Music from colonial life

Press, 8 May 1982, Page 16

Music from colonial life

A Distant Music. The Life and Times of Alfred Hill, 1870-1960. By John Mansfield Thomson. Oxford University Press, 1981. 239 pp. I $29.95. (Reviewed by John Ritchie) >, There is a suspicion that this book was ’’ planned for the centennial of Alfred Hill’s birth, but if its quality, content, and a somewhat surprising form for what started out as biography, are responsible for a decade’s lateness no-one will corpplain. It is too good to have conformed to deadline. >" There,remains an impression of surprise that Alfred Hill, who seemed to be among us so recently, was so long ago an important contributor to New Zealand’s early, musical scene. Longevity is a mixed. blessing. On the one hand it encourages the growth of tradition and legend; on the other it produces more persistent contemporary neglect than most composers deserve. Hill as a composer was, and is, neglected' Even in Australia, recent writing has ignored him, apart from Arundel Orchard, who 30 years ago published ’Music in Australia,” a general study which briefly made something of Hill’s stature. It is, of course, still an issue as to whether Alfred Hill the composer is of true significance in the Australasian scheme of things. One senses that John Thomson is not all that convinced for, on the one hand, he writes that Hill “is the most historically significant of- early antipodean composers,” and on the other “there was little organic development in the music and practically no significant experimenting with form”; Hill was “nineteenth century in substance” and “a last flowering of colonial feelings and rhetoric.” This probably explains the manifest avoidance of Hill’s music as the principal concern of the study and while musicians may regret that, the fact is that an important step forward in social history, if not biography, has been taken. The author hopes his work “will have value as a social document.” He may rest assured it will. “Waiata Poi” always possessed that special character which reconciled a touch of class, even genius, with banality in such proportion as to irritate the snob and inspire the pleb. It was Hill’s “Salut d’amour,” his “Humoreske,” his “Minuet in G” — betraying a warm, direct character, a man sensitive to Maoritanga. On such flimsy evidence we have had to encapsulate his essence as best we can. Thomson now enhances such brief ordinariness through a convincing study, detailed enough to illuminate both "life and times” and with sufficient definition to portray Alfred, the man and the musician, who emerges credible,' colonial and candid, a genuine character. The title of the beautifully produced

and relatively cheap book conveys a greater generality than that of a biography. The author has realised that the tapestry of Hill’s life was not so much as to justify the microscopic view. He has taken the telescope, stood back and viewed the “times” as being of an importance equal to the “life.” “A Distant Music” is certainly the most resourceful and absorbing account available of music in New Zealand and the eastern seaboard of Australia for the period 1890-1930, and even beyond. New Zealand’s coy claim to Hill has probably been over-modest. His early working life centred on Wellington and Christchurch and while it seems certain that he was lost to Sydney because we were not overly concerned to keep him (an old, old story that finds an exact parallel in Sydney’s loss of the great Verbrugghen to Minneapolis, described in absorbing detail here), it comes as a surprise to learn of the breadth of his musical involvement in the two New Zealand cities. As conductor and composer Alfred Hill made Wellington and, . during the exhibition of 1906-7, Christchurch buzz with activity. His New' Zealand International Exhibition Orchestra in Christchurch, twice a day for six months, played a repertoire from Haydn to Wagner among much else. In those palmy

days visiting opera companies also contributed. New Zealand heard and saw its first Valkyrie, Tannhauser, Dutchman and Lohengrin in the space of a few weeks. These full productions toured in 1907! - Long before this. Wellington had sent the young cornet-playing product of the Garrison Band to Leipzig. He was also a violinist and at the great Royal Conservatory he was able to hear Grieg and actually play under Brahm’s baton. Brahms “seemed to have eyes at the back of his head ... if we made a wrong bowing he stamped his foot and swore.” It is no wonder that Hill was grateful to those at home who had made his visit possible; and no wonder he developed the confidence on his return which was to give him so balanced an attitude to standards. He was able to write in a letter “We have just as many duffers here (Leipzig)." There was also the ultimate influence to which all young men succumbed in those days — Wagner. Strangely, Hill’s music shows this less than might be expected in a Leipzig-trained musician. But his own family was to display the antipodean capitulation to the great German through his yet-to-be-born offspring — Tristan, Isolde and Elsa. His working relationships with John Manifold, Charles Goldie, Rudall Hayward (the maker of the film “Rewi’s Last Stand”), Henri Verbrugghen and the Sydney Conservatorium all make for absorbing reading as do a variety of appendices. The account of the New South Wales Orchestra touring New Zealand in 1920 and playing in places such as Hawera, Invercargill and Hastings is nothing short of astonishing.'As a result, the Christchurch “Press” editorially suggested the formation of a national orchestra, a proposal which took 26 more years to eventuate. John Thomson is a patient, thorough researcher, a stylish writer, an author with an eye for piquant detail. Simple facts are marshalled to lend immediacy and realism. There appear to be a couple of slips which have escaped detection — a caption on p. 156 seems to indicate that the picture may be in negative and, later, April 31, 1924, is given as the date of the first Sydney Conservatorium Orchestra concert. As an expatriate writing about an expatriate, Thomson straddles northern and southern hemispheres with assurance. Even the Notes are eminently readable and his ability to quote from letters, articles and conversations argues a capacity for highly systematic retrieval. This book has been produced with assistance from the State Literary Fund and the Australasian Performing Right Association; both organisations must surely be delighted with the result.