SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT
SOME of the English literary figures of the nineties took their music hall songs and singers seriously. People who wrote aftectionately of the great performers of the day included Max Beerbohm, E. V. Lucas and James Agate. Sacheverell Sitwell not long ago wrote a piece which he called "Morning, Noon and Night in London," on Alfred Concanen’s coloured song-covers of the sixties and seventies. Summing up the merits of the songs, Sir Richard Terry, for many years director of music at Westminster Cathedral, says that many may have been banal, but those which have lived have a melodic and rhythmical vitality; and from the nineties onward, when they got away from the old vamping type of accompaniment, the best were stamped with real musicianship. It is almost awe-inspiring, says Christopher Pulling in his "They Were Singing," to find the tune of G. H. Macdermott’s song "By Jingo" analysed as "a pasticcio of the Kyrie in Mozart’s Tweltth Mass, and the ballad ‘Castles in the Air"" But, asks. Pulling, should we still remember "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay" if it had not been for "La Donna é€ Mobilé?" Should we have gone mad on "Yes, We Have No Bananas," if Handel had never composed his "Hallelujah Chorus?" or should we have gone "Chasing Rainbows" without Chopin’s inspiration?
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 765, 19 March 1954, Page 25
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216SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 765, 19 March 1954, Page 25
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