WORLD of MUSIC

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 23 August 1924, Page 13

WORLD of MUSIC

NOTES AND COMMENTS. Mr Walter Fennell, in the course of a letter to a friencl in Hawera, says: ‘‘l am under Mr Frederick King. He is very interesting, and I like him very much. He tells me i am going to do well, and is very pleased with my progress so far. I have succeeded in making him take an interest in me and am, working hard, so he is quite keen and so am I. I look forward to my lessons very much. 1 am working so far on Nava’s solfeggi for the voice. I have completed one book, and am on the second now. He tells me that I am the second pupil of his who has stuck to them. Only one other pupil, Percy Hemming, went through the two books, and now he is singing in Grand Opera. He tells me to stick at them, and this I am doing. I am taking the piano under a Mr Henry Isaacs. For sight singing I have Dr. Shinn. He examined me once for the piano. I think it was for Higher Division or Intermediate. He is very jolly. I also have diction and elements. It is all very interesting, and I like it very much. I have met quite an interesting lot of people over here. I find the English people very nice, and ready to do anything for one. It makes me feel very much at home. I have seen a number of operas, amongst which are ‘Salome,’ ‘Siegfried,’ ‘Rigoletto,’ ‘Tosea,’ ‘La Boheme,’ l I Pagliacci,’ ‘Espagnole,’ ‘Faust,’ ‘Tales of Hoffman,’ ‘Madame Butterfly,’ and ‘Maritana.’ They were all very wonderful. The voices were great. The baritone (G'esare Formiclii) is said to be the best heard in opera in London. He was simply wonderful. The other singers were good too. 1 went to hear Kreisler last Sunday week. He had a great reception, 9000 people in the Albert Hall. He was very wonderful.” Mr Fennell goes on to state that lie met Mr D. J. Goodwin in the Strand. “He has been having a great time, and looks well.” Mr Fennell had also met Miss Teresa McEnroe (wlu> has since returned to New Zealand) and Mrs Riddiford. Prom the Lyttelton ’rimes of 50 years ago: “Christchurch Harmonic Society—The society will perform Handel’s ‘Samson’ about the middle of next month, the committee having decided that the following concert shall consist of Haydn’s ‘lmperial Mass’ and Mendelssohn’s ‘Athalie.’ The “Dream of Gerontius,” which will be the Auckland Choral Society’s next production, on September 4, ' is considered by critics to he Sir Edward Elgar’s best work ; indeed, some regard it as the finest choral composition of the century. The work abounds with, difficulties for chorus and orchestra, but the local society is fortunate in having what is claimed to he the finest orchestra in New Zealand. Thus it is probably at the present time the only body in the Dominion in a position to produce this wonderful conception of the greatest living British composer—- “ The Master of the King’s Musick.” Nineteen of the most famous choirs in Britain, 480 singers ip all, took part in the festival service held in Westminster Abbey on July 7, for the benefit of King Edward’s Hospital Fund. No such, performance of English cathedral music has ever been given in London before. It was similar to the aifnual festivals held alternately at the cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford, and Worcester, hut on a larger scale. A young student lodging in Edinburgh bought a violin and started to play upon it. His landlady, hearing the unusual sounds, appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and shouted, “Mr Tam, what are ye daein’?” . “Oh,” said the student, “I’m trying a new violin I’ve just bought.” “Great guidness!” said the woman, “I thocht ve wis shiftin’ the bed.”

Matters are proceeding most satisfactorily with the Operatic Society in their reheairsals for their coming performance of the pretty and attractive opera “Our Miss Gibbs.” It is always a great attraction, and prospects for the local society apnear of the brightest. The conductor (Mr OUerensliaw) is quite enthusiastic over his chorus and orchestra, which he believes is the largest lie has had in Hawera, and has been doing excellent work at rehearsals. The producer, Mr T. Foster, has taken charge, and shows that lie has a fine appreciation of the requirements and an intimate knowledge of the opera. The work is taking effective shape at once, and bids fair to be a great success. All members are very enthusiastic and taking a very keen interest in the work. Keen lovers of music in Hawera will be pleased to learn that the AAmnganui Male Choir will visit Hawera on Tuesday, September 2, and present a full programme for the benefit of the local society. This fine combination of 45 voices will repeat in Hawera its second programme of the season, which is being presented in AVanganui on the 28th and 29th inst. Mr Trevor Thomas, who will be a soloist, is also engaged as soloist for the next concert of the New Plymouth Society. He has appeared with success in other parts of the Dominion. THE COMPETITIONS.

