RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 189, 5 February 1943, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

(No. 48: By

Marsyas

ous programme called Classical Music, broadcast by an auxiliary station. Had I known of it beforehand, the following quotation from William Glock (the London Observer's music critic), would have served a purpose on that occasion: "We have now reached a stage at which we must stop treating the music of the past as one glorious lucky dip, and try to summon enough intuition to see exactly what attitude will help to produce the right conditions, and especially the right audience, for the future." He goes on to assign to the BBC the leading part in fulfilling this responsibility. "One glorious lucky dip" is one glorious description for a programme which ranged over the classicism of Bach and Haydn, the sickly sentimentality of Rubinstein and Gounod (to which the confections of Albéniz and Granados were no antidote), the ineffectualness of Roger Quilter (after which Elgar’s Light of Life gave a deathly pallor to one’s hopes for English music), and the honest poesy of songs by «Schubert and Schumann, which had the effect of making pieces of Delibes and Moszkowski (excellent things in their own place), look undeservedly ridiculous. The question arises: Will an attitude which is probably the cause and certainly the product of such "lucky-dip" programmes "help to produce the right conditions and especially the right audience, for the future?" % % at UR greatest musical ambition is to have great composers. "To have great poets," says Whitman, "there must be great audiences, too," and it is not less true of composers. But great audiences: are composed of people who can and do give to any one piece of | AST week I discussed a miscellane-

-- good music that intense concentration which is essential to its full understanding — a mental effort that differs very little from the effort with which the composer conceives and the performer executes; intelligent listening is a creative thing. And the intelligent listener is no better equipped to switch rapidly from one extreme of state-of-mind to another, than is the composer or the performer. In fact, they are all three of them specially provided with mechanism to prevent its happening. The question so readily resolves into one of mere physical powers that it becomes directly comparable to its equivalent in terms of food. Ten weeks ago, I attempted to translate it into terms of the drawing-room furniture and effects; in terms of food it is even more repulsive to contemplate: Mushrooms, strawberries, asparagus, seed cake, sardines, passion fruit, bread-and-cheese, crayfish, banana custard, all on one plate, touching one another, their flavours mingling! It is obviously impossible to apply any decently critical standards-or discriminating, if the other word offendsto things which seem to have been assembled in such a sequence as to ofier the maximum of opportunities for misjudgment (as in hearing Moszkowski close to Schubert, Elgar close to Haydn, Quilter close to Bach). And as long as it is so hard, the audience will not be able to formulate standards, will not become a great audience, and will not give birth to great composers. Fortunately, it is not always so hard, These lucky-dip programmes are not general, not the rule. They have been fairly regular in certain quarters, as a casual glance back over old Listeners will reveal, but not everywhere. Still, the job of "summoning enough intuition to see exactly what attitude will help, etc." will not even have been begun until they are totally excluded.