The Music Subtle Harnessing

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30682, 23 February 1965, Page 7

The Music Subtle Harnessing

[By PROFESSOR

J.A. RITCHIE,

of the School of Music University of Canterbury]

Vaughan Williams, talking of incidental music, once said that the same score could -be used for a landscape ,a car crash or a love scene. It would sound different, he maintained, if the background was different. In his typically irreverent way he pointed to the astonishing versatility which music possesses when it comes to matching ideas outside its own sphere. Douglas Lilburn, incidentally, a pupil of “V.W.,” in his “Landfall in Unknown Seas,” appears, at first sight, to justify his teacher’s claim.

A glance at the printed page of this work offers no obvious ideas redolent of Curnow’s poem. And vet, translated into the flexible sound of a string orchestra, the score at once springs to life, cogent in its thought, congruous in its intangible I unity with the poem. I Every New Zealander 'Should visit the Golden Bay

area where Abel Tasman made his fleeting discovery of a new land. On a windy day there rings in the ears the very sounds that Lilburn’s music captures and harnesses for an artistic purpose. But it is a subtle capturing; a gently harnessing. It is music meant to be heard in an intimate relationship with the poet’s word.

The four movements allow time for contemplation—time filled with conducive sound, whose elements grasp the qualities of boldness, fear, disappointment and elation, i The facts have their own drama. The music, with something of the persuasive melancholy of Sibelius, underlines it with gentle simplicity and no rhetoric.