A feature of the musical life of the year will be the. third annual competitions festival, to be held at the Opera House on Monday-and Tuesday. The entries are such as to create a feeling of teh utmost satisfaction to the committee and the Male Choir, under whose auspices they are being conducted. The competitions are musical and elocutionary, and the judges are two men well known to llawera— Mir "Will Hutchens,- r*Tus.Uae., oi' "Wanganui. and Mu- A. H. It. A mess, of Stratford. The two days, and especially the recalls for various classes on Tuesday evening, will he. full of interest throughout. A MUSICAL GRIEVANCE. Writes J. W. A. in the Christchurch Press, and judging from one’s experience he is not alone in his opinion : “Will you kindly afford me a little space in vour valuable paper in which to express my opinion as to the effect produced on the minds of an audience (judging hy the state of my own mind) hy the preponderous playing of the organist, when he is acting the part of accompanist to a few vocalists, or a soloist kind enough to place their gift of song for the pleasure of the public. I am unusually fond of music, hut T prefer to have even music itself kept in its proper place. For instance, alien I am listening to a singer, I simply detest having to strain my ears to the highest pitch in endeavouring to hear the voice which is almost drowned by the organ. I have visited three of the largest churches in this city, and there is no doubt whatever that in everv case the organist has entirely overlooked the fact that his sole business is on behalf of the singer alone, to keep him or her in correct tune, therefore it follows. with no room for argument, that the more j softly he plays the better it is for all concerned. Recently the girls from

two choirs, who evidently had been chosen to form a special choir on account of their talent for singing, would have given all present a very special treat only for the organist apparently trying "his best to ‘outdo’ them. I wonder if many others amongst the assembly had their nerves set on edge as mine were.'”

MUSIC TEACHERS. SHORTCOMINGS IN THE COUNTRY. “Music is the one subject which everyone appears to feel himself at liberty to teach without possessing a trace of real technical knowledge or equipment,” said Mr Algernon Lindo in an address to members of the Musical Association recently. “Reduced to work for' a living, what lady resident in the country would dream of taking up the teaching of fencing, Italian literature, shorthand, or anything of that sort? For those pursuits one must have training. Yet to obtain appreciable results in the equally complicated art of music, at any rate as regards its early stages, it is considered sufficient to have some elementary knowledge of the _ staves and notes, joined to an ability to follow the slow perambulations of fingers over the keyboard, and notice when a pupil plays a flat instead of a sharp, or vice versa. My sympathy goes out to these benighted country teachers, struggling along as best they ran without contact 'with any authority on then' subject, and to their pupils. In my 12 years’ experience as an examiner in various parts of the globe I have come across some extraordinary phenomena, in the way of country teachers. The -trouble generally appears to be that the teacher gets hold of a book on some particular ‘method,’ and hopelessly misunderstands it. infecting' whole neighbourhoods with- surprising departhe normal. The best way oi helping him (or her), T think, is to give hints in the form of short, crisp, if, 11 ,... easily-remembered aphorisms. Editions of standard composers, too, ini ght well be compiled with a view te helping the student in nractical interpretation, rather than dwelling exclusively upon the academic side of the music.” SIR F. BRIDGE’S OPERA. ‘ ‘THE VILLAGE - I’OQUETTKS. ’’ The students of Trinity College of Music produced at King’s Hall, Covent Garden last Thursday night an opera by the late Sir Frederick Bridge: which proved to be his last work. “The Village Coquettes,” in its original form Vi 1 by ‘’Boss” and music by ioo” 1 was first produced in 1836, but a good deal of nuisic was destroyed by lire, and Sir Frederick Bridge found it was not possible to use, very much of what survived. Alterations in the structure of the play were also ,f ountl necessary, though the book is entirely the work of Charles Dickens. ,£be work is in ballad opera form, with a good deal of spoken dialogue, no recitative seeco, and very little accompanied dialogue. It is a comedy of English country life of the 18th century, with a farcical clement supplied by Martin Stokes, the village- busybody and a- true Dickensian character. The music is fluent and vocal, but the tunes have not the directness of earlier ballad opera or of Sullivan. Many of the songs are melancholy or nocturnal in charactei, and the composer lias been misled into the use ol too- many chromatic passing notes, which- more than once turn a romanza into an andante religiose before evensong. The performance was a little, rough, as though the company wore not quite used to an orchestral accompaniment, lhe singing of Miss Doris Duck and Miss Myrtle Stewart (the two village coquettes; was in this respect better than most of the numerous male characters, and had more style, though Mr Stanley .Graham, as one of the injured lovers, sang very well and gave no anxiety to the conductor (Mr Joseph lvimey). Mr Howard Cundell filled the important role of Stokes with an excel lent f sense of the grotesque, and Mr J. C. 1 timer, who played the villain oi the piece, had that easy stage deportment which helps the action of the whole piece to run smoothly.

