THE LOST OBOIST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 160, 17 July 1942, Page 8

THE LOST OBOIST

Sad Case Of G. B. Shaw

cently in the London "Times" and was reprinted in the "Pianomaker." We are able to give it to our own readers by the courtesy of Charles Begg and Co., Ltd, Sir,-May I beg The Times to remind the Chancellor of the Exchequer that musical instruments are among the first necessities of civilised life, and not luxuries to be made unobtainable by a Purchase Tax of 66 2-3 per cent.? To exempt wireless receiving sets, and by the same stroke cut off the supply of instruments and skilled players by which the masterpieces of music are broadcast, suggests that the Government is still in the hands of gentlemen from our public schools left to believe that anyone who can read the satires of Juvenal in their original tongue, but is unaware of the existence of the symphonies of the great masters, from Haydn and Mozart to Elgar and Sibelius, is an educated man. The simplest orchestra which can give us the eighteenth-century symphonies needs at least 32 instruments. For a full range of nineteenth-century music, the minimum must be put at 80. And each instrument is dumb withfollowing letter appeared re-

out a skilled professional player, each of whom must have been provided with it by his parents in his or her teens. Now the parents of orchestral players are not luxurious millionaires. Many of them come from families living so closely within modest incomes that a sudden demand for £20 or even £10, is a very difficult matter. In my boyhood I had a chance of being qualified as an oboist; and I should have jumped at it if I could have obtained the £14 which was the price of a second-hand oboe 70 years ago. For want of that sum I was lost to the woodwind for ever, and had to adopt a profession in which the equipment was sixpenn’orth of stationery.

The notion that not only the -- players in the BBC and London Philharmonic Orchestra, but in the brass bands of the Salvation Army and the factory and colliery bands which competed every year at the Crystal -E 7

Palace, the best of them being of firstrate artistic quality, are extravagant voluptuaries whose instruments may be classed with blue diamond rings and dispensed with on the smallest provocation, betrays a breath-bereaving cultural and social ignorance. I hope all the bands in London will hasten to Westminster Hall and do to the House of Commons what Joshua’s trumpets did to the walls of Jericho rather than let the Appropriation Bill pass as it stands without a protest, Faithfully

G. BERNARD

SHAW

pril 23. Ayot Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts.