‘A MUSICAL TRAIL'

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6613, 18 May 1928, Page 11

‘A MUSICAL TRAIL'

WITH LASZLO SCHWARTZ. As the guest of the Palmerston North Professional Musicians’ Society on Wednesday evening, Mr Laszlo Schwartz gave his audience a word picture of music. His theme was a musical tour of the world and its peoples —not, as ho said, mere fleeting impressions, but the crystalised results of careful observations made during'three world tours. In Alaska and Canada, where , weather conditions w'ero so severe, the result was that among the Anglo-saxon population a very high standard of choral and other concerted music had been achieved. Hungarian settlors in Canada, it was interesting to note, lost their power of song, because they missed the sunny skies of their homeland. On the other hand Ukrainian colonists, revelling in the fuller, freer life, and yet living in familiar weather conditions, developed a still more colourful musical life.

Thq lecturer considered that the Hawaiian people would never produce any music of real value, for they had not the capacity for suffering, without which nothing truly great could be created. Their so-called folk tunes, he said, were merely ordinary hymn-tunes regenerated and rejuvenated. Passing then to the Orient, Air Schwartz showed that the music of China and Japan, wonderful in its own national forms, became weak when it sought to imitate the West. In India music hold an clement of cruelty, and in addition, the Indian races had not sufficient sense of humour to make their creations live. Egypt, musically, was as dead as its famous Sphinx, but in Palestine, after thousands of years of wandering, the Jew's had recently given a complete performance of the opera “Aida” translated into Hebrew. The Balkan States were too much imbued with the spirit of war to develop their natural ability to the full, but in Russia, the highest standard of choral work in the world had been reached. The speaker made it evident that wo live in a world of contrasts. In Hungary, and also in Fiji, men singers were abundant and the w'omon were rarely heard; while in America women wore tho leaders in musical thought. The very country which had been responsible for the greatest musical infliction of the age —jazz —was the ono in which one could hear, at a cinema, a full symphony orchestra of 110 players performing the greatest classical works.

“Not that I have anything against jazz,” said Mr Schwartz, “except that it is beastly monotons. I don’t like pork and beans for every meal—l enjoy frogs’ legs occasionally.” Even tho negro himself, who has been held mainly responsible for jazz, was the creator of the beautiful negro spiritual.

Mr Schwartz was interested in the existing arguments as to whether music in Now- Zealand was dead. Perhaps it might be ailing, he remarked, but it could certainly never die in a country in which tho sunny skies and beauties of nature would always compel its people to sing. This, he said, was an ago of cheap music and of mechanical reproduction—regarded by many people as a curse. Yet, like any other invention of man, it had both a constructive and a destructive side. On the whole, he believed that the balance was on tho constructive side of the ledger.