THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 368, 12 July 1946, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

Pioneer Educationist | LISTENERS to 2YA at 3.0 p.m. on Sunday, July 21, will hear a _ programme commemorating Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, prepared for the NBS by Brian Sutton-Smith, B.A., 1946 Senior Scholar in Education of the University of New Zealand, and James McIntosh. Scholar in Education, Victoria University College. Pestalozzi was born in Zurich just over 200 years ago. Though thinkers everywhere now acclaim him as the author of an educational theory which has had tremendous influence throughout the civilised world, he appeared in his lifetime to fail in everything he did. He spent all his money taking children into his home, making them feel they were loved and cared for. His educational ideas were best expressed through the novel Leonard and Gertrude. After his death, teachers came from all over Europe to train: in his methods, which were largely the model of the great educational system of 19th Century Prussia, in its turn an example for education in the modern world. Film Criticism HE Winter Course series of talks from Station 1YA on the subject of criticism will finish on Thursday, July 18, at 7.15 p.m. when E. A. Olssen will discuss criticism as applied to the cinema. Film fans should not feel slighted that the cinema has been left to the last, for it is the youngest of the arts; if, indeed, it is an art at all-and there still seems to be some doubt on the point. They should rather sympathise with Mr.

Olssen in the difficulty of his task for, unlike his predecessors in the series who have been able to draw on the critical experience of the ages when discussing literature, painting, drama, and music, he will be entering a virtual desert where reliable signposts are few and the ground is littered with the bones of pioneers who dared to challenge the mighty power of the box-office and the advertising columns. But all this should make Mr. Olssen’s talk interesting and perhaps important, especially if he deals with the hazards of film criticism in New Zealand as well as _ overseas. Theatre managers and film company executives in particular may be expected to have their ears glued to radio sets on July 18. Symphony by Clementi OMETHING off the beaten track of music is to be heard from 2YC at 8.36 p.m. on Saturday, July 20-a symphony by Muzio Clementi, the Italian pianist and composer of Beethoven’s time, who produced the famous pianistic studies Gradus ad Parnassum, and founded the London firm of piano makers that became Collard and Collard after his death. Clementi was born in 1752, and in his thirties he went touring Europe as a virtuoso pianist. In Vienna he was pitted against Mozart in various tests of skill--sight-reading, improvisation, etc. He spent a good deal of his life in England, and settled in London finally in 1810. He there wrote his Gradus ad Parnassum (which have earned him the name of the father of

modern piano-playing) and several symphonies. He was married three times, lived to be 80 years old, and was buried with high honours in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. The symphony which 2YC will broadcast is his second. Atonality by Schonberg VERY different kind of novelty will be broadcast by 2YC on the same evening as the Clementi symphony. At 9.1 p.m. on Saturday, July 20, through the medium of another American recording listeners may hear Arnold Schonberg’s Second String Quartet in F Sharp Minor, with Soprano Voice. The singer will be Astrid Alnaes, the conductor Dmitri Mitropoulous, and the composer’s new arrangement for strings will be played by the strings of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. There are four movements, the first described as terse and laconic; the second a grim and spectral scherzo, the third a theme and five variations in which the soprano sings Stefan George’s, poem, "Litany," and the finale a setting of another of George’s poems, "Transport." Back to Methuselah HEARTENED by the news that the goats were still calmly munching the actinic hay when the smoke cleared at Bikini, we are prepared to listen more indulgently to Dr. Guy Harris when he speaks from 1YA on July 15, at 8.29 p.m. on "Science at Your Service: The Deluge." Scentical as some may have become about service rendered so loudly as that on July 1, it should at least be reassuring to remember how Noah (without benefit of armour-plate) rode out an even more extensive cataclysm some thousands of years ago.