NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23384, 28 June 1939, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

SOUND AND EMOTION

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said: "I sometimes think that the cry of the curlew goes to my heart more than any sound in creation," notes a writer in the Evening News. There are sounds, detached from sight and heard across wide spaces, which can stir or uplift human hearts almost more than other influence. One has to bo very insensitive to resist the echo of a bugle, heard across a summer dusk from a distant camp; or in the London night the sudden hoot of a tug going upriver on the tide; or the sound of church-bells across fields; the sleepy lap of water against a dinghy; the thrum of telegraph wires in the wind; the song of the lark, the jingle of a barrel-organ, the laughter of children, and all the soft little whispers of an old house on a quiet night.

NEW STATE MOLOCH

Over a largo part of the formerly Christian world the Christian scale of values on which our civilisation has been built up is openly repudiated, and new values of human creation have been set up, states the report of the Inter-Church Relations Committee presented to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In largo areas truth and justice are no longer regarded as standards which have their origin in God, says the report. The State sets up its own standards of truth and justice, and calls by theso names whatever it regards as necessary for its existence. The consequence is that human liberties are broken in the interests of the State; the human person is dethroned because God is dethroned; in the place of God the idol of the State is worshipped, with the result that mercy and compassion and the decencies of life are scoffed at and man is inevitably reduced to slavery.

SOOTHING THE SAVAGE BREAST

"A great many people may love music, but the question is whether they love good music," said Professor Sir Percy C. Buck, of London University, in an address to students of music at Liverpool. "People misuse music as they misuse games, by seeking glory for themselves. The reason for music, and all art, is a simple one —to make and spread happiness. The greatest compliment any musician can receive is to hear a listener say, not how well he had played, but how beautiful the music was. That is a lesson that musicians all over the world seem to have forgotten. They use their art as a means of self-glorification instead of as a means of bringing more beauty into human experience. I would like to steal into Liverpool City Council Chamber, when nobody is looking, and paint on the wall, as a sort of text, the wise words of Confucius, the sage of China: 'Have no education without music, for if wo had more music in the world there would be more courtesy and less war.' That seems very apt in these days."