Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 896, 5 October 1956, Page 20

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS ON AND OFF THE RECORD

GRAINGER

as 1882, and with a worldwide reputation as a performer and composer behind him, Percy Grainger (above) has come once again into public notice through his experiments in new ways of producing sound, and through his founding of The Percy Grainger Museum in Melbourne. Not long. ago Frederick’ Page, senior lecturer in music in Australia-as long ago

at Victoria University College, visited this museum and was fortun-

ate enough to find the composer himself at home. "An odd sight at the Melbourne University is the Grainger Museum, a hideous, squat, brick con-

. struction with something of the unwanted suburban power station about it," he described it to us. "I knocked at the door and Percy Grainger himself appeared. I had been longing to meet him since I first came across his music in 1920. It was he~-who first put me on to the Delius Piano Concerto through an essay of his I read by chance." Mr. Page said that Grainger was a wonderful man in 20th century music who was aware of the value of folk songs even before Vaughan Williams and Bartok, and of the value of small instrumental groups years before Stravinsky. "From the beginning he was determined to get away from the world and traditions of Vienna, and this desire has influenced his whole life. Today he has the fresh complexion of the vegetarian, still has a shock of hair, and he runs about his museum in sandals." The Museum recalls all the men who have left their mark on Grainger. There are collections of works by Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, Gustav Holst and so on. Inside the door is a bronze plaque of the man who first befriended Grainger and sent him off to Europe. Just around the corner among pots, pails and mops is a concrete bust of Beethoven with a printed tag hanging around the shoulders, "Apply to the Conservatorium." To Grainger, Beethoven is one of the academics. "One is shown clothes worn by Balfour Gardiner, and a reconstruction of Chote owen. © ale 8G ee. Pa OS 4a are See a a eee

a room in London where Grainger and his friends talked about and made music for hours, as it was in the early 1900's," said Mr. Page. "Then came collections of Icelandic clothes made of towels and paintings by passengers from old clipper ships-naive, touching and absurd. There is a machine constructed to sound 1/6th tones (im this field he is again a pioneer), and a quantity of photos of Scandinavian folk singers. What interested me most was a remarkable portrait of Delius done by his wife, which I did not know existed, and there were also some of her other photographs. In some respects the Museum is touching and inept, but Grainger himself is remarkable. He is an original, he has a touch of genius, and he is a great man. One shuts the door considerably puzzled." oi

GOONOODLES

aA \V HAT some New Zealanders think of Henry Moore we already know, what they would think of a recent "art" exhibition in the Press Room of the

BBC London headquarters we can only guess. There was, we’re

told, "an element of novelty bordering on craziness" in this show, which was a display of "doodles"--those spontaneous scribbles which Foreign Ministers,

office boys and others use to unleash their inhibitions in moments of tedium or excitement. These spectacular doodles were the work of the Goons-Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe-and ex-Goon Michael Bentine, who escaped to Australia about three years ago. This makes them, our office girl tells us, not doodles but "Goonoodles." They would be drawn on the backs of scripts during rehearsals or performance of The Goon Show, the BBC programme which has a following of about 5,000,000 people in. Britain, and is, now being heard from NZBS Commercial stations on Sunday nights. Major Denis Bloodnok, doodled by Sellers, who also plays him in the programme, was a caricature of an officer of the old Indian Army-not very surprising, since both Spike Milligan, who writes the script, and Sellers have associations with India. Milligan was born. in .Ahmednugar-which sounds a bit improbable to say the least--and educated at Poona, finishing off (or, if you prefer it, "and was finished off")

j/at Rangoon and Colombo. Sellers togred India and the East with Ralph Reader’s Gang Show, Sellers had also sketched

Henry Crun_ and the elderly spinster Minnie Bannister driving the steamroller that makes disastrous appearances in many Goon Show episodes. Harry Secombe had some far from flattering self-portraits on view, and Milligan’s exhibits included two nude studies "which indicated the more serious artistic interests of this talented Goon." Radio correspondents of the English Press were natur_ally curious to see

how the Goons themselves saw the characters that have sprung from their. fecund and fevered imaginations. They

may also have had some faint hope that they would find out at last just what The Goon Show is about. Many people think this is a virgin field of discovery, though the Goons themselves, you remember, have no objection to describing it as a "senseless farrago, set in a space-time discontinuum, in which the frontier between logic and lunacy is first rubbed out and then redrawn in another place." Spike Millinag (as our typewriter spontaneously called him) and Peter Sellers were present at the show. Asked why it was that all Goons doodled, Milligan said: "We do it to prevent us going sane."