LOCAL TALENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 444, 26 December 1947, Page 5

LOCAL TALENT

Sir,-I read your article "Making our own recordings" with great interest. I have no quarrel with our NZBS. One can usually find something somewhere on the air to suit one’s fancy. But I have also realised that our programmes are cramped and restricted for mechanical reasons. I like music hot and new. I was crammed with the older classics as a child and now their dreamy pastoral thythms and harmonies revolt my ear from sheer familiarity. For which I apologise to nobody. But then again I am unspeakably fed up with Pedro the fisherman’s little whistle, which rends my heart almost every morning from a station which should know better, I am so tired of American song hits. Here in New Zealand there are song writers who. cannot get a song published even if it has merit, because the local market is flooded with Hollywood hits. This is our country. We do the work in it. But the NZBS is trying to force a culture on us that is not ours. Imported songs. Imported records. The local: market cannot sell enough copies to make any local song repay publication costs. Surely talent shouid be our most cherished and protected industry? But he who vrites a song must be prepared to be sneered at. If a composer cannot hear his songs sung, he canhot assess their merits, or improve his style, or approximate to popular taste. Yet musical talent has to confine itself, in New Zealand, to teaching the next generation to hammer out the same old classics.

ithe NZBS, with its ample funds, could provide a wide opening for local talent. It could stimulate and advise and "encourage. If I were to beg for half an hour a week from 2YA of New Zealand made records, featuring New Zealand songs sung by New Zealanders, would I be crying for the moon? I should like to gnention that I enjoy NZBS stories and plays and um delighted to find that I can hear more and more of these. New Zealand wit is a subtle thing, whicli we cannot import. It actually grows here like the pohutukawa, and the kauri and the rimu. Strangely it likes no other soil. So, while not complaining about the programmes I hear, may I beg for New Zealand records. Incidentally, they don’t cost dollars. I know we have tenors, sopranos, contraltos, and basses here whose voices have our own pleasant insular drawl, which is as welcome as clematis in spring, besides all those other lovely qualities which make a singer easy to listen to. Now that we have the machinery, can we not hear them frequently?

STILL HOPING

(Feilding).

(Formerly technical difficulties have limited the recording of local artists. The new plant will help to overcome this. Last year, however, the NZBS broadcast 3,252 performances by local artists or societies and some of these featured New Zealand compositions. The Service is always willing to consider compositions submitted by local composers.-Ed. ) —