CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 349, 1 March 1946, Page 5

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

Sir,-I have listened patiently to the programmes of contemporary music broadcast by the main stations on Sunday afternoons, and have been rewarded at times by the presentation of good music, But I fear that I was most gratefu] to 4YA for playing only one movement of Morton Gould’s First Symphony, As the movement progressed I imagined the strings like lone spirits wandering about in the pit of hell in great agony and despair and hammered into senselessness at intervals by great strokes on the percugsion instruments, I can accommodate my ear to the dissonant. intervals of Stravinsky and Prokofieff on occasion but I find it impossible to wander down the maze of noises somehow incorporated into: a musical score by these American composers without wondering what it is all about, Of course, they are entitled to be heard, and as often as the exponents of the jazz medium, but one can’t help wishing that the announcer would indice these programmes , by, telling us i: foul. .clutch » of © cumstance precipitated the Ryde. "of such music. In most cases we can follow the works of the great masters with at least a glimmering of understanding and

always with admiration, but when admiration fails, as in many of these new works, could we not be introduced to the inner meaning of the music, if there is any, Virgil Thomson’s article on the subject featured in a recent Listener seemed evasive and inconclusive, and I feel that I would rather a musician kept to his province of making beautiful or meaningful music, romantic or architectural, and leave express trains, motorised armies and aeroplanes. to theirs, of creating monstrous noises. Contemporary British composers write tuneful . music. Perhaps they are weary of battle noises,

even as I,

G.S.

P.

(Dunedin).