MUSICAL EXTREMISTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 552, 20 January 1950, Page 5

MUSICAL EXTREMISTS

Sir,-In his two articles on the subject of "extreme" composers, your contributor, "H.J.F.," leaves us just where we were before, and has completely failed to answer the case put by Dr. Gal-way-in fact, all he does is to contradict the latter’s explicit statement. Dr. Galway said: "If history teaches us anything, it is that no great composer was unintelligible to his contemporaries." "H.J.F.," however, says: " .... Beethoven, Wagner and others were incomprehensible to many in their day." How does "H.J.F." know this? Will he kindly tell us on what authority he bases his dogmatic statement? Also, who are the composers included so vaguely in "and others"? The only people to whom Beethoven and Wagner may have sounded incomprehensible in their day were probably the same class of people who find them incomprehensible at the present time-the musically illiterate, who in every age are always in the vast majority. : Every truly great composer may have enlarged music’s vocabulary, but in so doing he. still employed the orthodox musical alphabet and orthography, and the accepted system of musical grammar. The strange and beautiful harmonic threads woven by Wagner, Grieg and Tchaikovski, made hitherto unimagined sound patterns, but never offended the most sensitive tastes. In other words, however much the standard innovators of the past advanced harmonically, they adhered nevertheless to the basic laws, written and unwritten, of music’s language. Dr. Galway had in mind only those modern would-be composers who avow-

edly and of set purpose put down on paper combinations of symbols~ which, translated into sound, outrage and destroy every vestige of melodic and harmonic propriety. "H.J.F." says also: "The more we may dislike certain music, the more we must insist on giving it a hearing." Again I ask, why? Are we not to be allowed to trust the evidence of our own senses? Let us suppose that a municipal authority deposits at the gate of "H.J.F.’s" residence a load of manure, and, when he loudly protests, informs him that he has got to smell it, whether he likes it or not, because that is to be the smell of the future. What would be "H.J.F.’s" reaction to such procedure? I can answer for him-he would feel about it just as Dr. Galway feels when the ‘noises of Shostakovich and’ Co. are thrust upon his ears-and not only Dr. Galway (whom the gods preserve for his forthrightness and courage), but the thousands of sane listeners who share his views, including

L. D.

AUSTIN

(Wellington).