A National Orchestra

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 367, 5 July 1946, Page 5

A National Orchestra

HE Prime Minister, whose statement appears on page 16, has said all that it is necessary to say about the assembling, training, and organising of a national orchestra. The question is: What do we, the public, expect from the orchestra? The fact that it is a national organisation, financed out of the public purse, of course gives everyone the right to make demands 6n it. It belongs to the man in the street and to the woman at the kitchen sink as well as to those to whom music is not merely bread and butter but the very expression of their beings. Because it belongs to everybody, everybody will push and pull and squeeze it to some extent, and the more true it is that there has been what the Prime Minister calls "a quickening of interest in good music all over the world," the more certain it is that these pressures will be felt. They ought to be felt. If music means anything at all to us we are entitled to protect what it means whether we are being starved by highbrows_ or assaulted by vulgarians. But most of us don’t know what music means to us, and that perhaps is where safety lies for the orchestra. Anyone who has sat through a classical concert and made critical but humble observations of the audience knows how difficult it would have been to say why about 60 per cent bought their tickets. But they did pay their money, they did attend, and they will attend over and over again. They will be no nearer to understanding at their tenth than at their first concert, but they will be there, and it is for that 60 per cent as well as for the musically more intelligent 40 per per cent that the orchestra is being brought into being. It is an attempt on a national scale to make art at once popular and selective, and can succeed only if we learn quickly enough that, if climbing is safer than descending, there is no upstairs without the ground floor.