PAGEANT OF MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 319, 3 August 1945, Page 5

PAGEANT OF MUSIC

Sir,-The absurdly short time into which H. C. Luscombe is expected to compress his "Highlights from Musical History" renders his task unenviables. arid,’ while he is doing his best to steer an overladen vessel between the Charybdis of comment without sufficient illustration and the even less desirable Scylla opposite, passengers might well refrain from®* bothering him with complaints about the catering. Your Radio Viewsreel of ‘June 29, for example, objects to the abrupt changes of key in the Mozart selections; surely a secondary" school. pupil of average musical intellie gence would take these in his stride? Your commentator, or perhaps it is the compositor this time, goes on to refer to an animal named Cerebus. This will give the well-informed pupil ‘pause. Cerebos I know, he will say; it is a kind of salt; and Cerberus I have heard of, a kind of dog; but this Cerebus has escaped me. Is it perhaps a new variety of spam? As to the number of its heads: the earliest Greek authority--Hesiod-states that there were fifty. A few hundred years later Euripides reduced them to three, possibly for metrical reasons; but in any-case he was a rationalist, Virgil, some hundreds, of years later still, also favoured three, but his contemporary Horace raised the bid to a hundred. It would therefore probably be safer to refer to Cerberus, if at all, and as I understood Mr. Luscombe.-to do, simply as many-headed. Gluck, no doubt, -knew better than to regard Virgil, pale imita- | tor that he was, as any sort of authority on Greek mythology, but he probably felt unequal to asking any orchestra ta perform more than three woofs at a time. Wagner, I imagine, would have had no hesitation in writing in the whole fifty: indeed, to my untutored ear, there seem to be several passages in his works ‘where he has actually done so.

HOMER

(Auckland).