"It Depends What You Mean By..."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 328, 5 October 1945, Page 8

"It Depends What You Mean By..."

"‘\/ITH some misgivings I prepared myself for the quartet. Half-a-dozen bars. had not been played before I realised that it far exceeded my worst forebodings. Never in my _ gloomiest moments had I believed that music could be so dismal, so ugly, so utterly incoherent." And never in the listener’s most prophetic moments could it be imagined that the above criticism applies to a quartet by Arnold Bax and was written, some years ago, by one of the Brains Trust’s most humorous and broad-minded members, C. E. M. Joad. The first of a series of modern quartets in 4YA’s Classical Hour happened to be Bax in G Major, one of the most cheerful,.most easily apprehended, most dexterously fashioned pieces of Music it is possible to imagine. The date of the work and the date of the quotation make it not impossible that this was the very

quartet to which Joad was listening when he wrote "completely destitute of either form or design . . . monstrously ugly . . . a series of shocks to my nervous system which left me irritated, miserable and depressed. The effect was similar to that produced by a spell of the dentist’s drill." I am not quoting Joad because I agree with him but because I could not disagree more com-

pletely, and I hope that no Dunedin listener was influenced away from this series of modern quartets by similar criticisms of modern music, by Joad or anybody else. In all, we heard Bax, Armstrong Gibbs, Debussy, Bliss, and Walton; and the idea of playing them in a series, one each day, was an excellent one, especially to anyone with the leisure and inclination to listen, for comparative purposes, to all of them.