...Sir, She Said

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 351, 15 March 1946, Page 13

...Sir, She Said

(CHRISTCHURCH programme watchers are hereby warned to search like hawks for all future programmes compiled and presented by R. R. Beauchamp. He it was, some months ago, who was responsible for "The Shepherd’s Song," based on the 23rd Psalm, a particularly attractive mingling of music and information. He followed this up.

the other night with "The Milkmaid’s Song," based on English, Scottish, French, and Swiss folk-music sprung from the cowbails. While I hardly suppose that this broadcast will turn Tai Tapu into a nest of

singing birds-for the old folk-music is a thing past and these milking tunes have only. indirect relevance to modern pasturing and pasteurisation-I ended with the feeling of knowing things about the history of peoples that I had not known before. But the point of this programme was not so much in its didactic side-as was the case with its predecessor-as in the singing of the vocal quartet (anonymous) whom Mr. Beauchamp has to back him up. Here was singing exactly suited to a folk-song programme-and how rare this is one only knows on hearing it-using a minimum of musical accompaniment, and working with a clearness of articulation, a total absence of frills, and a plainness of statement which unmistakably showed singers desirous not of using their song as a means of making an impression, but of simply laying before the listener a form of art in which he might be interested. It practically never happens that we are given song or music, not because it is famous or spectacular or exciting, but because it is interesting; and similarly it is very rare that we hear singing with that quality defined by Quiller-Couch as essential to folk-song, an element "seraphically free from taint of personality." But all this was here

and was so exactly suited to its subject that it is and will remain something to. have heard Mr. Beauchamp’s programme.