Harping Party

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 557, 24 February 1950, Page 10

Harping Party

HE topic for 2ZB's first Citizens’ Forum discussion for 1950 was a lush one, "Do Modern Songs and Modern Vaudeville Suggest a Moral Decay?" Round their home radios upbeaters and downbeaters gathered thick as jitterbugs 6n a rug; in the studio Chairman Macaskill! brooded over a -talented team consisting of 2YA’s official accompanist Frank Crowther, L. D. Austin, wellknown as music teacher and columnist, and Ray Harris, exponent of the musical new look. But they had left their

instruments at home, and, worse still, forgotten what the subject was. Mr. Crowther, pianoless, was reduced to harping on the Lily of Laguna, Mr. Austin did a lot of straight-from-the-shoul-der shooting at targets not for tonight (of Benjamin Britten-‘‘Hasn’t written a bar of real music yet"). Mr. Harris produced a quotation from sumeone that sorhe modern songs were better than ~ Straus§. waich Mr. Austin deried absolutely. The only relevant remark was contributed by the chairman, who said that if some modern songs were suggestive some Elizabethan lyrics were downright inviting. Now at this stage the only modern songs I could think of were "Riders in the Sky," "Buttons and Bows," and "Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple

Pan-Dowdy," none of which seemed to pose a moral question. I feel more | could have been done had the panel selected one modern song, say "Civilisation,’ got Mr. Crowther to play. it

so that we all knew what we were talking about, then settled down to decide whether "Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo" expresses a legitim: te impulse towards self-determ-ination of merely an anti-social and reprehensible bias against self-improve-

ment.

M.

B.