The Crackling of Dry Thorns

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 401, 28 February 1947, Page 13

The Crackling of Dry Thorns

HAND unknown at 3YA has made up and presented a special halfhour programme entitled "Ordeal by Music: A Primitive Custom in Modern Dress." . It consisted of a selection of modern musical pieces, played one after the other without much effort at arrangement, and furnished with a commentary. The selection opened with a truncated (continued on next page)

VIEWSREEL (Cont'd) (continued from previous page) slab of the first movement of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; went on through several obviously experimental or eccentric pieces, deviated for a moment to Duke Ellington and a crony being funny on some kind of bassoon, and wound up with Mossolov’s Steel Foun-dry-a child of the Five Year Plan which, be it said here and now, exhibited under a cloak of surface strangeness, all that laborious anxiety to depict the fruitfulness, virtue, and happiness of the existing state of affairs which accounts: for the stodgy unoriginality of most Stalinist art. It was quite obvious that the works in this programme were not selected on the basis of any interest in the study of modernist music, but simply because all, irrespective of their widely differing merits, happened to sound viglent, discordant, and odd; and because on this quality a facetious commentary could conveniently be hung. I don’t think, in point of fact, that the joke was particularly successful-the bad stuff was too depressing, and the interesting or vital stuff too clearly out of place-and the vague suggestion I detect behind the arrangement of "Ordeal," that all modern or experimental music is matter for rather left-footed humour, has lost none of its. power to exasperate as it has grown more familiar.