OLD TUNES RE-SUNG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 777, 11 June 1954, Page 12

OLD TUNES RE-SUNG

FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS, by George Dyson; Oxford University Press, English price 15/-. N 1924 George Dyson, not yet Sir George, nor yet Director of the Royal College of Music, wrote a book on contemporary music. The New Music, as Dyson ealled it, was a brave book because such inquiry into "modern"

music was, in 1924, still a dangerous adventure; it was a lucid book in its explanation of the new music when even the composers themselves were not altogether sure where they were going; it was also a wise book in that Dyson, for the most part, placed things in perspec,tive. Now, 30 years later, Sir George Dyson publishes a slender volume of essays, Fiddling While Rome Burns Not even the sub-title, "A Musician’s Apology," can prevent the disappointment at realising that Sir George has never quite come to grips with the problems he so adventurously put forward in 1924. Penetrating as he still is in his analysis of the situation, a shadow hangs over his argument about contemporary music, the shadow of "there’s no time like the old times." When Dyson gets off the creative side of his art and examines the administrative, educational and critical aspects of music, he becomes the George Dyson who wrote a successful army manual on hand grenades. What he says is good sense, clearly and convincingly put over. He deplores festivals-like Salzburg and Glyndebourne-which "skim the cream" but "do not create artists." He discusses the importance of the amateur in English music; he explores new channels of patronage and criticises the BBC’s conservative policy as a music patron ("musicians as such have no place in its governing ‘body, and the upper reaches of authority tend to be somewhat remote from practical musical issues’); and, off on another tack, he launches a shaft at ‘the contemporary fetish of performing old music in the original style ("At the first Handel festival the alto parts were sung by fortyeight men, doubled. by thirteen oboes, Do we really wish to disinter this past? Could we bear the raw sound of even one 18th Century oboe?"). In all his essays, George Dyson seems to be an observer rather than a partner in these musical affairs. He writes in an urbane style which is the man himself. In fact, it is not only the first essay which is autobiographical. The whole book is a study of George Dyson and his contribution to music in England.

Owen

Jensen