Two Voices

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 332, 2 November 1945, Page 5

Two Voices

we’ were asleep when we allowed one contributor last week to praise the Salzman concert and another to condemn it. We were wide awake. We saw no reason then, and we see none yet, why we should refuse the use of our columns to a contributor who had enjoyed the concert because we had already opened them .to a contributor who had not. Both opinions seemed to us honest; both were expressed intelligently; and each was presented as the reaction of one individual, They could both have been right, and with those qualifications no doubt were. A concert arranged for 2,000 people has almost as many purposes, It aims to please some of those people all the time but it never : CORRESPONDENT asks if tries to satisfy all of them any of | the time. Even if we simplify the matter beyond the limits of truth and reasonableness, we have two or three broad aims which can’t be coalesced further. We have an appeal to those whose taste is fine and exclusive, who take no pleasure in anything but the best, and who, if the concert were for them only, would get up and go at the first descent into the popular. No .one knows what proportion they are of any audience but everybody knows that they are not a big proportion, They are however entitled to say what they think and feel about the performers, and especially about the items, and the more often they say it, if they are respectful and courteous, the bet- —

ter it is for the whole audience, For the other large group, those who have no difficulty in listening to second- and even third-rate stuff, who are not sensitive but completely sincere, enjoy nearly everything that is offered to them, and the better that is the richer and more fruitful their enjoyment becomes. They too are entitled to express their opinions, without apology and without superior checks on their enthusiasm, and The Listener has as strong an obligation to one group as to the other, It has not the same kind of obliga-. tion to both, but an obligation of some kind to both as often as it takes notice of music or plays or painting or books.