WHAT-HO!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 354, 5 April 1946, Page 5

WHAT-HO!

Sir,-The dearth of intellectual fare so consistently manifested in your tabulated programmes has at last provoked a slightly tolerant person to a protestation of fundamental concepts. In a very liberal calculation, taking a recent Listener as typical, the following results were obtained. The conspectus for the four YA stations reveals that for an aggregate of 450 hours of broadcasting, 20 hours or 4.5 per cent. were devoted to music of a generally accepted classical nature, and 536 hours, with 32 hours of classics (5.9 per cent.), for contemporary national stations. The "Commercials" are, of course, negligible. I have no hesitancy in stating that a drastic curtailment of the extraneous matter at present cluttering up New Zealand frequencies, and the substitution of a bit more of "silly old Bach" would, educationally and culturally, constitute a first-night curtain for New Zealand art history. I would submit that, if the 4.5 per cent. which just manages to exist in unstable equilibrium with the monopolising influence of virose factions -if 4.5 per cent., in the future, represented the felonious surfeit of servile sophistry, with which a depraved taste is being soothed at present, an immense elevation of moral and cultural standards would result. Some day classicism will corffe into its own. Of that, I have no doubt. But the road, which is of necessity fraught with trials and disappointment, thus proffering a triumph of a more piquant semblance; that traverse could be rendered more facile by the conversion of classicism’s bitterest antagonists at this juncture-and they will have to listen to far more good music than is apparent ' at present, in ordér that they may appreciate it. Finally, a classic regime, once inaugurated, would, through virtue of its ever-satisfying nature, resolve into a national institution, ANTOINE WATTEAU (Mosgiel).