MUSICIAN ON JAZZ

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22714, 29 October 1935, Page 11

MUSICIAN ON JAZZ

WHAT RHYTHM MEANS NON-EXISTENT AS MUSIC PRIMITIVE BASIS Everywhere nowadays one hears of the iniquities of jazz, together with therid«r that at last it shows signs of dying (writes Percy Buck, professor of music at London University, in the Daily Mail), Assuming that the public are tiring, of jazz, did any good ever come of abusing a thing of which another man is fond? Few likes and dislikes, if any, are to he affected by reproach or argument; they must be "grown out of"; and I, personally, ain glad for several reasons if it is true that in the future I shall be condemned to hear less jazz than in the "In the beginning was rhythm," said a famous musician. . We, and most animals, are born with the power of dividing time into equal periods. The baby thumps ; its pillow or kicks its legs in strict time, and the newly-born animal walla or runs about with steps of equal duration^ The most primitive races develop this sense, on tom-toms and similar instruments, to a state of high efficiency, and for thousands of years they have, had no other form of music. METRE AND RHYTHM. It is a definite epoch in the civilisation of a tribe or race when they make the startling discovery that sounds of varying pitch can be superimposed on existjng rhvthmical units, thus producing, for the first time, what we would call music. Everyone dislikes the jargon of techmeal terms, but a good deal of misunderstanding arises from the fact that we make the word rhythm cover too many things. The division of time into equal parte, with accents placed periodically (as in the "left, right" of a marching regiment) is, in a strict sense, not rhvthm at all, but metre. -—',.•./' Rhythm begins with the first disturbance of the metrical pattern, as a curve begins with the first bending of a-straight line. After saying "All, the world s a stage," Shakespeare, continues:— And all the men and women merely players, which is metrical, with the five accents in their normal places. Having established this pattern, he continues:•They have their exits and their, entrances, which is rhythmical because it is a departure from pattern. " Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle," is ' metrical, but" The cow jumped over the moon" rhythmical. Substitute "bullock" for "cow" and the rhythm disappears.. CONSTANTLY DEVELOPED. Now these two aspects of music, the rhythm and the sound (that is to say. the melodic and harmonic aspects) imposed on it have developed continuously since first they were fused together. The rhythm of " Linden Lea " is as tar ahead of the little tags played on tom-toms as is the harmony of the " Tannhauser prelude when compared with early attempts at combining notes. . . The hall-mark of being educated ID music—which does not mean being a " highbrow." but merely that you can appreciate good music—is the fact that you are not appealed to by music which deliberately ignores this progress and tries to work on the primitive, unsophisticated elemental instincts. _ There is nothing discreditable in likins such a manipulation of sounds—we are all stirred by a bugle-call, though we should not put it in the category of " Rood music —but it becomes a potential danger when the bulk of a nation, including those who in other respects would resent bein/ called uneducated, openly avow that tms class of music is most worthy ot appreciation. , „ . Personally, I would not call jazz music at all. Its harmony, when it is not merely a scaffolding which is the common property of all, or a borrowed progression from Dclius or Debussy, is crude and unskilful. WEAK STRUCTURE. Its structure, the element on which au artist spends so much loving labour,.* almost non-existent —even the little jom« between the phrases, known in the trade as " breaks," can be bought at so much a dozen in the Charing Cross road. And its melodies seem, to a musician, to be all the work of one man repeating him self. But in its rhythm it may claim some merit. Until it came to bore us it was often felt to be original, striking, and seductive. To musicians the objection to jazz was that it was trying to oust the thing that music had come to be, after.thousands ot years of labour, in favour of something which was so purely an appeal to crude instinct that the primeval savage would, and does, appreciate it. We would all of us like life to be simple, but simplicity does not mean a return to the raw and uncouth; and though music may be a small thing In the whole apparatus of life, rhythm was a fundamental fact in us in a prehistoric stage. And. whether through jazz or any other modem perversion, few of us really desire to pander to our animal instincts.