Our Mailbag

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 39, 10 April 1931, Page 12

Our Mailbag

Out of Place? vce uniformly excellent. service is now being given listeners by the Radio Broadcasting Company, that one who has been critical in the past hesitates to cause fresh controversy. But I feel that I cannot allow to pass unnoticed what seemed to me to be a neculiar infelicity in the arrangement of the programme at Auckland on the night of Tuesday, March 31, The 1YA Broadcasting Choir had given a splendid rendering of Gounod’s beautiful "Messe Solenelle," and at the conclusion, with but a moment’s intermission, the announcer stated: "We will now broadeast a programine of dance records!" What a sacrilege! To play dance music of any kind after listening to one of the most sacred musical cor. positions ever written is surely not.% accord with the tragic associations 0% Holy Week. Dance music, and: plenty of it, is all right.in its place, but surely it was out of place to broadcast it on the occasion in question. It would have been. preferable either to have closed down, or else gone on with good gramoplone music. I am sure all who have heard "Messe Solenelle" sung at High Mass, and have been spiritually edified thereby, would not thank anyone who imposed dance music and jazz upon them afterward. I have a switch on my set, and after this gross offence against good taste, I promptly used it. -K.S. (Wellington),