Mozart to Bliss

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 496, 24 December 1948, Page 9

Mozart to Bliss

INE series of programmes which I follow with devotion is Professor V. E, Galway’s Masterpieces of Music from 4YA. These have been dealing lately with famous piano concertos and listeners have been taken on the long journey from Mozart to Arthur Bliss, tracing in the presentation of intermediate works the history and development of the concert6 form and also of the harmonic and technical resources of successive periods. I found the programme explaining the Bliss concerto very interesting, not the least intriguing part of it being Professor Galway’s brief passing reference to Schonberg and the twelve-note scale. Some time, said the speaker, he would explain this peculiar musical structure and its inner workings; he guaranteed that listeners would find it amusing if not convincing. However, what I should have liked him to explain was just how the harmony of such a modern work as the Bliss concerto has evolved from the harmony of, say, the Beethoven era. If Professor Galway would combine this with his resume of the Schonberg technique, many listeners who are puzzled over "modern" harmony might more readily differentiate between the sort of modernism (like Schonberg’s) .which flouts all existing conventions and_ strikes an entirely new path, and that other, saner modernism (like Bliss’s), which follows the path trodden by the masters, adding original ideas and expanding old ones. ‘