SOUNDS WITHOUT SENSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 553, 27 January 1950, Page 10

SOUNDS WITHOUT SENSE

HAVE always regarded those people who could read a musical score as being possessed of some superior kind of black magic. But I am beginning to wish that more of our scriptwriters could develop a little of the cult, because some of them, apparently, ate tone deaf, Writing a stage play and writing a novel call for two different techniques. With a novel the sense and rhythm can or should be conveyed by the eye

and the intelligence. . There is also, of course, an inward ear which listens as well as assimilates. " But with the stage play there is more than this. The playwright must _ set down his dialogue while actively listening in to what his characters are saying. If what they say doesn’t sound right, then he isn’t a play-

wright. if this ap- j plies to the stage scene where eye and ear are allied to intelligence to assimilate the plot and characterisation, how much more so is this listening technique necessary for the radio’ scriptwriterand how often it seers that it is absent. These remarks are provoked by one ot two anguished moments lately, when bothered announcérs" grappled with heavily-worded scripts carrying the minimum of sound value. Scriptwriters should by now realise that a sentence which looks all right, which conveys sense and meaning quite adequately to the average reader, can sound plain awful over the radio. Simplicity seems to be the absolute minimum of necessity, and simplicity seems to be the one trait which is by-passed or disregarded. A case in point was during one Woman’s Session recently, when the sentence, "A phenomenal facility for lyric writing," stumped the young lady who was compéring a session on the life of one of our musicians. I don’t wonder at it either. Try looking at "phenomenal facility for lyric writing." The sense comes to you at once. But try speaking it and you get as tangled up as any would-be King of Quiz when asked to mouth a tongue-twister. Then there was the poor announcer who, on New Year’s Day, told all male listeners that if they wished for sartorical splendour, they had only to go to Messrs. So and So to get the overcoat of their dreams. This wouldn’t be fair even under ordinary circumstances, but coming just after New Year’s Eve, it was quite sadistic.

Sycorax