Descriptive Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 739, 11 September 1953, Page 10

Descriptive Music

| ISTENING again to the William Primrose recording of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy (from 1YC), where the hero-viola discoursed° so _ eloquently among the musical mountains and fiestas, one was left speculating once more upon the possibility of programme music. At present, of course: we’re not supposed to approve: music should be "absolute," and the descriptive piece belongs in the limbo of "impure" art, along with every-picture-tells-a-story, the historical novel, and grand opera. Historically, there is solid reason for the purist attitude on the subject, if only as a means of clearing up the/thorough confusion which arose in the 19th Century, when music and painting told stories, and poetry and prose (in retaliation) painted pictures, One of the basic principles of the arts in the 20th Century has been, on the contrary, that everyone should stick strictly to his own job -no literary pictures, no sym-phonies-with-a-story, no so-called "word pictures"; though there were always the notable exceptions — Richard Strauss, for example. By now we should have them all sorted out into their proper compartments: can’t we perhaps allow ourselves once more to mix them a

little?

M. K.

J.