THE WORLD OF MUSIC.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 23, 28 January 1928, Page 9 (Supplement)

THE WORLD OF MUSIC.

GOSSIP OF THE PLATFORM.

NOTTS FROM FAR AND NEAR.

(By "ORPHEUS.")

'"Why," asks an English, writer, "do men. sing in the morning bath? We thought we knew, but apparently there is more in it than appears at first sight." In a lecture reprinted in the current '"Music and Letters," Mr. Hope Bagenal gives several scientific reasons. (1) The bareness of the walls, and the absence of carpets and other sound absorbents. (2) The resonating qualities of the bath itself, reinforcing certain tones. (3) A "certain tonality" set up by the falling water which "sensitively reinforced by the bath, acts in turn as a physical stimulus upon the anatomical resonators in the nose and throat." We have seen the matter explained learnedly before, but oddly enough the scientists never seem to mention the factor which the plain man would hit on at once, i.e., the tonic effect of the cold water. Here is evidence: Was ever man known to sing in his bath in the afternoon or evening? Nor does the bather sing immediately he enters the bathroom. Only with the delightful shock of the cold water does he lift up his voice. Add one more fact. No record exists of a woman ever singing in her bath. The more one thinks of it the more clear it is that the bracing effect of the cold water is th 9 prime cause.

New York gave its most picturesque contralto, Mme. Ernestine SchumannHeink, 66-year-old veteran of the concert stage, an affectionate farewell at Carnegie Hall recently. The voice, which began thrilling Americans back in 1898, was never more applauded. Carnegie Hall, with a seating capacity of 4000, had an extra 1000 standing. People sat on the platform and stood in the parquet, dress circle, and balcony. There were official testimonials, flowers, speeches and a great many lumps In the throat. The plump little mother sang out, for it marked her farewell concert appearance in the city. This was the twenty-fifth appearance of the singer in a seventyfive engagement, 44,000 mile concert tour, which began on October 5 in Sioux City and will extend until the middle of May throughout the United States. She will conduct a master class in singing for five weeks in Kansas City in the middle of March. In June and July she will attend the principal music festivals in Europe, after which she intends to return to America and devote the rest of her life to teaching and establishing community opera companies in American cities which have hitherto not been able to afford opera. Mme. Schumann-Heink made her American debut in Chicago on November 8, IS9B, in the part of Ortrud in "Lohengrin."

The question frequently arises, '""What are the materials of the music of to-day which make it distinctly different from the music of the older schools?" says Alfredo Casella, the famous Italian musician. Counterpoint has naturally been liberated, as the result of the more recent discoveries in polytonality, but it has nevertheless reserved the fundamental principles that lead, perhaps, to far greater diversity in the combinations of simultaneous sounds. Chords, considered as chords, had probably reaped their maximum complexity in the period we have now passed. At the time of thd end of romanticism—that is, since "Tristan and Isolde"—we find a tendency to turn to the excesses and errors of Scriabin and those to be found in some of the works of Schoenberg, with his proclivities towards atonality. To-day we can establish that the chords, which only ten or twelve years ago were composed of 7, 8, 10, or 12 diverse sounds, have now become newly simplified without, however, returning to the primitive character of the centuries previous to the romantic period. The whole-tone scale, which in itself is impoverished material, has fortunately disappeared with impressionism. Even the harmonic artifices of Scriabin already belong to a distant past.

"We often hear it said," says a writer in the "Century Magazine, "that a person whose ear is acute cannot bear dissonance, but exactly the reverse is the case. A keen ear hears more of the overtones which are a part of all sound, and the person who hears the higher, more dissonant intervals, grows accustomed to them and accepts them with enthusiasm. The great composers have steadily given us more and more dissonance. Each new interval has been denounced, usually with the extreme bitterness which critics feel toward the person who deliberately violates beauty. Time has taught us to accept certain of the intervals and to reject others. The important truth which is demonstrated scientifically by acoustics is this: that the intervals which have been accepted have been accepted in the order in which they occur in the overtone scale—first, the octave, then the perfect fifth, then the fourth, then the third, and so on. The innovations in harmony which time has refused, were out of that order. By this discovery science helps us to grasp intellectually the priniciple behind the beauty toward which we have groped slowly, blindly, yet surely through our emotional responses. The great masters who have developed our music step by step, have done so because their ears were keen enough to hear the harmony of the overtones and to play in outward notes the combinations which they heard."