FUTURE OF MUSIC

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 August 1933, Page 12

FUTURE OF MUSIC

HOPE FOR THE AMATEUR. Amateur music-making is said to be on the decline. Wireless and the gramophone are held responsible. The Incorporated Society of Musicians, a body of music-teachers, has often aired this opinion, though exactly how much there is in it it is impossible to know, without a scientific inquiry by some such body as the Royal Statistical Society (writes Richard Capel in the London “Daily Telegraph.”) The British Federation of Musical Competition Festivals called a conference in London the other week to discuss the future of the amateur. The occasion was an agreeable one, attended by many eminent persons, who spoke first upon one topic, then another.

True, the future of the amateur was rather lost to view. But we can hardly blame the conference, remembering that it is not easy to view even the present, let alone the future. Not much is to be expected of any conference in our difficult times. There are certainly signs which suggest that the age of amateur musicmaking is nearing its end, like that of home-ba'ked bread and home-brewed beer. Typically modern composers no longer consider the amateur. Brahms grew rich on the amateurs who sang and played his lieder and chamber music, but the amateur has no use for Schonberg’s lieder and chamber-music except as wallpaper. One form of amateur music-making —madrigal singing—flowered and died hundreds of years ago. The social basis of the art of Weelkes and Wilbye •was the domestic sing-song. A few generations later the descendants of the patrons of those great composers were subscribing to the Italian opera, and the great composers were writing music beyond the accomplishment of all but the most brilliant professional singers. Similarly the social basis of German classical music was a musie-

[ making middle-class, shut up in its little states and its little towns, with nothing much but music, home-made music, to fill the long winter evenings. The long winter evening is now a

: thing of the past; and the modern composer has parted company’ with the amateur —wide Webern and Hindemith, Casella and Honegger, and our own Sorabji. If history did as a fact repeat itself we could be sure that domestic chamber music is as nearly dead as domestic madrigal-singing, and we might spare ourselves the trouble of trying to put back the clock. But history does nothing of the sort; and the clock may only want winding up. The analogy between home-brewed beer and home-made music is, like a” analogies, inexact —a mere fancy. The fun there is in making music creates all the difference. The future! Since it was so serious a body’ as the B.F.M.C.F. that invited prophetic speculation, let us accept. The future of the amateur lies obviously’ with the mass of music meant for amateurs —the music of the past. MUSIC FOR MACHINES. There is every prospect of the composers of the future writing music beyond all human accomplishment: it will be a music for machines. The pieces, unplayable by hands, which Stravinsky and others have written for the pianola are but a start in this

• direction. Hand-played instruments will soon be ,superseded, probably by sounds from the ether a la Theremin. Each new composition will most likely be as sensational, expensive, and ephemeral as a cinema film. Meanwhile, the music that was written to be played and sung by men —all the music, let us say, from Palestrina to Vaughan Williams —will be increasingly- cherished and prized, as we prize the Greek and Roman classics. This is where the future of the amateur comes in. The mechanical performance of music of the pre-mechani-cal age will be regarded as no less inadequate, not to say barbarious, than aro translations of Pindar and' Catullus. , Wagner will be with Virgil. And just as for centuries past every English father who could by any stretch afford it has put everything else second to giving his sons the chance of learning to read Virgil in the original, so—while the vulgar and the idle turn on taps whence will issue a, to us, ■wildly unimaginable, ultra-Thereminian cacophony—will refined families make all possible sacrifices to cultivate an understanding of the music of the classic past, as representing, like the ancient literatures, an unsurpassable summit of human achievement, and one of the proved values and lasting consolations of life.

It may even be —we cannot tell—that the future of the amateur will be so glorious as to leave’in his hands the exclusive charge of all the music we know; and that he alone will execute the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner, just as to-day the Greek tragedies are the undisputed property of under-graduates and schoolboys. No; not the amateur’s future is preI carious, but rather that of the professional executant whose existence we foresee as before long to be extinguished between the forces of mechanisation on the one hand and, on the other, the academicising of all music as known to-day. The prima donna, the virtuoso, and the star conductor will be as little wanted "by the world as a professional reciter of aomer. The beginning of the new musical academicism has been witnessed by Englishmen who are still in their forties. While the disintegration of modern music becomes apparent on every hand, the policy of conservation has started in the schools.

Those of us who were at school not less than, thirty years ago recall how music was disparagingly’ classed with dancing, and what disheartening obstacles stood in the way’ of a little piano practice. Within the last thirty’ years music, has entered the English public school —while Euclid has, they say, gone out. Just at the moment when modern music has become unreadable the t schools are teaching the reading of music. Only a few years hence the inability to read diatonic and reasonably chromatic music—by then a dead language—will be a sign of a neglected education. And a little later every’ well-bred Englishman will be an amateur musician—to the extent to which he has in the past been an amateur classic scholar.