Listening Before and After

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 422, 25 July 1947, Page 8

Listening Before and After

RECENTLY had a stimulating argument with an average listener who knows little about good music but is wanting to learn more. He voiced a novel point of view, with which I was at first in violent disagreement. He had enjoyed the first concerts of the NZBS National Orchestra, but hadn’t known enough about the works performed to appreciate them: He was surprised and a little annoyed to find that on its next visit the Orchestra intended to present totally new programmes of works, none of which he knows any more than he did the previous ones. Why, he asked me, can’t they repeat some of the works played at previous concerts, so that ordinary people can get to know them? (Ordinary people, he pointed out, must comprise the majority of the audience). This point of view didn’t appeal to me at all, but I saw afterwards that there might be something in it-at any rate, from that listener’s viewpoint. I can also see a way by which this type of listener can be satisfied in his newly-acquired interest in orchestral music. Obviously our National Orchestra can’t be expected to play the same programme again and .again until even the ordinary listener knows the works backwards; but it might be a good idea for each local radio station to collaborate with the Orchestra by playing the same works on the air once or twice during the weeks subsequent to the concerts. The BBC Third Programme thinks nothing of repeating’a new and unfamiliar work on successive nights so that listeners may have a fair chance to get to know it. Similarly, our local stations might help the untutored listener to broaden the scope of his appreciation by deliberately repeating works already heard in the Orchestra’s concerts, as well as by playing, prior to the concert, some of the works to be included in the programme. This ¢ould probably best be

done in’ a special broadcast, or series of programmes, so that listeners would be able to tune in at set times in order to prepare themselves for public listening. It would be an added help if some competent musician would at the same time tell non-musical listeners gq little about the structure of each work, and’ indicate what to listen for. That there exists a public ready for such collaboration between radio and orchestra is suggested by the attitude of my acquaintance; there may well be other prospec. tive concert-goers who feel, as he does, that they would gain a lot by knowing beforehand just what they were going ~ to hear. The gain to the Orchestra, that of having a larger section of the audi. ence educated in listening, would be obvious.