More provision urged for electronic music

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32798, 24 December 1971, Page 14

More provision urged for electronic music

The rapid world-wide development of electronic music would spell the end of the conventional concert hall, an Australian-born composer and the director of music at the University of London’s Goldsmith College (Mr Donald Banks) said in Christchurch yesterday.

Mr Banks, is in New Zealand with his wife and family on a private visit before moving to Australia, where one of his works has been commissioned for March at the Adelaide Festival. He will also take up a fellowship in music at the Australian National University. “People should not be embarrassed to listen to music on electronic systems,” Mr Banks said. “After all they do this as naturally in their own homes, so why should they not be able to do this in their country’s best concert halls. At present, this is an impossibility as concert halls are simply out of date. “All existing concert halls will have to be re-designed to make way for electronic music, and no halls in the future should be built without full provision for multichannel play-back facilities,” he said. “If lighting is a natural part of the electrical facilities of a hall, then why isn’t sound in the electrical sense?”

Mr Banks said that most major concert halls in Britain had been “blacklisted” by large groups of British composers.

OUT OF DATE "Such halls as the Royal Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall are simply out of date,” he said. The only place in London in which electronic music could be performed properly to the public was an . old railway “round house” where the audience were surrounded by speakers .hung from the first-floor balcony. “This is virtually the centre for all avant-garde music in the city,” he said. The growth of electronic music was inevitable, Mr Banks said, because composers by their very nature were continually in search of new sounds.

“So you see the chance of finding new instruments as given to us by the modem development of electronics is a perfectly naturel outcome

of centuries of musical growth.” Conventional orchestral music would not be dropped, Mr Banks said. There was always “a place for the museum,” he said. “One must always hear the great museum pieces but orchestras are adapting very slowly to the needs of mod-ern-day music. The habit of orchestral improvisation will have to return, for it has been almost non-existent since the 18th century.” Universities in Britain were finding that, unless they could provide a fully-equipped electronic music studio and playback facilities, students in music were by-passing them, he said. At the University of London, all students studying for a bachelor of arts, bachelor of education, bachelor of music degrees and diploma of education were required to

work in electronic music as part of their course, Mr Banks said.

Mr Banks, who was bom in Melbourne, went to London in 1950 to study music after being a student of the Melbourne Conservatorium. Together with the New Zealand composer, Dr Ronald Tremain, he was awarded the first scholarship in music offered by the Italian Govemment to study in Florence.

Miss Rosemary O’Meeghan, a piano pupil of Miss I. M. C. Lassen, has been awarded $lOO by the Trustees of the Noel Newson Memorial Fund. The annual award is made te students of exceptional musical promise, to pursue their musical abilities at an advanced level