MODERN BRITISH COMPOSERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 742, 2 October 1953, Page 5

MODERN BRITISH COMPOSERS

Sir, "It is almost incredible that a musician. should utter such nonsense," says Mr. L. D. Austin (Listener, September 11), in words which I find equally appropriate as a criticism of Mr. Austin’s letter. Perhaps Mr. Austin, reared no doubt in a musical atmosphere of extreme Victorian conservatism, prefers the gutless commonplaces of Coleridge Taylor and Edward German (to mention but two of the more third-rate composers included in his list) to the music of our contemporaries. I do not, and thérefore resent strongly, Mr. Austiri’s flat denial of the existence of a large amount of fine music written by British composers during the last 25 years. If Mr. Austin had listened to the later symphonies of Vaughan Williams; the Viola Concerto, the symphony and Belshazzat’s Feast of William Walton; the Spring Symphony of Britten; Michael Tippett’s second string quartet; the Rubbra fifth symphony (this list could be extended considerably) with a mind undulled by constant application of the harmony rules of the once worthy but now outmoded Ebenezer Prout, he would not have found untenable Mr. John Longmire’s assertion that the Victorian era produced only minor British composers. Mr. Austin’s second point deals with that good old red herring "jarring dissonance." Surely any attempt to evaluate a musica] composition by the number of dissonances it contains is inexcusably lazy. Has Mr. Austin forgotten that only two sorts of music exist — good music and bad music? The category into which a piece of music is placed must be determined by a careful consideration of the fitness or otherwise of all the musical elements used by the composer. Surely if dissonance, however acute, is appropriate to the other musical material-in a composition, then that composition is unworthy of censure on the score of being ugly to the ear? May I remind Mr. Austin that "the story of the critic who denies that a new work has any musical value because it contains unusual tonal combinations, and is proved, wrong by the evluation of a later generation, recurs frequently in musical history?

CARRICK

THOMPSON

(Auckland).