NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20391, 21 October 1929, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

NEWCOMERS IN PALESTINE. "The religious differences between .Jews, Moslems and Christians in Palestine, which has always been a stormcentre of controversy through the ages, are not the sole cause of the unrest," say the London Sunday Times. It should be remembered that the native peasantry—the Canaanites, as they may be called—are a primitive folk, mostly very poor and shiftless, whereas the Zionist immigrants are for the most part educated people from Western Europe and America, who work hard and are building tip modern industries. Two widely different types of civilisation have been suddenly brought into contact in a small country and the adjustment of the relations between them constitutes a very serious and delicate problem. It may easily be imagined that the cultured Jew looks down with contempt on these ignorant peasants and nomads, and that they in turn regard him with envy and fear. When education has spread through the native masses ar d the full meaning of impartial British justice is realised, the two races will learn to dwell together in harmony and to respect each other. But this will take time and meanwhile order must be preserved at all costs." CASUAL ACQUAINTANCES. "All of us are continually coming into contact with ordinary men whom we never see again. We meet, perhaps converse, and separate to meet again no more," says a contributor to the Birmingham Post. "There is, if we consider the matter, something almost solemn in this brushing against a fellow creature for a few moments in the lifetime of both. Two men, each with his own personality and his own life-story, touch each other for a moment in the long course of history and then are lost to each other for the rest of their lives. The contact, however momentary, of two personalities is charged with possibilities beyond all power of calculation. There must be few people who cannot fell of the difference made in their lives by a brief talk with someone whom they never see again, of truths they have learnt, of seed-thoughts that have borne fruit, of new outlooks that have been gained. Formal logic may forbid us to argue from the effect of a few experiences to the prevalence

of a universal law, but imagination is here a truer guide than logic, and suggests that everything we hear and say makes a difference beyond the power of anyone to estimate. Considerations such as these must make all serious-minded people feel that they are under an obligation to be at their best wherever they go, and to remember that every stranger is a neighbour." NEW MOODS IN MUSIC. In his presidential address to the Incorporated Association of Organists, meeting in Hull, Sir Hamilton Harly. said a peculiar mental disease, which might ho called "the fear of being left behind," had afflicted the present musical generation with special virulence. Its symptoms were feverish enthusiasm for everything that was now, coupled with the complete lack of any guiding principles or standard of judgment. "Thoso who suffer from the disease in its worst form," he said, "are so tortured by anxiety to keep well in the front of every fresh movement that they cannot sgaro time to enjoy in peace anything which has already been accepted and approved. They are terrified at the thought of missing the coming of what they pathetically call the new music without knowing what they mean, and they are so obsessed by a determination to be ultra-musical at all costs that in reality they are hardly musical at all." .There were few modern %vorks which had sue' ceeded in gaining a wide and increasing succe-ss in any broad sense. Composers might bo gathered into two principal groups, tho serious pioneers who wero seeking fresh methods of expression, and tho charlatans who wore consciously insincere and whoso great aim was always to go ono better in the production of ugly and discordant noises. What wero the principal emotions conveyed by much of tho music of to-day ? In his opinion they wero restlessness, hardness, brilliancy, grotesqueness and a certain sardonic humour. Tho last was, perhaps, tho most valuable of the new moods in music, but ho doubted whether the qualities ho had mentioned were sufficient to give music enduring life. Dealing with tho future, ho said that perhaps future historians, when they looked back upon the present epoch, would refer to it as the Machino Age of music. They would note that as our daily lifo became oven more noisy and nerveshattering, so our music showed in its results an avoidance of steadiness and leisureliness. They would look back upon a period of discords with a contempt of charm and delicacy, with a ruthlessness and disregard for reticence, and would find in those characteristics a.reflection of the spirit of the age.