MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1049, 2 October 1959, Page 17

MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY

NE of the commonest criticisms levelled at music written this century is, in the words of Neville Cardus, that ", . . the composer chooses to remove himself from the mass of reasonably intelligent listeners; he deliberately cultivates a strange language; . . . he has a contempt for ‘the familiar style; he would perish rather than write music easy to understand and remember." Putting aside Richard Strauss and Edward Elgar, this criticism may, by and large, be justified. But even the sternest lover of the classics cannot help admitting that in the last 50 or so years there have been many works that

show every sign of possessing the qualities to withstand the passing of time. Both for general listeners who want a not too technical introduction. to some of these masterpieces, and those to whom most of them are already well known, Owen Jensen has prepared, under the title Twentieth Century Orchestral Masterpieces, a series of 12 illustrated talks. These talks, each of them 20 minutes long, are being heard from the YCs at 9.15 p.m. on Wednesdays, starting on Wednesday of the present week (September 30). Mr Jensen opens with a general introduction. He traces the development of the orchestra from the string music of Bach in the 18th century, through the periods

of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, to the orchestras used by Berlioz and Strauss. This brings him, in his second talk (October 7), to the first of the works he has selected: Debussy’s tone-poem The Sea, written in 1905. Few of the writers who have enthused over the beauty and "impressionistic" quality of The Sea have conveyed qa clear picture of how it is constructed. "Beautiful sounds and nothing else," Mr Jensen remarks, "do not make en orchestral masterpiece. What in the end makes The Sea a great piece of music is the magnificent way Debussy has organised all these sounds into a significant design. It isn’t one of the text-book forms, but is none the less coherent for all that. Debussy doesn’t

use long themes as most of the older composers did ... his themes are mere fragments, a tune as Vaughan Williams would have called them .. . and they fit into the composition rather like a mosaic, or in fact, like the patches of colour in an impressionist painting." A recorded performance of the complete work will be heard from 2YC immediately following the talk. : The other works Mr Jensen has chosen to talk about aré, like The Sea, all comparatively well known. Among them he includes Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and The Firebird, Elgar’s Falstaff, the Sibelius Symphony No. 5, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (with An American in Paris in the same programme), the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, and finally Veughen Williams’s Symphony No. 6.