Prophets Without Honour

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 315, 6 July 1945, Page 8

Prophets Without Honour

N Dunedin recently the Music Teachers’ Association gave a recital of works by local composers, the first half of the programme being broadcast from 4YA. We in New Zealand wrongly place more emphasis on performance than on composition. We arrange public subscriptions to enable our promising

executants to proceed overseas for study, and when they reach the top of the tree we are proud and self-satisfied. Our composers, on the other hand, find the utmost difficulty in getting their works performed, let alone published; should they succeed in doing both, public apathy generally ensures that their labours will have proved in vain. It ig necessary, therefore, that support be given to any manifestation of the creative talent in our midst, and the M.T.A. deserves thanks for its venture, which we hope will not be the last of its kind. The phrase "local composer" is an unhappy one, with its suggestion of amateurism. The musicians whose work was represented here are amateurs in that composition is not their means of livelihood, but their work shows a solid background of harmonic and contrapuntal knowledge, and a technically competent use of these basic resources. It is time that such work by New Zealand composers should take its rightful place in regular broadcast programmes, to refute the general false impression that there are only, at most, one or two people in the Dominion who are capable of writing music of any quality.