The Flood of Music
"HE BACKGROUND OF AN ARTIST" (1YC), a talk by Mary Tweedie, examiner for the Trinity College of Music, London, contained some of the most perceptive comment on the proper atmosphere for great, music I have ever heard. A somewhat "plummy" English voice, a Sibylline utterance and excessive literary references (I remember Blake, Milton, Shakespeare, Schweitzer and Plato, and there were others) did not detract from the value of her plea for the creation by teachers and musicians of a sensitivity to the inter-action between music and the other arts and of a mental and spiritual attitude to beauty in which knowledge and imagination combine, and which allows no compromise in standards. In today’s flood of music, breeding a "miasma of uncritical acceptance" and at best, partial attention to music, as well as in the leaving behind by the composer of his audience, Miss Tweedie saw a great challenge to the teacher, and what she offered as a constructive philosophy | merited the attention of anybody interested in the art. While many of us regard the modern ubiquity of music as "a Good Thing," she sees its dangers clearly, and, in drawing attention to the responsibility of reverence, emphasised something which we, in our tendency to meastire musical activity statistically,
| tend so often to forget.
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540129.2.19.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 758, 29 January 1954, Page 10
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219The Flood of Music New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 758, 29 January 1954, Page 10
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