RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 190, 12 February 1943, Page 2

RECENT MUSIC

Re ¢ No,- 4 9

By

Marsyas

to be listening to 2YA on the morning of Sunday, Jenuary 31, heard what was, with certain reservations, the most instructive musical broadcast for some time. Instead-of the Catholic service scheduled, a prepared session on the development of the Mass in the early Christian era was presented, with plaingong illustrations recorded by the monks of Solesmes. "T eve who were fortunate enough Nothing could have been a better preparation for the half-hour of Sixteenth Century Polyphonic Masterpieces which 3YL. broadcast on the following evening, or for the Byrd five-part Mass, which is being heard quite frequently at present. "T am quite aware that it needs some effort to appreciate sixteenth century works, which have none of the apparent ‘purpose’ of the later symphonists, and none of their dramatic perspective: only a purity of soul and a perfect plasticity of rhythm," wrote William Glock in that same issue of the Observer which I quoted last week. The need for that effort would diminish if we had frequent opportunties of hearing plainsong in all its pure simplicity, and the polyphonic music which, while retaining the same purity of feeling, developed away to the other ex- treme-intellectual and technical complexity. "Perfect plasticity of rhythm" is the phrase to give a most revealing clue to the nature of plainsong and its descendant polyphony, provided "rhythm" is

read in its widest sense: rhythm of wordmeanings, and rhythm of the emotional response, in addition to the purely mechanical factor-Latin prose rhythm, Our difficulty in being receptive to it all has arisen out of the predominance in our daily music of dance-rhythms, which govern the pattern-basis of almost everything on which the ordinary listener bases his musical experience: square-cut sections of music with recurring points of rest, the very opposite of "perfect plasticity of rhythm." By usage, we have made the prose-rhythm factor seem strange and incomprehensible to the ordinary listener whose daily bread it once was, and the understanding of the other factors has gone with it, ae % bd HOSE plainsong chants, which fall so strangely on the ears of some listeners, and the music of the sixteenth century differ from the great products of-the symphonic era in that they admit no Questions; it was not a matter of stating and reconciling conflicting ideas, nor even of setting off contrasted keys against each other. They presupposed faith. There were no soulstorms, no torments to be resolved in the mighty struggles of masterly finales, only expressions of faith to be clothed in musical raiments of celestial beauty, If we had no other relics of the people who produced and used this music, we ould assume that they never knew the torments of the soul that Beethoven knew. So if we find that plainsong, or Byrd’s Mass in Five Voices, conveys nothing to us, it is not because we don’t know enough, but probably because we know too much,