What Our Commentators Say

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 478, 20 August 1948, Page 14

What Our Commentators Say

Music in the Morning S a penance for my sin in picking the profession I did I am sometimes at home in the mornings during the week. The printed programmes are frequently not very precise about exactly what music is being played in the mornings, but a fairly wide experience of them has led me to be a regular‘ listener to the 9.4 am. 3YA session. There one may always hear some a +) -_ tin i -_- ao

really interesting music, though no system seems to operate in the arrangement of the programmes, which are quite varied &s to composer, performer, and period. Nor are unusual works offered; old friends may be met every morning. If I am away all week, and home on Saturday, however, I look in vain. for this half-hour. Instead of it I find a session called Dusting the Shelves, a resurrection of discs which have died, usually of sheer musical debility. It seems as though 3YA’s programme organiser, who has a high opinion of the musical taste of listeners during the week, thinks it slumps badly on Saturday. Wasted Opportunity FOUND the two recent Home Science talks from 2YA What Is Colour? somewhat colourless. I ‘should have welcomed something a little more philosophical, something @ little more scientific, even something a little -:nore entertaining. Theré was no attempt to answer the question pused in the title and the two talks merely concerned themselves with relating a few broad facts about the history of various colours. (Brown was the earth-colour, sacred to Ceres, hence worn by peasants and subsequently landgirls. Green had camouflage value in forests, hence was worn by outlaws, e.g., Robin Hood, and so considered unlucky and even to-day not very popular.) I felt very strongly that it needs no grad. from the Home Science faculty to tell us this. And I mourned the opportunities lost for learning what colour is. I should even have been grateful to learn where the colours in my paint box come from, quite apart from the theory about the eye of the beholder. Then something quite practical about spectrums ‘and homedecorating would not have come amiss. And the whole, for entertainment’s sake could, have been’ garnished with informed comment on The Red Menace, The Wearing of the Green, Blue-stock-ings, Brown Studies, and Mood Indigo. Dido and Aeneas HETHER seeing an opera actually performed (Carmen, I need hardly specify) has quickened my interest in | opera, or whether Dido and Aeneas is

especially delightful, I certainly enjoyed my hour of opera from 2YA last Sunday, Possibly the comparatively simple and well-known plot makes Dido and Aeneas particularly suitable for broadcasting, since it reduces commentary to a minimum; and then again there is a lot to be said for an English opera which has not had to pass through the paws of translators. In spite of its locale Dido and Aeneas has little of the Mediterranean flamboyance, the typically Southern vehemence, of Bizet’s Carmen. It seems wood wind to Carmen’s brass. Its passion is sensed more remotely, and the audience listens as Wordsworth listened to his Highland reaper. I was struck throughout by the objective quality of Purcell’s music, the discipline that makes the composer sacrifice dramatic verisimilitude to the tyranny of tunefulness. A Stravinsky or a Shostakovich could have let loose fearsome discords to herald the powers of darkness, Purcell’s witches express themselves in cascades of sweet sounds not unbefitting his. shepherdesses, and the Demon Ballet is conjured up to music which a church organist would not scorn to play as a voluntary. Music at the Fair OR _ musical entertainment which comes under the amorphous category "light," and yet has good intrinsic value as music, the BBC-produced features take some beating. Britain in Music, an example of this type of programme, consists of traditional airs played and sung by the BBC Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, with a narrative of very slight thematic import connecting the various items. With a good orchestra and chorus, and one or two tuneful solo voices, a well-produced feature has been made out of what would otherwise be disconnected songs. I’m not sure that simple traditional airs need all this "atmosphere"; at least as far as the musician is concerned, they can stand alone as concert items without loss of beauty or effect; but the reason for. tying them together with a descriptive" narrative evidently was to present a connected picture of "Britain in Music" (in this case} a country fair and its surroundings). This was a picture of a Britain which, musically speaking, must largely be a thing of the past-moré’s the pity. There may be out-of-the-way hamlets where gaffers chant "Greensleeves" over their pints of alé, but such anachronisms must be rare. I imagine the average citizen of Britain, like the average New Zealander, is more familiar with the latest and crudest hit from Tin Pan Alley than with any of the lovely traditional airs which are the heritage of both countries, but which remain alive to-day mainly owing to the efforts of collectors like Terry Sharpe, the Kennedy-Frasers, and Percy Grainger. Inwardness ; STATION 3YA broadcast a. recording of a most stimulating talk by Thomas Mann on Sunday of last week, Mann, who would be the despair of the Hollywood moguls if they had ever (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) heard of him, evidently believed he was speaking to an adult audience. His flow of ideas kept the mind at full stretch, a most satisfying experience, when, breath regained, one views the new horizons opened to the sight. He was talking about Germany and the Germans, and he was neither comforting nor optimistic. The chief characteristic of the Germans, he said, is romantic inwardness; and without hearing that intense voice it is impossible to guess at the force he gave the first syllable of inwardness, or at the harsh, drawling menace of the second. He pointed to Goethe’s Faust as the romantic archetype, the personification of unworldly spiritual provincialism in a nightcap, spooky, demoniac, abstract, mystical, the spiritual divorced from the socio-political element. To "Thomas Mann, romanticism bears in its heart the germ of morbidity. The romantic individual is always ready to surrender to the seduction of death, and Germany, the* romantic nation,’ surrendered hysterically to Hitler. There are not two Germanies; wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray through ruin. "Tt is all in me," he said, humbly and tragically. How aptly ironic it was that Thomas Mann should talk to New Zealanders about the romantic grror on a Sunday afternoon, of all days the most New Zealand, cut from the whole cloth of puritanical materialism. Decline of the West HE western in radio, as in films, is "still with us. The Lone Ranger has disappeared, leaving only an echo and a cloud of dust; but good old Hopalong Cassidy still chases the baddies on Satuyday nights from 4YO, early enough or the children to hear him, and late enough for grown-ups who enjoy this sort of thing to listen also. How many years ago was it that I first discovered Hopalong between the pages of one of those red-backed novels we used to buy so cheaply? At that time he seemed a most glamorous figure, and his associates the most romantic bunch. On the screen,

