MUSIC?

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19720, 20 August 1927, Page 1 (Supplement)

MUSIC?

SOME CONFESSIONS.

BY H. X. GIBSON.

If there exists a'person who is a bigger numskull than I am in matters musical, I would like to meet that person. A little learning being a dangerous thing, my attainment in music is very dangerous indeed, and that is one of the reasons, I suppose, why I am writing about it. Curiosity, however, is the chief motive, curiosity to find out whether the feelings of any other people are similar to mine. I cannot tolerate most of the music I hoar nowadays. I mean the ordinary type of music one hears in the ordinary way. It jangles my nerves. Some of it drives me mentally berserk. Some of it makes me feel homicidal. Does anybody else feel the same ? Tell me, friend-in-the-street, do you really .like the up-to-date type of ballad, the songs wo hear every day, most of them perpetrated in America? Do you like the whispering baritone? Do you like —ask it not in Gath —the popular fox-trots, the jazz tunes and all the kindred jangles ? If you do, you are lucky, for they are the types of to-day. I have to get out of range of their noise. Either Ido not understand them or there is something wrong with my ears. If jazz-jangle is music, however, I wouldn't have my ears different for all the brass gongs in Crazyland. Tone deaf? No, I'm not tone deaf, for I can readily distinguish between Wagner's Bridal March and Horsey Keep Your Tail Up, though possibly this might be through association of ideas, for I hear tho one only when I attend church to witness young optimists sealing their doom, and the other, well, tho picture on the cover is fairly descriptive, isn't it! "Then you are fond of high-flown classical music?" someone asks. No, decidedly not. I can no more understand the superlative in music than I can understand the impressionism of the cubists. When I listen to very high-class music, I mean those wonderful things called symphonies in P major, and Op. 2.05 and concerto-de-cube-root (my terms are adrift ! but you know what I mean), when I listen to those wonders I feel as though I had been taken up aloft among celestial souls that gape askance at my human crudity, and I long to get down again to mother earth and to my pals Annie Laurie and the Company Sergeant-Major. I know I am displaying bad taste, but I cannot help liking, tho songs and tunes that make me feel happy or reminiscent or lazy or all stirred up. Give me the ope.-as I can understand. I would rather hear Maritana or The Bohemian Girl tonight than listen for twelve months to all the praeludia and adagios and dithyrambs, or whatever they are, that were ever Rubinsteined. Is It Bad Taste? Is it bad taste that causes mo joyfully to spend precious pounds so that I shall not miss a single note of Gilbert and Sullivan's delightful liltings and tilting.-?, that caused me, vears ago, to journey nearly 100 miles through mud and rain to hear the Bossies o' the Barn, and yet which leaves me cold at the wondrous execution of a world-famous pianist who holds his audience spell-bound with the artistic elegance of his academical rhapsodies ? Maybe, but I prefer the homelike things I can understand. I prefer to watch with enjoyment the crackling logs by my own fireside than to gaze with awe at the frigid beauty of a majestic iceberg shimmering iri the blue of an alien sky. Bv high-class music I do not mean the many simple and beautiful airs given to us by Grieg, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, Haydn and a score of others, but when those masters of music wander off into their weirdly ultra-artistic compositions with a tinkling treble, a roaring bass and a midships crash, then I'd rather listen to the sharpening of a cross-cut saw, for that I can understand. Regarding a type of balled are getting to-dav, to those folk who Wanna Go Whore "sfou Go, and to whom Our Grapefruit I'll Bet You is Not Gonna Wet You, I have nothing to. say. I dare not criticise, for in the days of my youth I frequently addressed in song a certain Miss Daisy Bell, vociferously informing her that She'd Look Sweet, Upon the Seat, of a Bicycle Built for Two, and many a time I have declared to the world that a lady named Annie Rooney was My Sweet-heart, that I was her beau, and that soon we'd marry, nev-er to part, but, when serenading these ladies my mates and I did not endeavour to put our knees out of joint by imitating the neurotic niggers of Charleston, nor would we have tolerated the thumping of tom-tom accompaniments to our amorous declarations. I cannot understand the craze for the whispering baritone. I\'ve tried to. I've listened carefully to faithful records and to the actual singing, and I've always felt that the whisperer must be gripped in the bonds of a tight pair of corsets, or that he is in prison, lisping his lullaby through tho bars to a sympathetic morepork. Perhaps the whispering baritono originated in the raspings of an ulcerated throat. Anywav, I would rather hear our honest old "On the Ball! On the Ball!" ringing from the throats of a lusty brake-load of muddied oafs than the artificiality of all the whispering baritones that ever wheezed and gargled. Jazz Music. Jazz music ? That's a contradiction in terms. As well speak of ugliness lilies or colourless rainbows. Music is a connected series of sweet sounds, melodious and harmonious. Jazz is a syncopated cacophony of unmelodious noises, usually disconnected and inharmonious. Not even the flappiest flapper or tho pommiest pretty-boy can truthfully deny that. On the mud flats of the Congo, with naked savages for "musicians," and with crocodiles and monkeys for an audience, the Aeolian howling and erratic thudding called jazz is quite at home. Elsewhere, under the guise of music, it is an insult. Played by tho best of its bands it is bad enough; we have to suffer it as we suffer paranoia and other mental diseases. But when the saxophones obtrude themselves the noise is to me like a materialised neurasthenia tweaking a severed nerve. I'm glad saxophones are expensive. I think the word itself must be a hybrid derived from sacks-o-phonos, meaning, of course, the sound "Oh!" snorted through empty sacks. This reminds me of another instrument of torture, the ukulele, which, by the way, is not of Hawaiian origin. It came, I believe, from Portugal, and the word means "-the jumping flea," an insult to the flea, for that pest is silent when it jumps, whereas the other yowls and twangs. Ukuleles are tolerable when one hears them across the water (far across) played by happy summer lads and lassies. Otherwise, to me they sound like neuralgic zithers with their insides missing. The Bagpipes. This article is developing into a diatribe, a jeremiad, so I had better get on to a final confession. Laugh, jeer, hold up your hands, or point tho finger of scorn as you will, but —I love tho bagpipes. You cannot reconcile dislike for a saxophone with love for the bagpipes ? I suppose not, but there it is. Nothing in the Avide world sends my blood a'eoursing as does the wail o' the pibroch. Maybe because many ancestors marched to the swish of the tartan and the skirl of the pipes. Ido not know. A bit of a jumble, all the above, and I pity anyone who tries to describe my taste in music. I fancy I can hear 99 out of ICO opinions. Anyway, I've confessed the truth, and I'm wondering whether I am alone, isolated, ostracised, or whether anyone else feels as muddled and inconsistent in his ideas about music as I do. If so, I liopo he'll own up !