MOUNTAIN MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 455, 12 March 1948, Page 10

MOUNTAIN MUSIC

Eee | Written for "The Listener" |

by

G. A.

McC.

SIC is as potent as disease; it is as much a disease as opium, as cocaine, and like them torments the mind with fragmentary fancies. Certain it is that the true musician does not so much practise an occupation as suffer a ferment and an intoxication; his work is an enthusiasm rather than mere employment. Nevertheless, even this almost religious fervour succumbs to the law which makes intense concentration produce weariness and tedium, so that it. becomes necessary at times to relax the mind with unfamiliar things. Thus it was that I put aside scores, books, and musical instruments in favour ‘of an alpine pack, a few old but beloved garments, and departed with a small party into the solitude of the Spenser Mountains, far from towns and men; my companions knew little of music and frankly cared less. Music was not discussed, yet I was never unaware of it. As the eyes play tricks when sudden darkness follows light, so. the mind, bereft of normal toil, recalls images of everyday things. Go where I would, to lakes, rivers, bush, mountains, in weather fine.or foul, mindmusic lingered tauntingly. I began to observe the types of music whose themes recurred so constantly when stimulated by New Zealand scenic beauties. By the end of the trip it was evident that recalled music had three common features; it was composed by intensely personal stylists, it was from the Romantic and Modern periods and was usually lyrical and rhapsodic. More recall of Delius than of any other composer was obvious; indeed his Violin Concerto became a silent theme song, background music, sweeping along in the mind, however slow the body, enhancing the loveliness of lake and river, of forest and mountain. Superb alpine lakes and beechwoods inevitably associated themselves with the finale of Koanga, that sinuous upsweep of the

’cellos, the languorous quietude of the chorus, fragments from Appalachia, and the songs. Vidlence and Peace The violence and pathos of Rachmaninoff’s second concerto symbolised the turbulence of flooded South Island rivers, but after the day’s march, the peaceful camp with its writhing blueness of smoke brought a warm flood of themes from the D Minor Trio of Arensky. Specific climatic conditions brought special reactions. Boxing Day in the cirque of the Travers approached the Deluge; rain drove strongly as we climbed laboriously in the swelling roar of a water course: with the storm, austere grandeur increased until a vast rainfilled wind shrieked over scree and crags, and the appalling roar of it came down to us as we sheltered insignificantly and coldly beside a snow drift; a grasshopper sheltered in a cranny, we in a crevice, puny, unimportant. Never once could I clear my mind of the unaccompanied Chaconne of Bach; its austerity, its grandeur matched perfectly the mood of awe and impotence. The dawn of the following day, faultlessly clear, evoked the only Brahms, a mournful miscellany from the Clarinet Quintet and the Violin Sonatas, soon replaced by cold glimmerings of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. Always, the weird and bizarre in nature evoked Bloch, his Quintet for piano and strings, the Concerto Grosso. Thus was the gloomy rift of East Sabine Valley, the haunting strangeness of Mt. Iris filled with the sound of lost souls. Oddly enough, the latter was more suited to be a backdrop to the Ring, for it would not have surprised us to have beheld Brunhilde whooping down from vaporous mist through the grotesque (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) embattlements of purpling rock.. New moods came with the Venetian colour of Lake Tennyson, in the strange yearning Clarinet Rhapsody of Debussy, the ebullient vivacity of Enesco’s First Rumanian Rhapsody. Analogy from Poetry What lies at the back of such mental selectivity? Firstly, I believe that the poesy of Delius epitomises Nature; a predilection for Delius you say! Perhaps, but why no Tchaikovski, no Beethoven, no adored Mozart? Why did Mt. Iris not conjure up Moussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain which. delighted me greatly some years ago? An analogy might be found in poetry; does natural loveliness reflect Dryden, Pope or Cowper? No, it is with Keats, Shelley and Coleridge that the full tide of Romantic passion began, the Lake Poets, and so the secret is out; Delius is an expression of physical loveliness, a translation into music of visible beauty. The beauty which Delius had in mind while com-

posing could hardly be reproduced in the hearer in exactitude, but it can produce a condition of emotional satisfac-| tion of the same kind as is produced by contemplation of superb scenery. Here I believe is the secret of enjoying this subtle and rather neglected composer; futile to analyse and dissect, heavenly to absorb. | Here too is a paradox; that on a holiday of three weeks of strenuous toiling, of Spartan fare, and icy baths, the music of the mind was the music of the sybarite, luxurious, richly emotional, as colourful and hauntingly beautiful as the land through which we passed, but inevitably omnipresent as the grave. Happy the man who works with his hands, mechanically, routinely. No problem to him to leave his tools with an untroubled mind; but the musician, that sober alcoholic, that~- untainted drug addict, go where he will his passion goes with him lurking in the mind, satisfying the senses, soothing his loneliness.