The Solitary Listener

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 540, 28 October 1949, Page 10

The Solitary Listener

SOMETIMES think of the very profound change which the radio has made in our habits of listening. Along with the gramophone it has enabled us to listen in solitary state to music which may require hundreds of people to perform. It is possible for us to sit in the comfort of an armchair and have the Ninth Symphony played for us, or to hear Tristan, things which we could normally either not do at all, or do in

the company of a number of _likeminded listeners assembled at considerable trouble and expense. In a concert hall the atmosphere of excitement is a very. potent part of the whole apparatus of listening: the presence of other people concentrating their attention on the music lifts our own ability

to concentrate in no small way. At home we are, I sometimes feel, more easily bored, our attention more easily flags without the sight of orchestra, soloist or singers. Some works I have followed wholeheartedly in the: hall I find not so interesting on the air. Some, of course, are as potent there as ever; I think that en the air the terse, the concentrated work makes its effects.more surely than does the loose and the sprawling, which in the concert hall may be able to hold the attention a little better> It is for this reason that I find Elgar, with the exception of such works as the Enigma Variations and the Introduction and Allegro \for Strings, less interesting on the air. I find my armchair listening more difficult with him than -with Brahms, for instance, whose tense thought allows no drooping of attention. The way to keep the attention riveted, of course, is to use a score, which I do whenever I can. The Longmans Edition, with its large number of miniature scores printed in one volume, I find a great boon, especially’: in chamber music. ; One of the effects of this solitary listening is that music which depends upon an admiration of agility in performance inevitably loses its appeal. A coloratura soprano on the operatic stage, with all the subtle build-up of operatic performance and the mass excitement of an audience, gets tremendous applause. The same aria heard on the air without all these trimmings may be seen as the barren scaffolding it really is. In the same way piano bravura, like Liszt’s La Campanella, seems more worthless when broadcast. Again, there is in a concert-hall audidence not a little of the feeling of musical snobbery. "What jolly intelligent people we are to be listening to all this!" is a feeling which has helped me through the works of ------ but I'd better not give myself away too much. In the home there is no such incentive; there is no one to pretend to and we don’t | give ourselves away by saying exactly

what we think, which may have disastrous results if done in public. In the home no one knows or cares whether we turn The Rite of Spring off or listen to it, and the music is inevitably judged without snobbery. The one thing that listeners are most likely to forget, however, is that the radio is only a machine, with a machine’s imperfections and that what it reproduces is not the real thing. I have a friend, a very keen listener, who complained to me of the horn and oboe

tone ,in the National Orchestra when he heard them in the flesh and said that all the strings "were not mellow enough." One minute spent listening to his radio told why; he had his reception so. arranged that all his top frequencies were cut off, his strings sounded like a quartet of saxophones, and his horn

like a euphonium. He was then judging an actual performance with a sense of values completely distorted by bad listening. In the hands of the solitary listener himself lies the power to make of his reception what he will,. but he must not impose false values on reality.

D.

M.