Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 741, 25 September 1953, Page 24

Open Microphone

» NEWS OF BROADCASTERS,

™ ON AND OFF THE RECORD,

By

Swarf

in. Winton asks me to publish a portrait.of his favourite artist, Isador Goodman, and some details of the pianist’s personal history which he can paste . CORRESPONDENT living

in his album. of artists. Isador Goodman, born in South Africa, has been on the move for several years, travelling in England, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland and Australia. His

last visit to New Zealand was in 1949. Last year he was preparing to become a "family man with. settled ways," in Edgcliff, Sydney, with his wife and young step-daughter, and making a {fulltime job of an ABC programme called Music for Pleasure. He was hoping to become for Australia what Andre Kostelanetz is for the United States of America» and George Melachrino ifs for England. During one of his visits to New Zealand The Listener asked him his opinion of the song-writers who take melodies from great classical works and "adapt" them for popular use. His _reply was short: "I’d machine-gun the lot of them!" A point about the photograph on the left is that. it was taken in 1YA’s main studio, Auckland, late one afternoon when Mr. Goodman was beginning to exhibit traces of a "five o’clock shadow." He explained that like a good many other artists. he shaved only once a day-immediately before his evening performance.. A powder puff was borrowed from a 1YA typist and the pianist’s shadow faded under a generous application of tale into but a shadow ‘of a shadow, me bs

PRIZE-WINNER

o CABLED message from London the other day announced that Scotsmen were aghast at the action of English tech-

nicians who had produced’ a bagpipe machine which played

bagpipe tunes "with a true bagpipe quality even to the characteristic-drone."

It’s doubtful tf even such a tireless contrivance as that could assemble as many cups. shields. medals and other nroceed«

of piping times as are displayed here by South Canterbury’s Donald Ivor "Bowman. All told, Piper Bowman has wen 14 Provincial Championship .cups and 87 first prizes in the last 15 years. He broadcasts in 3XC’s Scottish ° sessions, ard*at 7.30: p.m. on Sunday, September 27, he will be heard in solo interludes during the Timaru Highland Pipe Band's programme, ~

HAND-TO-MOUTH EXISTENCE «

\ HEN he was guest soloist with the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra recently, Larry Adler presented the Prime Minister, Louis St. Laurent, with the harmonica he had used to entertain Canadian and United States troops in

Korea at the beginning, of this year. ."Play it!" cried the audience.

The Prime Minister stood in his box and played a fast scale. The critics said: "St. Laurent will never replace Adler." The harmonica player is now in the middle . of his autobiography called From Hand to Mouth; he has also begun work on a_ harmonica instruction course, Next month he is due to start on a tour of West Germany-his first visit since 1949, when he was with Armed Forces shows. Larry Adler has appeared with symphony orchestras in many major works and now Vaughan Williams has written for him Romance for Hatmonica. x

HOW TO 8E SPONTANEOUS

IGEL BALCHIN, the _ well-known British novelist, who has taken part in a number of unscripted broadcast discussions for the BBC, recently wrote about the problem of how best to provide spontaneous . broadcasts. The ques-

tion in his view bristled with difficulties of every kind, chief among them

being the fact that really good conversation was far rarer than was generally supposed. Few people were able to take part in unscripted discussion without hesitation, and this marred some of the best broadcasts. On the other hand, if the speakers met in advance to thrash out their arguments and get the feel of the discussion, the broadcast itself was likely to be flat, for points that the protagonists had made at the preliminary

te ee \f{AJOR Cc. J. WYLIE, SIR EDMUND HILLARY, SHERPA TENSING. NORKAY, G.M., and SIR JOHN HUNT, tour members of the expedition eto Mount Everest, broadcasting in the BBC programme, "Asian Club," with John Morris (second from right) who acted as chairman. Morris, who is Controller of the BBC’s Third Programme, and before that ‘was Head of the Far Eastern Service, was himself a member of the Everest Expeditions of 1922 and 1936. Every week some eminent speaker is questioned by Asians in Lendon during the broadcast of "Asian Club," and on this occasion the four climbers were almost overwhelmed with questions. These were fired at them by Asians of many. nationalities and covered almost every aspect of the expedition. "What were the main difficulties?" "Did their appetites fail on the higher slopes?" "What kind of fuel did they use for cooking?" "Did they see an abominable snowman?" "Was it possible to climb the mountain, at any other time of the year than the pre-monsoon period?" "Did they want to go back there or try to scale other unclimbed Himalayan peaks?" "What was the reasoa for climbing high mountains, anyway?" Sir Jahn Hunt, the expedition’s leader, said in reply to the last question that nobody had ever bettered the answer to it givem by George Leigh Mallory, who was lost on Everest in 1924-‘‘One climbs Everest because it is there." Tensing, the Sherpa pgrter who reached the summit with Hillary, answered some of the questions in Hindustani, which was immediately translated into English, and proved that besides being a fine climber -he is also a ; considerable diplomat :

