THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 437, 7 November 1947, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

Auckland C.T. Choir HE Auckland Commercial Travellers. and Warehousemen’s Association is well known for its good works in patriotic and philanthropic causes, and, as with the association, the association’s choir, which pays periodical visits to hospitals, disabled servicemen’s homes and similar institutions. Such work does not, of course, bring the choir to the public eye-or ear, but John Citizen has an opportunity of seeing the choir at the Anzac Day Dawn ceremony, at which it has always led the singing, and of hearing it when it ‘Sroadcasts from time to time. Anzac Day is still a long way off, but’ the choir will be heard from 1YA at 81 p.m. this Saturday, November 8. It will be under the baton of Will Henderson, who has been with the choir since it was formed in 1933 first as a chorister and for the last eight years as its conductor. The only other foundation member still with the choir is Sid Poffley, but there are others with quite long associations, these including the pianist, R. Caulton, who has been accompanist to the choir for the past nine years. Full of Care? A BRITISH journalist, H. R. G. Jefferson, who has come to New Zealand to live, thinks that most of us are nice* people, but he is vastly disturbed -at how little fun (according to him) we get out of life. His observations over the last few weeks have convinced him that even our children are gtim and intent, with faces lined and careworn, even when they are supposed to be enjoying themselves. Only a few children laugh in public, he finds-till the massed, chilly stares of seriousminded adults put a stop to ‘that sort of nonsense. He may be right; perhaps our distance from the world’s centres gives us that insulated look, and perhaps we do appear (to newcomers) a nation which takes its pleasures seriously. Listeners who tune in to 2YA at 7.15 p.m. on Monday, November 10, may accept his Invitation to New Zealanders to Laugh It Off, which will be extended to them in a talk in which he will chastise us for our alleged melancholy. One From Five > HE 1000th anniversary of the founding of the Russian nation was celebrated in 1862 by Balakirev’s tone poem Russia, a work which makes use of three national themes, each symbolising a period in the development of his country. This composition, together with his symphonic poem Thamar and_ the oriental fantasy Islamey, will be heard from 1YX at 8.24 p.m. on Monday, November 10. Balakirev was the leading spirit of a group of Russian composers known as "The Five". or "The Cabinet," who in the latter part of the 19th Century fostered the growth of a national music, the others being Cui, Moussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. -Balakirev collected and edited native folk songs, started the Free School of Music, and in his position as director of the Imperial Music Society, investigated a wide range of music (especially the works of the German masters),

-. bringing before the Russian public & vast amount of composition that was of incalculable educational value. Sound the Pibroch LL those Scottish listeners who have attempted at some time or other to draw music from a_ chanter should listen to the programme The Making of a Piper, which will be broadcast from 2YA at 9.30 p.m. on Friday, November 14. There is an old Highland saying that seven years of his own

learning and seven generations of piping blood go to the making of a piper, This suggested to Robert Kemp, BBC producer in Scotland, that there were the makings of a good story in the career of Pipe-Major William Ross, Head of the Army School of Piping in Edinburgh Castle-and a man who has generation after generation of piping hot blood in his veins, having sprung from people "with music in them" both on his mother’s and his father’s side. In addition to telling how Ross became the best-known piper of his day, this story explains much of the mystery of the pipes and their music, so that whether you already love pipe music, or whether you just wonder what makes other people like it, you should gstill enjoy listening to The Making of a Piper. (A photograph of Pipe-Major Ross appears on Page 21.) Men of Steel STORY of a band of Cumberland countrymen-leadminers, farmers, shepherds-who aided Britain’s war effort by turning themselves into highly efficient steel-workers has been dramatized by the BBC. J. Eric Steel (appropriate name), the man who had the idea and put it into action, tells how it all came about. He found a derelict mill, turned it into a foundry with the aid of his inexperienced helpers, and got it working in the face of every kind of difficulty (except trouble among his workers) till his band of enthusiasts was turning out 22,000 cases for the three-inch mortar bomb ip a week. The story, called Swords and Ploughshares, will be heard from Station 3YA on Tuesday, November 11, at 8.12 p.m, : Hope and Hindemith JN a recent number of the BBC Listener Humphrey Searle said that "in Germany Hindemith is now looked upon as the one person who is likely to be able to rescue German musicians from the cultural morass into which Hitler and the war led them." Although he "stands apart from the two main tendencies in present-day music — the twelve-note writing of Schonberg on the one hand and the diatonic methods of

Stravinsky on the other---Hindemith’s qualities of restraint, logic and clarity seem to be having a salutary effect on many of the younger composers. His symphony Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter) will be heard from 4YO at 9.28 p.m. on Tuesday, November 11, in a recording by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the composer. This symphony, heard first in 1934, is actually part of an opera on the same theme which was not produced till 1938. It is important as revealing a mellowing and humanising of Hindemith’s outlook in comparison with his earlier disregard for the human element in his music, and although it still contains some mechanical and lumpy orchestration, technically it shows well his present tendency to attempt to reconcile linear counterpoint with tonal harmony. Clarinet Sonata Series HE greatest contemporary clarinet player is popularly reputed to be Benny Goodman, the dance band leader, but the history of the clarinet as an orchestral instrument goes back to the 18th Century. Mozart wrote in a letter in 1778, "Oh, if only we had clarinets; you can’t guess the lordly effect of a symphony with flutes, oboes and clarinets!" In fact it was due, Percy Scholes says, to Mozart’s love of the clarinet that we owe the first really artistic development of the instrument, which today can boast of a repertory that no other wind instrument can equal. In the sonata form alone works for it have been composed by Brahms (two), SaintSaens, Honegger and Bax, to name only four of the more famous composers for® the instrument. In many cases the com-\ poser has been incited to activity by ? contact with some great clarinet virtuoso, as Brahms was, for instance, by Richard Muhlfeld. Station 2YA is to broadcast from the studios at weekly intervals a series of six clarinet sonatas featuring J. A. McCaw (principal clarinettist of the National Orchestra) and Dorothy Davies (piano). The first programme, Brahms Clarinet Sonata No. 2 in E Flat Major, will be heard at 8.30 p.m. on Thursday, November 13.