Victory Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 310, 1 June 1945, Page 8

Victory Music

URING the VE celebrations, of course, most of the scheduled programmes had to be scrapped at the last moment to make way for the most exciting news that has been heard over our radios since 1939. In between news items, stations played their entire repertoire of patriotic marches and songs. There has been much music written during this war, good, bad and indifferent; but when 4YA broadcast the Victory Concert from the Dunedin Town Hall it was noticeable that the programme’ was mainly composed of well-tried classical music composed long before the Nazi war was so much as contemplated. This proves nothing except the well-known fact that when musicians want to give vent to their pent-up emotions nothing is good enough but music of the highest classical standard if such emotions are to be expressed adequately. It also points to the amazing fact that musicians are bound by no ties of race or creedthat to celebrate victory over a conquered nation it is not regarded as incongruous to include in the same programme works by victors and vanquished. Purcell, Parry, and Elgar, together with Schubert, Beethoven, and Handel, raise together a mighty paeon of thanksgiving. By what other nation but ours would this strange juxtaposition be considered not only fitting’ but inevitable? This sinking of prejudice in music, if practised in other spheres and

by all nations, may mean that the brave new world of our dreams is not so unattainable as we now imagine.