MUSICAL VALUES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22350, 22 February 1936, Page 36 (Supplement)

MUSICAL VALUES

ART OF APPRECIATION r "HARD TO DO PROPERLY" r- ■ '■ ll " Musical appreciation has its reputation still to make," says an English writer. "So much at least is clear from the manifost desire of its disciples to change the name. 'Appreciation' has come to mean 'just talk,' as 'criticism' has come to mean 'condemnation.' only because people do not as a rule appreciate dr criticise well enough. And they fail, not because of any inherent vices of head or heart, but because appreciating and criticising are both very hard thingH to do properly. " One of tho things that makes appreciation difficult when it deals w'ith music is that it is not pari materia with it. It is not merely that music turns chiefly upon feeling and words upon thought, and that before words can do their duty by feeling they have first to bo rescued from their ordinary associations; it is rather that appreciation is a matter of words, but musio of deeds. The musician does things, and they are final, or seem to us to be so. It can, indoed, be argued that words may be final, too; that Milton said things about' Christmas, Ralegh about death, Chapman about taking risks, Stevenson about the British Admirals, that do not need saying again. " Yet appreciation can bo a doing, too, I have twice heard it so, and am prepared to believe in many more instances of it. Ons was when Sir \Yalford Da vies collected a number of rarumscarum boys for a choir practice. He sat at the pianoforte, telling them what books to get, chants to look out, order to sit in and the rest, 'accompanying his requests with tunes they knew and counterpoints they could follow, till they were orderly and amenable, and the practice began in the right atmosphere. Such a little thing, no ono would notice it;^ yet so potent, xhe other was when George Dyson assembled a number of hard-bitten grownups inclined on the whole to believe that there was nothing much m all this modern stuff, and played and talked to them. Ho managed to say only half of what he intended, but it did not matter; his fingers and their touch had said it already; the explanatory words were useful, but tho playing met the need. . " ][t j s on the strength of such instances that one believes that gramophone illustrations will never achieve much. They bore, because there is no doing in them; it is &H done. That is in itself a contradiction of the artist mind. The painter has little interest in his finshed picture; he is itching to get on to the next one. It is his own fingers that tho appreciator must use, or his vocal cords (or his pupils') —his tongue, too, of course, but sparingly. " The besetting sin of appreciators is to become exhaustive and exhausting. We do not want to know everything. We do not as a rule get our knowledge of anything in that way; we browse. We read and re-read all about Elizabeth's sea captains and Cromwell's Ironsides, about Lackland and Cade and the Chartists, absorbing the how, long before we ask for the when and the why. We pick our bits of Shelley ana Herrick, Heine and Moliere, skip the Odyssey up to where Odysseus comes home and finds Eumaeus and Eurykleia and the dog, skim Mrs. Jameson after we have read about Portia and Ophelia and the ones we know, and we play and replay certain bits of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mozart's twelfth mass, capriccios of Mendelssohn, a book of selections of Bach and a whole lot of nameless stuff, long before we sit down to 'the 48,0r Wagner, or the books of violin sonatas. And when wg have done browsing we want chiefly to chew the cud and—to browse further; while appreciation keeps asking us to distinguish turnip-tops and thistles—a. thoroughly excellent way to end, but not to begin.''