The Hungry Gramophil

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 546, 9 December 1949, Page 11

The Hungry Gramophil

RAMOPHILS-who may be arbitrarily defined as connoisseurs of the best recorded music-are a depressed class in the community. They suffer the scorn of the performer who sees them as the victims of unnatural appetites, preferring canned music to the concert hall, the artificial to the real. The dealer, too, looks askance at their small numbers and doles out a grudging list of new re-cordings-a mere trickle of importation from the. flowing founts overseas-and blandly places the blame on the broad shoulders of Mr. Nash. Even over what records the gramophil has acquired loom the spectres of the microgroove and the wire recorder. His case is pitiful. The radio, alas, which might rescue him from isolation, treats him instead with maddening indifference. He looks up The Listener and is not fed. Certainly he finds scattered there such an array of recordings as he can néver hope to own himself. But he comes to believe that some malignant god presides over the choice of records, inflicting upon him aged or vilely recorded discs, under the thin excuse of the exigencies of programme arrangement. At present the gramophil’s is a lone voice piping in the wilderness, but it would pay stations to heed it and examine in time the standard of their classical recordings. Some of them ought never to have been acquired: others are overdue for the scrap- |

heap.

K.J.

S.