OUR MUSIC CRITIC.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 181, 11 December 1942, Page 3

OUR MUSIC CRITIC.

Sir-Musicians are notoriously a jealous, irritable, cantankerous, narrowminded, thick-skinned, humourless, savage, and vengeful race. (I can at the moment think of only a few exceptions, like Handel and Bach and Schubert and Parry and Stanford and Cesar Franck and Schumann and perhaps half a dozen or a dozen or two more). It was therefore inevitable that "Marsyas" should in due course stop a few bricks-even if he gets off without being flayed alive, like his namesake the wood-wind performer who so irritated Apollo. But I really think he has stopped so many bricks that it is time someone helped him throw a few back. I therefore step to his side and heave this one. "Marsyas" has of course made the sad mistake of thinking and speaking freshly and candidly about music and musical performers, in a country which has no tradition of criticism in the arts; and where therefore any remark that has not been reverently or positively made a hundred times before is met with the yells of pain and astonishment which a politician emits at some hint that a shadow has passed over his reputation for probity. There are times, too, when "Marsyas" has been witty. This is bad, very bad. Persons who talk about music should not be witty. He has said things about Beethoven. This also is bad. Some day the devilish fellow may cast an aspersion on the sacred name of Bach. Has he not already delivered himself of dicta on the flesh and blood performers who so pitilessly assault our New Zealand ether? Base, lewd, profane, irreverent, vulgar, and pretentious inkslinger! I suggest, Sir, that some of your anti-"Marsyas" correspondents should pull themselves together and take a short course of Ernest Newman and W. Jj. Turner and Cecil Gray and G. B. Shaw and M. D. Cal-vorcoressi-for gq start. That might give them a hint that writing on music is not necessarily the portentous. repetition of platitudes, or the sloppy spreading of adulation, to which we are so generally accustomed in our country. Of course I don’t think "Marsyas" is always right-I ‘think he’s wrong about the Ninth Symphony for instance, But maybe it is I who am wrong. At least, though he sometimes — like all other writers in music-talks what seems to me, in my infinitude of wisdom, nonsense, he doesn’t-unlike some of his own critics-talk solemn nonsense.

J. C.

BEAGLEHOLE

(Wellington).