BIOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 734, 7 August 1953, Page 14

BIOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL

(CHILDREN who like travel stories or music or both will be interested in two sets of programmes at present going the rounds of the Commercial stations. The travel stories consist of five BBC talks on subjects ranging from the Masai herdsmen of Africa to octopus hunting in the Gilbert Islands. The music series consists of 13 dramatised storie§ about various composers, produced by the NZBS. Some children will have heard the features before in the Broadcasts to Schools. Many more. will want to hear them. The BBC series starts off with Everyday Life in Aden, a talk about the British port which commands the southern entrance of the Red Sea. Situated in the tilted crater of an extinct volcano, Aden is familiar to many travellers as a port of call and as- one of the hottest places on earth. The Sea _Dyaks of Sarawak deals with one of the many peoples who inhabit the British Crown colony in _ north-east Borneo. It. is these people who have given Borneo its association with headhunting, The tall race of warriors and herdsmen who for centuries have pastured cattle on the plateaux of Kenya and Tanganyika are the subject of the third talk, With the Masai in East Africa, The final two talks centre round the Pacific Islands. One, on octopus hunting in the Gilberts, is by Arthur Grimble, whose Tales from the Pacific

Islands was mentioned in last week's Listener. The other deals Jargely with the great platforms and monoliths on Easter Island, sculptures which have never yet been satisfactorily explained. In the musical series there are two programmes each about Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, and single ones about Purcell, J. S. Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and Grieg. Written by Lesley Coleman, the programmes help the listener to visualise these great composers as living human beings. Handel, we find, had trouble learning English, and was very inclined to give up in disgust, with the remark that it was better to go back to music, because in music there was no English and no German. Mozart spent perhaps as much time worrying about his rent as he did on the music that won him fame. And Beethoven is reputed to have invited some guests to dinner, but having forgotten the invitation was found at din-ner-time playing the piano in his shirttails. The five BBC programmes are at present being broadcast from 2ZB at 5.30 p.m. on Sundays, They are scheduled to begin from 3ZB on September 9, from 4ZB on December 27, and from 1ZB and 2ZA in March next year. The NZBS series, They Wrote the Music, is playing from 4ZB at 5.30 p.m. on Sundays. It begins from 2ZA on October 11, 1ZB on November 1, 2ZB on December 6, and 3ZB on December 31.