MODERN BRITISH COMPOSERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 5

MODERN BRITISH COMPOSERS

Sir-I (expected an avalanche to result from my remarks on the above subject, and my present difficulty is to reply adequately without encroaching unduly upon’ your space. A pleasing feature of the controversy is that your correspondents all sign their full names. Anonymous commentators are not worth bothering about. To Mr. John Longmire let me say(1) I appreciate his courteous tone; (2) he still maintains that the Victorian era produced only minor British composers, but excepts Elgar, Parry, Stanford and Delius-which is a distinct retreat from his earlier pronouncement. But what about Stainer, Sullivan, Mackenzie, Cowen, Edward German and Landon Ronald-all of whom were knighted for their services to British music? Can Mr. Longmire deny that they were composers of eminence and distinction in their own spheres? (3) Of course, as Mr. Longmire says, there is "dissonance and discord in all good music," but the great composers knew how to use dissonance discreetly and occasionally; whereas most modern music is a// discord, Mr. W. H. Warren quotes Arthur Jacobs’s references to jazz, with the obvious implication that, in Mr. Jacobs’s opinion, modern British composers haye assimilated the jazz idiom! This does not surprise me; on the contrary, it emphasises the poverty of invention so evident

in the majority of present-day British composers. I might add here that Mr. Jacobs’s expressed leanjng toward jazz himself completely nullifies his claim to be a sound critic of serious music. Mr. J. M. Cochrane says (1) "Music, if it is not to decay, must progress and strike out into new fields of tonal expression." Quite true, but "progress" means, change for the better; ugliness is not an advance upon beauty in music. (2) Music must express or reflect the age in which it is written, says Mr. Cochrane, just as composers like Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, etc., mirrored the spirit of their own times. I have demolished this argument before, but it won’t hurt to do it again. The idea seems to be that, by contrast with our own era, the period of the composers mentioned was quiet and peaceful. Let us see. The generation before Bach witnessed the Thirty Years’ War, followed by disturbed conditions all over Europe, culminating in civil war and regicide. in England, and large-scale massacres in Ireland. During the lives of Haydn, "Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, there occurred the French Revolution and wars in almost every European country. The Napoleonic conflict raged for 20 years, producing conditions of starvation and misery among the masses everywhere comparable only with what happened in the post-Hitler debacle. The careers of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner were passed in an atmosphere of constant upheavals-political, military and economic: such as the Chartist riots, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Crimean and FrancoPrussian wars, famine and desolation in Ireland, In fact, the entire Victorian era was a period of acute suffering for humanity in general, but more especially for lesser orders, the reactions against which went far to precipitate the First World War of 1914-18, Bearing all this in mind, how can anyone contend that former composers reflected the spirit of their age? Mr. Cochrane offers Benjamin Britten as a typical modern composer-quite rightly so. Up to the present, Britten has not written a single bar of. worthwhile music, but he is a worthy co-adjutor of T. S. Eliot, whose "poems" are on the same level, Mr. Cochrane admits that "the works of modern composers are dissonant," but, he says, should not be looked upon as "harsh" or "ugly." Why not? The term "dissonance" means harshness and ugliness of sound: so why attempt to evade the issue? Your correspondent then naively asks: ‘What are \they (i.é., Vaughan Williams, Britten, Wa'ton and Rubbra) writing if they are not writing music?" My answer, Mr. Editor, isheaven only knows!

L. D.

AUSTIN

(Wellington).