"The Orchestra's Run on Enthusiasm"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 420, 11 July 1947, Page 6

"The Orchestra's Run on Enthusiasm"

HE‘one question Boyd Neel dreads when reporters come at him is "And how was the orchestra founded?" He has tired of telling that story, because he happens to be a very modest man. He also wishes people would stop calling him "Dr." Boyd Neel. He practised medicine once, but doesn't now, and prefers to be "Mr." Neel, lest anyone think he poses as a doctor of music-which he is not. It would be hard to imagine anything further from what he is. Although it amounted to asking him the very question that makes him throw his hands up, we did, however, try and discover from himself which was cause -and which was effect in this matter of the modern string orchestra-which came first, the demand or the Boyd

Neel? ‘(But we might have known better. It is one of those historical ‘queries that will never be quite answered.) It is difficult now, when we hear so much music for strings. both modern

and classical, to imagine how the musical scene was before 1933. But the fact is that there were only four or five pieces for the medium that were played then-Tchaikovski’s Serenade, Mozart's Nachtmusik, Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, Arensky’s Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovski, and Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The reason why so little music for strings alone was being played, Mr. Neel told us, was partly that it was uneconomic for orchestras with full wood-

wind and brass to lay aside these players, but also and perhaps chiefly that the greater quantity of string music required an utterly different approach. It must be tackled as if it were chamber music (which it is). "An orchestra that is going to do it well must be able to play it almost without a conductor. My orchestra can now. I often leave and go into the hail to hear how it sounds." England’s "Renascence" Having heard that Mr. Neel, while he was in Australia, had pricked the bubble of the "renmascence of music" in wartime England, we put a question about this. It is "absolute rubbish," he says, to say that England went all music-loving overnight. Audiences there are back to normal now, and worse. The forces swelled wartime audiences and created a false boom-with helpyfrom what Mr. Neel has called "hysteria." Result: concert promoters’ sprang up to take advantage of it, and many are still in the field. "Now," Mr. Neel says. "There are too many concerts and not enough audience." It also had a bad effect on the taste shown in programmes. Infinite repetitions of "the Tchaikovski Concerto," Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, etc., were sure sellers, cheapened such works, and made business bad all round. "People don’t go music-minded overnight," Mr. Neel says. "Why should they?" "And so the Arts Council no longer rides on the wave, as CEMA did?" "Far from it. It’s reducing its grants all round. I get £250 to help me run my orchestra. That wouldn’t pay a secretary’s salary. If it hadn’t been for friends of the orchestra, we’d have collapsed altogether on two or three occasions. When I landed in Sydney and

heard about the £60,000 subsidy for the orchestra there I nearly fainted." The Boyd Neel. Orchestra has only two of its original (1933) members still with it. Two members. lost their lives in the war. And the group has "only just got going. again now." "Maurice Clare played with us twelve years ago. And he came to Paris with us not long ago. In fact, he really started with us. So there’s a little bit of news for you." "And what about the social side? How do you take 18 musicians round the world with you and stop them fighting?" Boyd Neel laughed cheerfully. "I don’t. That’s the answer to that one. No. Everyone’s keen on the job, and they feel that’s the main thing. The orchestra’s run on enthusiasm." We asked him to amplify what he had said on the air about jargon. When he objected to a musician talking about "An allegro vivace in B flat major," did he mean that composers like Britten and Walton (who both use Italian directions on their scores) should try and find English words to convey what they want? "No, no. I mean in talking to ordinary people. I quite agree that the Italian term may convey a precise meaning to musicians that can’t be got as well any other way. But I think a great deal of harm has been done by musicians talking to laymen and using their own technical terms. As far I know, music is the only profession where that’s done. Engineers don't do it. "It scares ordinary people off good music. They think: ‘Highbrow!’ And I don’t blame them. I suppose it all started with people like Pachmann and Paderewski-poseurs, the long hair and flowing tie type, pretending that musicians are a people apart. It would be easier if people would only realise that the musician is a working man, a chap who does a job of work."