HACKNEYED CLASSICS.
Sir,-Listening to Ngaio Marsh in her talk "Defending the Hackneyed Classic" it occurred to me that there is an essential difference between the hackneyed classic in music and that in literature. Whereas the former can lose its appeal utterly through repetition, the literary classic never will because even for the ordinary listerier or reader it has intellectual as well as emotional content and can thus stand up to the test of endless repetition. Music, on the other hand, being to most of us a purely emotional experience, cannot be repeated after a certain point with the same degree of response and appreciation on the part of the listener: our sensibilities become blunted and we find ourselves indifferent to the work in question. Somerset Maugham seys, "It would be no less tedious to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony every day than it would be to eat caviare." It is unfair, therefore, to dismiss as intellectual snobs all those people who avoid listening to hackneyed musical classics: they have merely had a surfeit, which is not surprising in these days of recoided music,
N. D.
LOEB
(Palmerston North).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 474, 23 July 1948, Page 5
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187HACKNEYED CLASSICS. New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 474, 23 July 1948, Page 5
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