COMPOSERS AT WORK
Sir-Owen Jensen would appear to be an acute sufferer from St. John’s Wood-itis, a disease afflicting many native-grown artists, composers and writers. The most distinctive and distressing symptom of this disease is a belief that the only standards or material on which the creator has to work are those derived from suburbia some 12,000 miles away: ". . . The composer in New Zealand . .. has no evocative reservoir of song and dance from which to draw his ideas. He has inherited no folk material. . ." This reminds one of the girl overheard in the bus one morning. She was describing to her companion a man she
had met: "No, he didn’t look like a New Zealander, I think he was a Maori." Up St. John’s Wood, N.Z.!. Let it never be- said that any melodious sound ever echoed amongst our hills and valleys before the coming of the white man and his vigorously melodic and evocative hymn tunes and _ funeral marches.
GERALD
WAKELY
(Auckland).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19550121.2.12.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 808, 21 January 1955, Page 5
Word count
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163COMPOSERS AT WORK New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 808, 21 January 1955, Page 5
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