The Week's Music...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 948, 11 October 1957, Page 25

The Week's Music...

by

SEBASTIAN

] )OMINION DAY was noticed briefly by several stations, and there was a programme of New Zealand composers’ music (YC link) to add weight to: it. Though well vafied, these pieces pointed out clearly that though we may be a Dominion, a nation ourselves, our music still has little national touch, with no féatures to distinguish it from other countries’ modern music. Composers here tend to have a cosmopolitan outlook, with their own personalities superimposed, and the result is a corpus of music in which it is ‘hard to trace a common factor, or the germs of a national style. We lack the traditions of the European countries, and the oahead American way; and having nothing to take the place of these attributes, our serious music is apt to sound a bit derivative. I suppose there ig an independent spirit that one can hear, as befits music from a young colony; but we can hardly be called musical pioneers, The programme in question included Lilburn’s setting, "Landfall in Unknown Seas," which [I recall was featured on Dominion Day two years ago; and its strings sounded as Anglicised as ever. There were three piano pieces played by Peter Cooper, which wefe pleasant, but not particularly dis-

| i tinguished. More interesting were David Farquhat’s six Songs of Women, courageously sung by soprano Gabrielle Phillips-for these were extremely difficult. They dealt in art, not without aftifice; and had a spiky, ungrateful style, full of rather unvocal leaps, which mellowed towards a normally musical level in the Lullaby and Epilogue. This is not soothing music; but the settings were not inapt, and the accompaniments added materially to the songs, Still, the style was a personal and individual one, and cannot represent New Zealand music any more than a single work of any other local composer; and one must agree with Owen Jensen’s remark in a recent talk (NZBS) that the coming of the gramophone here nipped in the bud a national musical culture that was just about to begin. In National Orchestra concerts lately, one highlight was the Concerto for trumpet, strings and. percussion by John Addison, with Ken Smith as soloist. This English composer (he is 47) writes gay, light and technically brilliant music, reminiscent in some ways of good-humoured Malcolm Arnold; and this concerto was a shining and exhilarating example of his work. I should like to hear his wind Sextet played here-any offers?