MUSIC AND NOISE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 55, 2 September 1937, Page 8

MUSIC AND NOISE

When a musician tells aA audience of musicians' that the organist resembles the motorist because each controls a machine of tremendous power which, if recklessly used, is capable of becoming an engine of destrUQtiori, the layman who likes peace and quiet or music that soothes will sit up, take courage, and also notes. The speaker, Dr. Harvey Grace, who, as their president, was addressing' the Congress at» Plymouth of the Incorporated Association of Organists, did not spare the feelings of his hearers, but went on to say that he feared that the "^modern musician's craze lor-, noise" would "affect the nerves of the younger generation and sooner or later the aural sensitiveness, on which the musician's work depended, would suffer." The ears and nerves of the young, he added, were exposed to non-stop loudspeakers at home and noise in ; the streets and cinemas. It was time somebody got up and said something like that. It is true that the great preacher Spurgeo^, when asked the difference between noise and music, replied: "Music is the sound which our own children make as they romp through the house; noise is the sound Which other people's children make under the same cirri cumstances," but that was in the days when it was sometimes possible to "hear a pin drop." What Spurgeon probably meant was that one man's music was another man's poison, and if he had heard samples of "the modern musician's craze for noise" in the shape of jazz and the art of the crooner, he would have understood that "aural sensitiveness" must suffer. If the preference for noise grows, then music will disappear. Even now where are the musicians to compose tuneful melodies like those Of the day before yesterday that calmed the nerves and did not fray them? Medical opinion ,is unanimous that noise is a serious danger to health; the modern musician might well study the healing art of the music that "hath charms," inrtead of--adding to the evil. N