MR. CECIL SHARP. MASTER OF FOLK SONG AND DANCE. (London Times.) Mr Cecil James Sharp, the wellknown collector of folk song and -dance, has died at 4, Maresfield Gardens, -Hampstead, after a short illness, in his both year. -10-n 1 was k° rn on November 23, 1809, the son of a city merchant- whose hobby was architecture. As a bov he had seen most of the cathedrals of England and knew something definite about each. He went to Uppingham and to Chue about the time when Stanford was infusing new life into Cambridge music. At 24 he became -Associate to the v hi,O' Justice ol South Australia, and in the course of ids ten years at Adelaide he* founded there a school of music. In 1593 lie married Constance finch, by whom he had one son and three daughters. Soon after his marriage he became principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire, working at the same time at Arthur Dunn’s school. He hat! bee n for soup. years collecting folk songs, and flic fruits of this appeared successively in a new edition of Baring Gould’s ‘'Songs of the West,” “A Jiouk ol British Folksong.” ‘“English J'olksong: some conclusions,” 19()7, and “Folksongs from Somerset,’’ 1905-10. His notebooks contain more than 1700 variants ami he published about oncsixtii of these.

Jn December, 1999. lie saw the morris danced at Headingtou, and became aware that here was an art of which our literature was full and of which we knew nothing. Pfe would rush off, with or without a meal, to any place where lie had heard of its existence. In the course of these expeditions he saw the sword dance in the north and the country dance in the Midlands, and the latter lie then worked up from Playford. He was the first- to interpret Pla.ytord’s directions. One of his main difficulties was to evolve a notation ; he partly borrowed and partly invented one which is now in everyday use with the English Folk Dance Society, which he started in 1911. A dozen small hooks, and others with the tunes, embody what he learned of all three subjects. ( During the war he went to the Southern Appalachian Mountains, where there is a small plot of the England of two centuries ago, and found what lie was looking for—more antique forms of the songs he laid been collecting here. He was enchanted with the simplicity of the life and gave a series of first-rate lectures on the subject when he returned. This incidentally led to his being appointed Occa-

sional Inspector to the Board,of Education in 1919. He thought latterly of Newfoundland as a likely field for collecting song and dance. He had some years before been put on the Civil List, and in 1923 lie was made -an Honorary Master -of Music of Cambridge University. To ticket him is difficult; neither musician nor writer exactly describes him, and in point of fact neither “Grove” nor the “Literary Year Book” contains his name. Indeed, the SO odd volumes, great and small, lie put forth in his time are neither music nor literature; and lie always said of himself that he was no writer. But they are the stuff out of which musicami literature are made; they are the facts, not the fancies, oi artistic life. PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOUR. GREAT COMPOSERS AND THEIR CENSORS. Anyone, it has been said, who seeks a lesson in the fallibility of human judgment where matters of art are concerned cannot do better than study the history of music. Certainly it is'true that mankind in the past seems to have shown an amazing aptitude for going wrong over its great musicians. It would indeed hardly be going too far to say that practically every great composer that the world has ever known has been, if not actually despised and rejected, at any rate misunderstood and misjudged by his contemporaries. Genius Misunderstood. Bach supplies an early instance, for he was regarded as little more than a learned contrapuntist and brilliant executant in his day. Certainly few, if any, of his own time had any real conception of his unapproachable greatness or could have imagined it being said of him a century after his deatlp as it was by Ssehumann, that to him music owed almost as much as Christianity to its Founder. Mozart was another great author who, although he enjoyed plenty of favour in his day, was often considered most difficult to understand none the less, and a well-known anecdote tells how one of his aristocratic patrons (Prince Grassalkowics) was so enraged by what he considered the extravagance ami eccentricity of one of his quartets that he absolutely tore it up and stamped on it! Ready for the Madhouse.

