“JAZZ BARBARIANS”

Evening Star, Issue 20314, 24 October 1929, Page 10

“JAZZ BARBARIANS”

The present musical generation k afflicted with a specially virulent disease—The Fear of Being Left Behind, This was the statement of Sir Hamilton Harty, the eminent conductor, iu his presidential address to the Congress of the Incorporated Association of Organists at Hull recently, states the ‘ Daily Mail.’ “Its symptoms,” he said, “are feverish enthusiasm for everything that is new, coupled with complete lack of any guiding principles or standard of judgment. “Those who suffer from tho disease are so tortured by anxiety to keep well in front of every fresh movement that they cannot spare time to enjoy in peace anything winch has already been accepted and approved. “ They _ are ’ terrified at the_ thought of missing what they pathetically call the ‘ new music,’ without knowing what they mean, and they are so obsessed by a determination to bo ultra musical at all costs that in reality they arc hardly musical at all. “The Bright Young People of today seem to deride the great composers upon whom our own tastes were formed, and professed to find pleasure and satisfaction only in certain latterday music which to' many of the older schools is ugly and meaningless. “Composers may be gathered into two principal groups, the serious pioneers who are seeking fresh methods of expression, and the charlatans who are consciously insincere and whoso great aim is always to go one better in the production of ugly and discordant noises.”