RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 174, 23 October 1942, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

— No. 33: By

Marsyas

MASS IN FIVE VOICES, by A William Byrd, recorded to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his birth, has found its way here, and listening to it revives that wonderment with which we survey the greatness of the Elizabethan age. We ask each other "Why was it?" when we | consider the magnificent splendour of | success in every field of endeavour open | to the Englishman of that time. It is a stirring thought. But even more profound, and perhaps more pertinent, is the question, how did it come about that the Elizabethan composers were exceptions to the now complacently accepted rule that really great artists-composers in particular-die in poverty, lacking both security and recognition? "To have great poets you must have _great audiences, too," says Walt Whitman. And while it was left to posterity to provide the great audiences for the rediscovered treasures of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, it was the contemporary audience that recognised "Mr. Wm. Birde" and the great madrigalists. In other words, a great audience. John Dowland was the one notable exception, but then he was different, because he found fame in European courts and returned to poverty in England. Now, we so nearly forget the Elizabethan composers that we need such reminders as this quattrocentenary recording. Those whom their time neglected, we treasure; those who in their time were treasured, we neglect. Thus Stephen Spender (in "Exile From Their Land, History Their cile’’):Where do we recognise their similarity To our own wandering present uncertainty? ; * 7 * ‘THE Byrd Mass is sung by "The Fleet ’ Street Choir," evidently a body of gentlemen of the Fourth Estate, who, considering their vocation, are commendably articulate. Sufficiently so for me to notice, to my delight, that they were singing "Pleni sunt coili" instead of the faddish "Pleni sunt chelli." Even so, I couldn’t make certain that all the basses had resisted what must have been a strong temptation to sing "Credo in unum Daily." The Fleet Street Choir would have surprised me less had they presented a choral arrangement of Strauss’s "Morning Papers Waltz." * % * SOMETHING recondite: The song of our "rainbird" (or grey warbler, or riro riro, or pseudogerygone igata), is the one native bird song I know that could be employed musically; and has always been known to me in the follow- ing notation (six-four time): dotted minim C, crotchets B, B, A, dotted minim C. (With upper mordents on the crotchets), On glancing through a reference book the other day what did I see but this very notation (without the mordents). Here, I thought, was someone else actually recording the song of our rainbird, but I found that it was the "Landino sixth, a cadential formula common in the music of the 14th and 15th centuries . . . in which after a descent from do to la, a return jump is effected." Henceforth, I shall know the rainbird as a harbinger of polyphony.