Sir.-In declaiming against. our contemporary British composers, L. D. Austin has overlooked the fact that music, if it is not to fall into decay, must progress and strike out into new fields of tonal expression. I know what Mr. Austin thinks about modern music reflecting the unrest of the age, and the influence of external strife on the subconscious, (He made his opinions quite plain in a. recent broadcast.) But if music does not. reflect an age, then Bach. Handel, Beethoven and Mendelssohn have been deceiving us. Just as these composers wrote in a style best suited to their eras so do our composers write in an idiom best suited to this age. Benjamin Britten has set poems by Auden and other contemporary poets to music. If these poems were set in anything but a modern idiom they would
look more than slightly incongruous. Could anyone imagine T. S. Eliot’s "The Hollow Men" jogging along happily with music after the style of Mozart? We must move with the times. I am afraid that Mr. Austin, like so many music-lovers and teachers of this country, has stuck at Mendelssohn. Such a belligerent attitude towards anything faintly "new" is not at all beneficial to the musical .and cultural progress of New Zealand. The works of the modern compose: are dissonant, but should not be looked upon as "harsh" or "ugly." Let us treat our contemporary music as being more adventurous than ugly. And to say that composers like Vaughan Williams, Britten, Walton and Rubbra are "not acceptable as writers of real music" is pure nonsense. In fact, "it is almost incredible that any musician should utter such nonsense." What are they writing if they are not writing music? As for. "no intelligent music-lover sub. mitting to preposterous noise’-might I ask what does constitute an "intelligent music-lover?" Does he possess brains es well as ears? Perhaps some music-lovers do not take to contemporary music because they do not care to exercise their brains and imaginations as well as their ears.
J. M.
COCHRANE
(Auckland).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530925.2.12.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 741, 25 September 1953, Page 5
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341Untitled New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 741, 25 September 1953, Page 5
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