Sparrow Pictures

meeting would be either avoided of covered by their adversaries at the transmission, and so the cut and thrust of genuine discussion would be lost. If the trial run was dispehsed with the discussion would certainly be natural but, as was also natural, there would be long auses, everyone would talk at once, nd there might easily be irrelevancies, fatuous remarks and all the other drawacks which, unnoticed in general comwere only too obvious over the ir. The alternative, said Balchin, was for a script to be written, embodyingthe best points made by all those taking part and coming to a shapely conclusion. Unfortunately, the people capable of * providing such a discussion were not good at reading from a prepared script, ° and their reading of their own lines ‘tended to be like the performances of bad amateur actors, while. in Balchin’s opinion there were few actors and actresses who could speak the lines of an intellectual discussion without sounding mildly funny. None of those alternatives, he felt, could produce the kind of broad-

cast that the listener was entitled to get from unscripted discussion, and he considered that the best course would be to get speakers together round a microphone and let them talk for as long as they wished, reproducing the whole conversation on.a tape recorder. The pro- ‘ ducer would then have the arduous but Wewarding task of ‘cutting this recording into a manageable whole of the required @ length, leaving a broadcast from which oe extraneous matter had been deleted.

NEW HEAD OF MUSIC

* \ AURICE JOHNSTONE, Head _ of % North Regional Music for the BBC since March, 1938, has been appointed Head of Music Programmes (Sound).

Mr. Johnstone was born in Manchester in 1900. After studying at the Royal Colleges of Music

in London and Manchester he became a journalist, He was secretary to Sir Thomas Béecham from 1932 to 1935, when he joined the BBC. His compositions include five original works for brass band,,A Welsh Rhapsody; Tarn Hows, a Cumbrian Rhapsody; a setting f Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach for

baritone and orchestra; Banners, a celebration overture composed for the Liverpool Festival, 1951; and improvisations on The Oak and the Ash, commissioned by the Manchester Corporation. a

ANY OLD KEY

A \ "HEN a singer says to an accompanist" who. is perhaps an_ indifferent performer but happy to oblige, "Can you play this in. a-higher (or lower) key?" the person sitting at the piano at the ready is sometimes placed in a position of acute embarrassment. A British piano

company has now come to the rescue. A brochure announcing that. it has devised ‘a "transposing

m~ piano states: "Ihe object of this invention is'to make it possible to transpose music at sight either up or down, to accommodate singers, and also to endble the less skilful amateur to play music written in-some difficult key by a mechanism which enables him, ‘while apparently playing in some simple key to which he i$ accustomed, to produce the actual sounds of the musi¢ as written. . . The transposing piano is also of great. use when accompanying wind instruments, for their pitch: varies considerably, and also the temperature of a heated room tends to flatten "the pianoforte while it raises the wind. instruments in piteh." A sliding keyboard is operated by a lever under the key-.-bench. oe

VOICE OF VARIETY

x "T TAM" (Petone) wants to know something about Ronnie Ronalde, BBE . artist, vocalist and siffleur. Ronnie was born in London on June 29, -1923. He was later a boy soloist in St. Bartholo-

mew’s the Great, Smithfield, and he entered the theatrical profession when he was 14. His first ap--

pearance on the BBC .was with» Jack Jackson’s Band in 1938, and _ subsequently he broadcast with Sandy Powell, Nat Gonella and in Children’s Hour. In 1939 he toured the Scandinavian countries and served with the Royal Engineers during the war, He studied singing at Steinway Hall and yodelling in Switzerland, which is said to be the

home of this odd accomplishment. Ronalde has made -many radio and stage appearances in England, and has broadcast in THe Ronnie Ronalde Programme as well as Music Hall, Variety Bandbox and Workers’ Playtime. In

1947 he visited the United States, appearing on Broadway. When he. appears in the BBC’s ‘The Vioice . of Variety Ronalde demonstrates ‘his dexterity as a whistler by giving coloratura arias , in this medium; and in another section of the show he: presents 4

popular song with a bird-like lyric, followed by. an imitation -of ‘the bird. How was he "discovered"? His talent came out at an amateur concert. Recently Ronalde has been entertaining troops in the Middle East. In a -10-weeks’ tour "he travelled 10,000 miles, giving more than 50 performances. His smallest audience was a dozen. or so hospital patients and his largest disappointment was not being. allowed to visit Cairo, which ‘was strictly out of bounds. I have been unable to find answers to "Ham’s" two questions — (1) Does he (Ronnie Ronalde) produce his whistle with tongue, lips of mechanical aid? (2); Has: he an abnormal throat that allows him to sing, yodel and whistle with consummate’ ease? It’s unlikely that he would tell even his best friend, "Ham." =

SOUVENIR

AS a souvenir of TIFH, Joy Nichols "has taken to Australia a tape recording made at a party held shortly before she left England. In a_ characteristic

speech Jimmy Edwards implored her to "Come back soon, Joy; we had

quite enough trouble while you were ‘away before having that dreadful child." I have heard that Jimmy Edwards and Dick Bentley are expected to tour Australia in about a year’s time, but so far no mention of a visit to New Zealand.