Music and Money

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 344, 25 January 1946, Page 5

Music and Money

T is everywhere agreed that there are things Governments ‘must do whatever the cost may be: provide schools and hospitals, for example, and maintain law and order. In a slightly less urgent category are services which, though no one questions their necessity, Governments supply as circumstances permit — universities, research centres, art galleries, music schools, and so on. Here it is permissible to ask what the cost will be, but not to ask too anxiously or too long. Millions may live by bread alone, but no one should, and it is therefore very pleasant to be able to announce in this issue that the National Broadcasting Service has been able to.resume its war-inter-rupted plans for establishing a fulltime national orchestra. That is not merely good news but (to the musical at any rate) exciting news, and the immediate necessity is to avoid reading more into it than the official announcement actually says. It does not mean that the orchestra will be assembled next week and start playing the week after; nor can it mean that when it is assembled the orchestra will be comparable with any of the famous combinations in the world’s |

great music centres overseas..We must walk before we run, and creep before we walk, and our first steps forward will be laborious and costly: how laborious and how costly readers will begin to understand if they read the footnote to the official announcement on page 6. The estimates given by the New Statesman are of course for London and only remotely applicable to New Zealand conditions, but they do emphasise the fact that a full-time symphony orchestra is almost as expensive as a battleship, and a much more delicate mechanism to create and maintain,