too, the horse opera always has an added attraction because of the inclusion of shots of genuine scenery and animals, and because the inevitable chase can never stale when it is followed by the movie camera. But on the radio, where one can’t see the action or the landscape or the livestock, all that is left is a frankly boring story, and stock characters painted in tones as contrasted as soot and snow, played by actors whose accents are wearisomely familiar. This, of course, is speaking from the grown-up viewpoint. For youngsters there is still the excitement of discovering the vast appeal of the "westerns" as it strikes a young imagination for the

first time. As one for whom that golden ege has vanished, I must say I envy them. Piano Tone ALK about scientific criticism of the arts leaves me cold. It is all very well to be precise about a black: or white scientific fact. Everybody in the game knows perfectly well that such and such a star (say Gallahadion, because it has a nice name) will be in such and such a place at such and such a time, but literature or art or music have more shades than black and white, and some of the greys are as fleeting as fingerlings in a pebble-bottomed stream, On the other hand, this is no excuse for woolly criticism, and it is woolly I may get if I try to describe the distinctive tones of the various concert pianists who have broadcast in New Zealand since the war. Kraus is easy: she had vitality, she marched, she danced. Solomon was graver, technically perfect, singing, but to me, impersonal. "Here it is," he said, holding it up and regarding it coolly. "Eh sirs, I contemplate it with the appropriate emotions." Who else? Barere: liked to shine technically, had everything but great’ simplicity. Horsley: strong, amazingly consistent, but not quite there yet. Farrell: uneven, extremely rewarding on the "difficult moderns,’ engagingly human. Lympany: seems to play with a grin; the word facile would be unjust; elusive, fairer but not helpfully descriptive. Now who knows what these descriptions mean, if anything? » Does the tonal quality come from the artist, the piano, my slightly battered radio, or my completely untrained and punch-drunk ear? Never mind, it’s a pleasant game, _ Applied Psychiatry CTING page to the Screen’s King Wenceslas, Radio has sampled the psychopathic. At 9.30 (my favourite listening time) last Sunday morning listeners were treated to a play called "Dreams," a pedigree Third Programme product written by Nesta Paine, the author responsible for the excellent feature programme on atomic power. It concerns the problem of a famous brain surgeon whose repressed anxiety concerning the after-effects of brain operations on his patients is transferred to conscious worry about ‘the failing of his own eyesight. The psychoanalist painstakingly sifts the surgeon’s dreams for clues to the hidden conflict, and sure enough unearths a particularly nasty Inferiority Complex lurking in the mud at the bottom of his Subconscious, And they all live happily ever after. Admittedly‘ my knowledge of ‘the ways of psychiatry is sketchy (I don’t know nearly as much about it as Gregory Peck or Dorothy Macguire or John Mills), but I was impressed by the logical rightness of the whole procedure, and by the psychiatrist’s stressing of the fact that his function is purely clinical, that he cannot resolve the patient’s conflict for him except in so far as he can point the way to selfknowledge. The play seemed to me competent rather than merely slick, and had the merit of confining itself to the well-trodden (and proven) paths of psychiatric practice rather than bogging its listeners down in dubious psychopathic quagmires,