WHEN CHILDREN SING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 289, 5 January 1945, Page 5

WHEN CHILDREN SING

| Sir,-I read with a great deal of interest an article by one of your staff reporters entiled "When Children Sing." I have re-read it to find out wherein it was, so I thought, destructive; and I think I have found it. Criticism, to be of any value should be, like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. It should be impersonal and constructive. One might add that in dealing with any performance by children there is the psychological side which is so important that it cannot be overlooked. Children learn by repetition, particularly music such as choir. work. They learn to sing a certain way because they have confidence in the teacher. Now to destroy that confidence in any criticism of the finished product is a serious offence against both teacher and children. To make my point clear one cannot read paragraphs 3 and 4 on page 13 without seeing a definite criticism of the teacher concerned. No school or teacher in this country would teach (or "let," to quote your critic) children to sing or speak as he stated in "Drink to Me Only." I was there, and certainly did not hear anything approaching what he suggests. Therefore his criticism becomes a matter of opinion. I agree that purity of vowels is essential for all choral work. But listen to any choral society: do you get it? I could cross swords with your writer on the use of "ai." I much prefer "ah" with a closing consonant completing the word "thine." Your critic says that "several songs were taken far too fast." Tempo is a matter of taste and judgment. If your critic will turn to page 928 of the Oxford Companion to Music he will read, regarding tempo: "In fact, what matters is not the tempo the performer actually adopts, but the tempo that the listener is led to imagine he is hearing, for whifst in science things are what they are, in art things are what they seem." When the Grenadier Guards Band was in Christchurch they played the music for the morning service at the Cathedral. The tempo---speed-at which they took the hymns left everyone well behind. I asked Major Miller after the service why he did so. "Oh," he replied, "tempos are all being speeded up in England now." Who.was right, the Guards or the people? Some years ago a number of English conductors went to America as guest-conductors. On the journey over they decided to increase the age-long tempos at which some of the choruses of The Messiah were taken. Critics howled, but the public liked it. Who was right? When Henri Verbrugghen and the N.S.W. State Orchestra toured New Zealand in 1919-20 they combined with the choral societies in Auckland and Wellington for the production of The Messiah. Some of the tempos differed a good deal as taken by Colin Muston and Temple White and then Henri Verbrugghen. But the latter did not say that either or both of those gentlemen were wrong. He merely said, for I was there, "Ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to take it my way, as I am conducting now. Thank

vou: 99 Who was right?-

H.

GLAD

STONE HILL

(Wellington).

[Our staff reporter replies: "I cannot see why criticism should be ‘impersonal.’ A critic tries to do by a sort of remote control just what a conductor does, and Flight-Lieutenant

Gladstone Hill must know that he would be superfluous if he were impersonal. I do not follow the remark in his second paragraph to the effect that my criticism would have been more than mere opinion if he had happened to think the same way. "As for tempo, it is absurd to ask ‘Who was right, the Guards or the people?’ Both may have had the right speed for their own purposes. But a tempo is too fast if it is beyond the power of the particular performers to make the music (and words) intelligible at that speed. The tempos used by the choir in question might conceivably have been suitable for a smaller, more agile medium, though one would hardly recognise Holst’s ‘I vow to thee my country,’ scampered through at that rate, for the broad tune it is in The Planets.’’]