THE OLD SONGS

Evening Star, Issue 19161, 30 January 1926, Page 15

THE OLD SONGS

INCUBUS OH MUSIC Do you realise that the provinces are asking for exactly the same things m music as they demanded forty years ago? (writes Madame Melba in her newly-published book, ‘ Melodies and Memories ’). Do you realise that when I go to big towns which possess, according to popular tradition, such excellent taste, 1 am compelled time and again to sing the same old songs, and that whenever 1 endeavor to put something new on the programme, I am regarded as positively eccentric ? Do you realise that even now, in this year of 1925, wherever I go I am being asked to sing Tosti’s ‘Good-bye,’ ‘Conun Thro’ the Rye,’ and all the other old tunes that they have heard a thousand times ? I try Debussy, 1 try Dupare, Ravel; I try anything and everything which strikes me as beautiful and fresh, and always I am greeted with the same response; enthusiastic, it is true, but tame compared with the positive uproar which I receive when i sing the old favorites. Why is it that we are so behindhand in our musical imagination? Why is it, of all countries in the world, wo go on with the same old things alter the same old way, distrusting anything that is fresh, unwilling even to make any experiments? When I go to America, when I sing in Pans, or in Italy, I am overwhelmed with requests to sing works by hitherto unknown composers. None of, these requests over come to me in England. We are conservative to the point of madness. .1 have no patience with such an attitude. Art is not national; it is international (adds Madame Melba later). Music is not written in red. white, and blue; it is written with the heart’s blood of the composer, whether ho be English or German, black or white. If T felt that there was the vaguest excuse for imagining that by closing our concert halls to any hut English music wo should thereby encourage English musicians, I should write differently, hut the facts all point in tiro opposite direction. Germany does not shut her. doors to British music; when there is any work of merit written in_ this island, she is the first to appreciate _it at its true value. It is the same iu Austria and Prance. That interesting composer, Mr Joseph Holbrooke, for-example, bad to go to Vienna for the first performance of one of bis finest piano concertos. Wire? Not because we are unwilling to listen to British music, but simply because the dreary grey lion els who have pushed themselves to a position of prominence in our musical world are unwilling to listen to anything, which they imagine may have been written since the death of Queen Victoria.