THE WORLD OF MUSIC.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 261, 3 November 1928, Page 9 (Supplement)

THE WORLD OF MUSIC.

GOSSIP OF THE PLATFORM.

FROM FAR AND NEAR.

(By ORPHEUS.)

The New Lynn Glee Club was unfortunate in being unable to put on the concert it* had planned recently, owing to the theatre being out of action. In order that the rehearsals should not go uncapped by some sort of public performance, the members of the club went round to the Evelyn Firth and several other homes in Auckland, and entertained the inmates. The club, which has a regular performing membership of about twenty or thirty, meets once a week, and receives considerable sup- ! port in the district.

"Musical Opinion" describes the last opera season in London as "the longest and dullest of recent years. The solitary venture into the unusual was a production of Gluck's 'Armide,' which did small justice to the opera. We were given no Strauss, old or new, and Strauss is the outstanding figure among opera composers of the day. Neither 'The Woman Without a Shadow' nor 'Intermezzo' has yet been heard in England. When 'The Egyptian Helen' reaches these shores, some of us will be a lot older, and some will be dead. Krenek's jazz opera will probably arrive when jazz ia no longer a thing in which we are greatly interested." We in Auckland sometimes complain because the choral and other societies seldom put on new works, and because we have little or no opportunity of hearing new music in general. But seeing that even London seems to be afflicted in the same way, one is tempted to believe that we are fortunate in hearing even the older works.

The broadcasting debate in the British House of Commons has created" rather a stir in England. "That august assembly," says "Musical Opinion," "is not in .the habit of talking about music. When it does, it is quite in keeping with a country possessing no Ministry *bf the Pine Arts, that the discussion should arise .on estimates for the maintenance of >a system; for delivering letters. It .was in keeping with expectation founded on the national preference for anomalies that, the spokesman for a Government institution should disclaim any responsibility for the service provided by that institution." Judging by this and by further remarks of the writer, I should imagine that the difficulties ' and grievances. that arise in* connection with radio in England are roughly the same as. .those, we have in this country. In both cases the Government, though financially interested in broadcasting, refuses to interfere with the organisation of the service, when it is obvious that a vast improvement might be effected if the State, displayed a little interest in the matter.

A writer in "The Musical Times" attacks the notion that the ultimate result of the gramophone and of radio will be to create a nation of listeners, and to annihilate the home-player. He says, "I ask any reader to look at his own case, and that of all his friends. Is there among them a single individual who is really fond of playing, and who has given it up because of the facilities offered by wireless and gramophone? I myself have never, in the whole of my misspent career, got more pleasure out of the pianoforte than to-day, in spite of hearing stacks of gramophone records and wireless and other concerts without number. Moreover, wireless and gramophone have increased the home-players' repertoire, by bringing fresh works to their notice, as well as by helping them in the interpretation by means of performances which are (usually) good object lessons. No doubt a proportion of players have given it up, but they were folk who in the past got little or no music beyond that of their own making; they had to play. But I can't conceive of anybody who played for the pleasure of playing ever being entirely satisfied with listening. So letus hear no more jeremiads concerning the effects of mechanically reproduced music.''

For the benefit ol those who have not read Miss biography of Clara Butt, I quote the now celebrated "muck" passage in full:—''So you are going to Australia!" Melba says. "Well, I made twenty thousand pounds on my tour there; but, of course, that will never be done again. Still, it's a wonderful i country, and you'll have a good time. What are you going to sing? All 1 can say is, Bing 'em muck; it's all they can understand." To my way of thinking, the moat significant point is not that Melba should so accurately, though brutally, have estimated Australian musical , taste, nor that Miss Ponder should have been so divertingly tactless as to publish the passage. What tickles me is the general tone of the first part of Melba's remarks. She appears to be entirely preoccupied with the commercial side of music in her beloved Australia, to the total exclusion of the artistic aspect. Can it really be true that during Melba's career her interest in Australian music has been confined to the box-office? In view of the sentimental bond we all know to exist between Melba and her native country, I shrink from contemplating anything so dreadful.

One of the things we miss here in New Zealand is the opportunity of attending such- musical events as the Haslemere festival, where the members of the famous Dolmetsch family play such instruments as the viol, the rebec, the hautbois de Poitou, or shawn, and the serpent, or bass of the cornet group. "At Haslemere," says an English critic, "we hear the music of the past played with the contemporary technique on the instruments for which it was composed. There are those who argue that Bach's clavier concertos, for example, gain as much as they lose when played on the modern concert grand because 'the essential thought of the music . . . comes, through unimpaired in its contra-, puntal lines, while the greater flexibility of the piano makes explicit the rhythm and nuance which the clumsy mechanism: of the harpischord can only imply. But to some of us its sound-coiour is also an essential element of a work of musical art. What would the painters say if, for instance, the colour of an early Italian masterpiece were covered with a vivid moderi pigment —although its lines were unimpaired and its chiaroscuro made more expicit?. One of the most valuable results of Arnold Dolmetsch's long and splendid service to music is that we can now hear the the sixteenth, seventeenth arid eighteenth centuries sound just as their composers and contemporaries heard them sound. No longer reproductions in another medium, they have recoj&red their. Individuality iagalV' ~" ■''■■