RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 176, 6 November 1942, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

By

Marsyas

No. 35

film Fantasia saying: "But you can’t take it all in at once." What they mean is that you can’t be taken in all at once; this is true, even if, as is the case with such people, you have a humble estimate of your capacity to "understand good music," come away from Disney’s From the purely musical viewpoint, there are no imaginative heights in Fantasia that the ordinary picturegoer mind cannot scale. It is well below such musical taste as our radio programmes may have established. If it didn’t pretend to be anything more, one might not object, but it does. It pretends to be Art. And it sets out on a very unartful basis-a series of direct falsehoods. The printed souvenir says "The artists themselves have remained faithful to the spirit of the various compositions.’ Where, then, are the "visual" accompaniments that were specifically indicated by the composers of four of the works used? The Nutcracker Suite has no "mirlitons," no "Arab Dance." Stravinsky’s own intentions for the Rite of Spring are studiously avoided. Scott’s poem, good enough for Schubert’s Ave Maria, is not good enough for Disney. In the Beethoven (Pastoral Symphony), the programme actually boasts of Disney’s "fine disregard for the obvious." Yes, indeed, a fine disregard for the obviously vast possibilities of a symphonic movement named "The Awakening of Pleasant Feelings on Arriving in the Country," and another one called "The Scene by the Brook," where Beethoven wrote under the "ripple" theme, "The deeper the stream, the lower the note" and mimicked cuckoo, quail and nightingale, These and other ideas that Beethoven actually put into the music are ignored by Disney. And another falsehood. "The music, of course, is performed just as Beethoven wrote it," says the programme, This is untrue, What is played is certainly not as it was meant to be played. However, Disney pays a great tribute to the race of critics: Zeus, or Jupiter, is undoubtedly a caricature of G, B. Shaw. ‘THE "abstract" treatment of the Bach. Toccata and Fugue is the nearest thing to an invitation to take Fantasia seriously, but even here, Disney’s men missed the great opportunity to "point" the entries of the "fugal" subject and pile up a series of visual cross-references. Elsewhere, too, the essence of recapitulation is missed, and a musical idea, on recurring, often gets entirely new treatment. In other words, they just didn’t "understand" the music themselves from the outset. At all events, they’re very self-con-scious about it. In the interval, members of the orchestra break into a bit of swing, and the clarinet makes an illusion to Alec Templeton’s Bach Goes to Town just so’s we'll know they’re not "long-hairs" or "arty" folk, (The film itself will be reviewed ~ G.M. in our next issue.)