Occasional Music
I] T must be ten years since I listened to a ZB request session with any care: I did so on Sunday and was intrigued to find that they haven’t changed at all. After some time, I felt ridiculous giving to a thumping thirty-two bar chorus on the fickleness of some unruly jade the attention proper to a symphony, and found my thoughts free to wander at their will. Resounding phrases for use in this column began to rumble, viz.: "The ear debauched by a surfeit of coarse sound and ignoble conceptions," but this is pointless, and quite ignores the purpose of the session. It is occasional music, and what is the occasional? That while reading the paper, while convalescing after a dull week or the Saturday night bacchanal, one should have a background pleasingly distracting and quite undemanding of the intellect. To each his taste: mine is silence on such occasions. All music was once (continued on, next page)
occasional; it is only since the Renaissance that music, simply as concord of sweet sound, has been listened to for its own sake. I grudge none’ his Sunday soporific; what is more alarming is that. to most of us, music, as a vague rhythmieal or glutinous background to the overpowering tedium of the mid-20th Century, is the only occasion admitted.
B.E.G.
M.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 10
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224Occasional Music New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 10
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