MUSICAL EXTREMISTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 548, 23 December 1949, Page 10

MUSICAL EXTREMISTS

T a luncheon given a few weeks ago in honour of St. Cecilia, Patron. Saint of Music; Dr. V. E. Galway gave an address which was recorded and broadcast that evening. It is doubtful if this speech obtained the prominence and number of hearers that it merited. Its main theme was contemporary music, and what ought to be said about some of it by courageous people with adequate musical background. His appraisal of some of our modern music was candid and forthright: "I think that many of us, when we hear a revoltingly cacophonous monstrosity, have become scared to say so. ... if the history of music teaches dnything, never has a great composer been out of touch with everyohe but a small handful." Illustrating his point, he com-

mented on the unintelligible later music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, though all three have produced admirable earlier works, The description, by Schoenberg’s disciple Krenek, of the twelvetone technique of

composing, its illustration by Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, and Stravinsky’s insistence on the complete banishment of emotion from music were scathingly dealt with, and it must be admitted that'to most ears Dr. Galway’s criticisms seem justified. To wash out, as he puts it, a thousand years of harmony, melody, and form, to scrap the past completely, and indulge in this sort of musical Esperanto may well seem the work of an idiot. There ought to be, as he stressed, enough people reasonably well acquainted with the great masters who, if they find the atonalists and polytonalists distasteful, should have the courage to say so. Interesting comparisons can, of course, be made between this phase of ‘music and much of modern art. Lord Elton, as Dr. Galway noted, has observed that up to a point modern art, however -unseasonable, can be tolerated, but that the absurdities of modern sculpture force one to realise the necessity of becoming savagely critical. Is there anything to be said on the other side? Yes, of course there is, as always in any controversial matter. Schoenberg has written an orthodox Treatise on Harmony, though his own harmony is quite distinct; in a recent number of the Australian Canon he contributed a well-reasoned and sensitive article in praise of Gustay Mahler, whose music could hardly be more different from his own. George Antheil, for many years the enfant terrible of American music, has written, "I write strongly contrapuntal and developed music today because, perhaps, I am _ approaching forty-five ... but when I was less than half as old my objectives were different." One’s outlook is always affected by age and personal development, There is, in fact, so much to say on the other side (apart altogether from one’s personal

views) that a separate article is required to deal with it, and its implica-

tions.

H.J.

F.