Talking With Sir Bernard Heinze

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 890, 24 August 1956, Page 9

Talking With Sir Bernard Heinze

T was a clear, bright Spring morning. No snowdrops erupting through the cracks in the city pavements, no shoutings up and down Tinakori Hill, but the sniff of Spring unmistakably there even in a hotel super-heated for trans-Pacific tourists. Sir Bernard appeared, parted amiably from James Robertson ‘with whom he had _ been breakfasting, shook hands with The Listener representative, dashed off to make a phone call, came back and steered us up in the lift to the firstfloor lounge with a sort of absentminced expeditiousness. In the lounge he led the way towards a patch of sunlight slicing through the Venetian blinds as a thirsty man hunts down water. The Australian in him, though presumably undaunted by rain, had evidently found our airs too nipping and eager for his comfort. Once settled in his chair, Sir Bernard talked easily, the phrases well-turned in his mind so that they fitted what he wanted to say with the same understated elegance as the dark charcoal suit and muted grey check waistcoat fitted his sturdy frame. Sir Bernard Heinze is a man on whom age seems to have set almost no mark. His hair is smooth, black except for touches of grey at the temples. At times, he seems to simmer with surplus energy and general bonhomie. He works ferociously hard at rehearsals and performancesso hard that he has had to have constant treatment on his New Zealand tour for a strained back-yet, at other times he gives the impression of being cool, even a little remote. Without effort, unconsciously and yet unmistakably, he is a civilised man, a product of Australia who has remained Australian but has been shaped and smoothed by European influence. "Tt’s five years since I was last in New Zealand. It’s been a very pleasant experience, and a very interesting one, to see how the Orchestra has improved so tremendously-both technically and musically-in that time. It has a fine potential, and I think will bring great lustre to the reputation for cultural development of this Dominion." We thought this a rather handsome tribute,

coming from a representative of the elder brother in the Australasian partnership, but then elder brothers can sometimes afford to make a generous gesture. What we wanted to hear from Sir Bernard was not what he expected we wanted to hear, so we gave the conversation a gentle shove in a more contentious direction. We asked him about the stature and outlook of Australian composers today. "Australian culture," he replied, "like that of the United States and your own, is a transplant of European culture. We have no musical background on which we can call, toward which we can look for inspiration, as a medium of national

expression. The Australian aborigines sing in eighth tones and _ less. Some of their songs are translatable into the European tonal system, but I’ve never heard a composition based entirely on aboriginal tunes. Some of our composers, like Clive Douglas and John Antill, have used its rhythmic figures as a foundation and have used arrangements of the songs for thematic material. But I cannot believe extensive use of it will ever be made. While I’m a great protagonist of national music, I think you must recognise that it has to be international in appeal. If European music deliberately moves towards the acceptance of quarter and eighth tones as extensions of the faculty of musical composition, perhaps Australia and the Asiatic

countries may come into their own, but the chances are remote. Especially as several of the Asiatic countries are strenuously educating their musicians in the European system." Composers, said Sir Bernard, are all the time searching for an idiom expressive of their own country’s musical content, and musicians should be given every conceivable encouragement in their often thankless efforts to explore new fields. "The acid test of all music is public performance," he added, "and here the conductor can help by trying to ensure that new music gets not just one performance, but three, four, or more. Think what would have happened to the world

of music lovers if Beethoven had got only one performance of his works!" The thought being too dreadful to contemplate for more than a second or two, Sir Bernard moved on to consider the work of Margaret Sutherland (whose Adagio for Two Violins he had introduced into his programmes here) as being typical of a new development in Australian music. "This Adagio is remote, tender and tremendously personal to her. It contains a great deal of feeling within a slender mould, and at the same time has an immediate appeal. I think it could quite well quicken our belief that eventually the music we produce will be as expressive of the human scene as our painters have been successful in presenting the Australian light and landscape."