As to Beethoven, he suffered to the lull, as was only to be expected in the case of one so far ahead of his time, the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. Thus the immortal C minor symphony, which Schumann declared ‘will live as long as there is a world and music, ’ was for long regarded as an absolute enigma, which was only listened to out of respect for its creator, even Spohr going so far as to say that except for one passage he considered it quite unworthy of Beethoven.

The ‘Eroiea” was found almost equally puzzling, while as for the glorious “Seventh” it was recorded by r rled rich AVieck, who was present when the work was first performed* in f unanimous opinion Of all the leading musicians who heard it the symphony could only have been written by a composer in his cups' It was after hearing the Seventh Symphony , too, that AVeber, who should have known better, made his famous lemark to the effect that Beethoven was now really ready for the madhouse ! Astounding Judgment. Beethoven’s experience was only that of his fellows, writes Hugh Arthur Scott in John o’ London’s AVeekY‘ „ , ven Schubert—Schubert of the deathless songs and the divinely beautiful Unfinished”—did not * escape the general fate. Thus when MenUe.ssohn rehearsed his great C major symphony with our own Philharmonic Urchestra, they adopted such a derisory attitude that he refused to go on, while Habeneck, rehearsing the same immortal work in Paris in 1842. had an even worse experience, since the players in this case actually refused to continue after the first movement ! But even these are nothing to some later instances which may be cited, lake some of the astounding judgments which were passed on Chopin, tlere, for example, is what one of the leading critics of the day (one Rellstab) said of him: He is indefatigable, and I might say inexhaustible, in his search for ear-sphtting discords, forced transitions, harsh modulations, and ugly rp S Ar l '^ l^iV s melody and rhythm. . . ~F Mr Chopin had shown, this composition—(one of the Mazurkas)—to a master the latter would, it is to be hoped, have torn it and thrown it at his feet which we do here symbolically.” “Ranting Hyperbole.” Moscheles another famous musician °t the period, compared him unfavourably with Field—a composer now almost totally forgotten: “AYhere Field smiles, Chopin makes a grinning menace; where Field sighs, Chopm groans; where Field shrugs his shoulders, Chopin twists his whole • °T y -Emld puts some seasoning into the food, Chopin empties a handful of Cayenne pepper. . . . Those who -have distorted fingers may put them right by practising these' works—(the matchless Etudes)—but those who have not should not play them—at least not without having a surgeon at hand.” For a really humorous verdict on Chopin one must go to J. AY. Davison, the famous critic of The Times, who let himself go as follows: 1 .i ll striking reflection on the capability for thought possessed bv the musical profession that so very ciude and limited writer should he esteemed a profound classical musician. Alt* Chopin, does not want ideas, but they never extend beyond eight or sixteen bars at the utmost, and then lie is invariably in nuhibus. . . . j. he entile works of Chopin nreseirt a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating, cacophony.” It was this same Davison who afterwards came equally hopelessly to grief over AA-agner. Tins was the sort of thing he wrote, for instance: RiVliard AYugner is not a musician at all”; “this excommunication of pure melody”; “absolute chaos”; "ild, extravagant, and demagogic cacophony”; “ ‘Lohengrin’ is an incoherent mass of rubbish’’ ; “ ‘Tannhauser’ is tedious beyond endurance’’ • “ ‘The Flying Dutchman’ .. . the most hideous and detestable of the whole” ; and so on. Even To-day. Coming down nearer to our own day we find Tchaikowskv writing of Richard Strauss : “Such an astounding lack of talent united to such pretentiousness never before existed”; while some of the things which have been said more recently still concerning Schonberg, Stravinsky, and other modernist ma.sters go almost as far as any of the examples already quoted from critics of the past. AYhether the.se, too. will appear equally ludicrous in days to come, when these composers also have become better understood, it is impossible to say. Time alone can tell.