JUMBOMANIA.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 221, 18 September 1929, Page 6

JUMBOMANIA.

It seems appropriate that an American should 'have coined this word to express the" modern worship of elephantine proportions. On hearing it one's thoughts immediately fir to the United States, the home of mammoth buildings, huge choirs and orchestras and multi-millionaires. The word is new, but the desire for vast proportions goes a long distance back towards the beginning of things—the Pyramids in the ! Great Wall in China, the mighty temples now being discovered in various parts of the world. ; In music, too, there is nothing new in large numbers, for in the First Book of Chronicles one : reads of Kii|j David and his fondness for music jin big doses. He established at Jerusalem a singing school for four thousand voices and they were accompanied by orchestras of trumpets, pipes, harps, psalteries and instruments of percussion with .Asaph keeping time on the cymbals. "And David spake to the chief of the Levites to appoint their brethren to be the singers with instruments of musick, psalteries and harps and cymbals, sounding, by lifting up the voice with joy." At the dedication of Solomon's Temple there were one hundred and twenty trumpeters, and, according to Josephus, Solomon kept two hundred thousand trumpets for use in the Temple. The .effect of all this noise must have been literally stunning.

Orchestras nowadays are considered feeble unless they contain a hundred performers or more, and the conclusion one reaches is that with a big proportion of the public quantity is more esteemed than quality. Hence chamber music, written as it is for three or four players usually, sounds thin and meagre to the man whose ear is accustomed to the music produced by large numbers of performers. There is no doubt, however, that this tendency is not a sign of increased musical culture. The following satirical lines were written to Richard Strauss:

We arc cloyed with the cult of the Russian,' We are sick of the simple, the bland, We long for persistent percussion, For brass that is gruesomcly grand. O teach us that discord is duty, That melody maketh for sin, Come down and redeem us from beauty, Great despot of din !

It is undeniable that there is something impressive and moving about community singing in large numbers, even when it cannot be considered good music, for how can masses of uncultured voices produce beauty of tone? Men who have to sway their audiences by emotion rather than by logic know the power of a sing-song on a waiting audience, but this feeling of elation .can be experienced by any person in a great crowd, whether singing, praying, watching a football match, or a pageant, or being at a theatre, so it is not necessarily a result of music. Is it possible that this excitement is . a primitive emotion felt by an army of savages gathered for war ? If you are doubtful whether or not jumbomania makes for art in music, go and hear a record of "Land of My Fathers" sung by 92,000 voices (how green with envy King David would have been!) at the football cup final at Wembley, then listen to any beautiful solo rendered by a lovel}' voice, or hear a massed bands record and then go and buy Schubert's Quartet in D Minor. —MARGARET HERALD.