Music for Victory

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 323, 31 August 1945, Page 8

Music for Victory

| 44 choice of music used to fill in the hours between news broadcasts and announcements on days of victory has not, to my mind, been settled with much dignity on either occasion this year. Perhaps there is no solution. We all wish to have these big moments surrounded by some of the music we like best, and no two of us will agree about what that is; nor is the mdod of these hours a simple and unmixed one, except in the very young. Those who like their music slightly classical found, certainly, that the evening programmes from 1YA and 1YX stood as listed on VJ Day, but they probably wished that some of these composers had been allowed a voice earlier in the day. There are Handel and Brahms, for instance, who have written music that is triumphant, but not thoughtlessly nor unpityingly so. Elgar, too, of impeccably English birth, has done the same. Tchaikovski would. have had something helpful to say, and a little Prokofieff would have been a graceful gesture to our Soviet ally. As it was, the catering was left almost entirely in the hands of the light orchestras and military bands, to whose sweet, old-time favourites and immortal marching songs I have no objection at all, except that after some hours they began to pall. "Waltzing Matilda" stood up amazingly well to the strain imposed upon it throughout the day, but I thought that just this once 1YA and 1ZB might have spared us "The Merry Widow."