PAGEANT OF MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 320, 10 August 1945, Page 5

PAGEANT OF MUSIC

| Sir,-To be attacked in your columns by so venerable an exponent of the | spoken word as Homer himself leaves me flattened; but what can this bard know of the pitfalls of modern journalism? I wrote "Cerberus," but my copy is retyped at The Listener office in Wellington, set up and printed in Auckland, always against time, and the marvel to me is that there are so few mis-prints, It is an axiom of journalism that misprints, when they do happen, appear in the most unfortunate places, such as in a sentence where one is accusing somebody else of inaccuracy. Like "Homer" I had consulted some classical manuals and found that there were several versions of the number of heads on the dog, though no classical reporter seems to have headed him up as "septiceps." One might expect Homer to view Virgil as a "pale imitator," but the point is that it was the Virgil tradition that prevailed in Gluck’s time. These few seconds of the Gluck recording were put on expressly for us to hear the bold innovation of the orchestral woofs; the music itself is explicit, and any preliminary comment should be explicit too, If, as Homer suggests, Gluck had Horace’s estimate in mind, but decapitated the dog 97 per cent. because he had cold feet at the thought of asking his orchestra to woof, he behaved in a wishy-washy fashion which must be unique in the history of musical composition, and Mr. Luscombe should have commented on it at length. Homer thought he heard Mr, Luscombe refer to the "many-headed" dog. I was listening with a companion who hac had

an even longer acquaintance with Cerberus than I have and we were simultaneously startled to hear that the peril of the tria guttura had increased 133 1-3 per cent. We had been drinking black coffee and were wide awake. but everv.

one knows how apt Homer is to nod. In suggesting that Passengers refrain from bothering Mr. Luscombe while he is steering between Scylla and Charybdis, Homer reveals his antiquated idea of this journey; modern Passengers, namely, radio listeners, keep saying to the helmsman, "Is your journey really necessary?" If he can’t convince them that it is, they just fly away. I said in the paragraph in question that. Mr. Luscombe’s job was an unenviable one. I don’t suppose that he likes this "digest" form of musical education any more than I do. But I still think that both in speed and relevancy he could make better use of the time between the records, This. as I made clear. ic aniv mu

own opinion. —

VIEWSREEL

COMMENTATOR

(Auckland) .