RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 179, 27 November 1942, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

= (No. 38: By

Marsyas

‘ AVING lately been twitted for writing about something other than Recent Music, I suppose a risk attaches to writing about Recent No Music. I can only recall the barrenness of one or two casual programmes of assorted "classical music." I have never met a man who would start the evening off with the evening paper, turn to a satire by Donne, pick up Dickens and enjoy a page or two, read his friends a passage from Damon Runyon and a Barrack Room Ballad, sip a little Swinburne (for private pleasure), and then read himself to sleep with Dale Carnegie. Nor have I ever been in a house where there was Michelangelo in the hall, Burne-Jones over the fireplace, a coloured print of Bedouins and camels on sand-dunes (pyramids in right background), over the writing desk, Picasso on the east wall, and "The Monarch of the Glen" on the west, with a Rodin plaster in one window and a big porcelain spaniel in the other. But every day some National station broadcasts a programme of this nightmarish kind. In John Dowland you will find sweet Elizabethan solace, but in a moment, Verdi will destroy it; Haydn amay restore sanity, but if there happens to be something by Massenet on the back of the Verdi record, this will be handy as a "vocal number" (even so-called sometimes). Finally, perhaps, the Hassan Serenade by Delius, Yet all the time one knows there are records available of good things thet are rarely but gladly heard, and one knows how programme organisers can rise to the occasion with sane, balanced, and unified programmes, far removed from late 19th Century self-indulgent romantic medleys, lush harmony, and voluptuous melody. Too often though, it seems as if the compiler didn’t know where to look for something more that would suit ‘the context, and has had to fall back on something so familiar that the record can probably be located without reference even to a card index, * * * HEN this kind of thing ceases, programme organisers will find that listeners are taking them seriously, and that might lead to recognition of the fact that a programme organiser has a position of responsibility about equal to that of the principal of a metropolitan high school. As. long as the listener can feel with his ears how little credit for taste the programme organiser gives him, the listener will be unable to take the programme organiser seriously. And just as long as that situation exists, the programme organiser will be a far less useful unit than a teacher in a sole-charge backblock school.