MUSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE HOME

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 23, 28 January 1939, Page 3 (Supplement)

MUSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE HOME

By Jess Duff

YOUR hobby may be tasting wine* or tea; let mine be music-tasting. A good way to do this is to get in touch with a powerful all-wave radio. With all the world for your choosing, and two to choose, how can a little diasension be avoided? Even if two hearts beat as one, two pairs of ears remain two pairs of ears, with their own kinks. As likely as not, X will prefer talks just when you are hankering for light music. Women talk plenty themselves, so they like a change from talk.

Last niglit, for example, "The Flying Dutchman," to which I am inordinately attached, was to be relayed from Wellington. But, at that hour, Professor Splnkers was also billed to talk on Pathogenesis in Woolly Aphis. I lost. At other times, when X is deep in some tome without picture# or paragraphs, one is perverse enough to want to hear "hot jazz." Could I then suggest a sort of solitary confinement for all who take their all-wave radios seriously f When we tune in at random, the foreign jabberings are distinctly novel at a first or second hearing, but in the end become so much mitre useless noise. And life these days is a struggle, frequently vain, to shut out extraneous noises. If you aspire to be truly international, what a stimulus a seven-valve radio is going to be, if used with inteljjgence. To derive full value from the different nationalities in music, it will have been necessary to have explored the field well for years before. To love music a lai'jje vague way is not enotigh. The only way to get the feel und texture of it is to have tackled it yourself.

Many factors contribute to the making of a nation's music; climate should have much to do with it, a'l'l, of course, lliu general raciul characteristics.

Admittedly there are contradictions; Cesar Franck, to give an example, and Debussy—both French composers and approximately of the same period; but what a difference! Berlioz, too —perhaps a little fearlier, who, like the poet Blake, can't quite be pigeonholed. There is all the difference between, say, Wagner and Brahms, yet the same country and cultural background produced them both. However, with all these inner contradictions, you could still say broadly that there is in music a national type— a certain common denominator.

Nationality in music is a most enthralling study and for the small pains I have taken to scratch the surface of musical geography, 1 have had most gratifying results. To begin with a ready and easy example—the Hungarian ending of a phrase is most easily detected, perhaps most easily of all; also the Hungarian snap, extraordinarily like the Scotch snap and possibly pointing to similar origins. Once I heard a dance by Bartok and I could hardly believe it was not from north of the Tweed. If you are at all familiar with the national Czardas, with its violent changes of mood, then you will soon master the special Hungarian idiom and something of tins racial temperament as well. Spanish rhythm is easily located and has certain unmistakable beats—as in the Bolero for instance. Itl« interesting to trace in some Spanish tunes a tincture of Arabic, which I have found as well in a few Rumanian and Russian tunes. But when we come to British and Germanic music—which is fairlv alike—we find no spicing of Arabic "or Magyar there. Four-square chunky tunes, these, not too syncopated, but level-headed and keeping to the point—«ee what music tells us? But move on to the Celtic fringes around Britain and what a change of musical climate! I believe the scale has a lot to do with it. The pentatonic

scale, used in the traditional Hebridean and Irish tunes, is believed to be one of the oldest in Europe, therefore many of these tunes sound alien. Not a doubt of it, but a few of these sound as strange as Icelandic or Finnish and, oddly enough, the seven beat rhythm is used in both Finnish and Hebridean music. From the north the Swedish Polska, the Norwegian Hailing have all the liveliness of the English hornpipe or eea chantey, the Scotch reel or the Irish jig. Further south we grow more elemental —the Italian Tarantelle, the Polish Mazurka mix melancholy with wildness and so do the Russian folk melodies; but the Russian Gopak has cast melancholy aside and is as barbaric as can be. My one attempt at French folk song yielded disappointing results. I wonder how yodelling evolved in Switzerland. Probably it was first a call to wandering cattle far away. In an old Norwegian Shepherd's Song I have found a suspicion of the yodel, too. Another matter of musical sense is to discover the special style of each composer. There is in Mozart an unmistakable line which the observant listener will perceive at once. I have caught Mozart being quite Hungarian as in the last movement of the Prague; Brahms, also, in two of his waltzes ha:a genuine Slavic note. The love of music is in ua. all, deeper and more instinctive than the love of books or art. And yet how few, musicians included, think to write of their musical impressions. Perhaps they are not encouraged; perhaps musical phrases, unlike literary, cannot be quoted in a newspaper. Perhaps music should not be talked about and that we murder to dissect. At all events, 1 refuse to believe that musical perceptions are rarer than any other. A. loves music for its rhythm, B. for its brightness, C. for its depth, D. likes it—well, because he likes it, E. likes opera, F. likes oratorio, G. must have voices, H. won't have a voice at any price, I. prefers a particular period, J. a particular nationality—and so on.

The best-intentioned of us can hardly help getting into our little corners and staying there. For myself, I am restless in corners and would include ali music—if one only could!

Finally, I like music for this: Whatever it may state, it concludes nothing, solves nothing and is itself its own justification.