WORLD OF MUSIC

Southland Times, Issue 19102, 21 November 1923, Page 10

WORLD OF MUSIC

At Home and Abroad

(By

“Presto.”)

Edward Branscombe’s Westminster Glee Singers commenced a farewell tour of New Zealand at the Town Hall, Auckland, last Wednesday. From J. Albert and Son, of Sydney, has come a copy of the notorious "Yes, We Have No Bananas,” a song which has already captured three continents. It rose in America, the work of two members of a Jazz Band. They took a slang phrase and put the song around it, with the result that now their bank accounts are bloated. A great deal has been said the blatant nonsense of the song and its central phrase, but actually it hits off the foreign street vendor with rare skill. It has a good lilt, is easy to sing, effectively humorous, and in the hands of a man with some imagination could be made quite a good character study. When you have played it over you have no doubt about the reason for the craze you have heard about, that, of course, is if to stop your whistling of it to ponder on its terrific success. I predicted it, and it has arrived (writes James Glover in the London Stage)—“The Blue Hungarian Band” at the Grafton Galleries, an orchestra of eleven ex-enemy aliens in the employ of a British concern run by three British ex-officers. It appears that the eleven “gipsy musicians” — for so they are described—got a permit to come over here for seven weeks to exploit some lectures on Hungarian music at a Liverpool congress, of course with the usual result. Having got a footing in this country they’ wanted to stop, but the Ministry 7 of Labour has put its foot down, and I suppose they are now on their way back, for their application to remain cannot, in view of the general unemployment, be seriously considered. But this is not all. Two other ex-enemy aliens have also come over, the one to give a violin recital, and the other his accompanist. They were soon found, when they had finished their recital labours, directing dance bands in one of our most British caravanserai. I will not labour the matter, as I understand the M.U. has it well in hand; but Sir Montague Barlow’s absence in Ireland has rather retarded immediate action, although why it should do so I know not. The banjulele is the latest craze of society’s leisure time. Stage stars, peeresses, and daughters of Cabinet Ministers are all playing it. You pronounce it “Ban-joo-lay-lay,” and it comes from the romantic Hawaiian Island (says the Westminster Gazette). Its mother is the native ukulele, and its father the banjo. You play it with your fingernails, and its effect is dreamy and languorous, suggestive of quiet nights under the Southern Pacific moon. “Jazz music,” said Mr Keech, the inventor, “is dead. It is nothing but a noisy blare. No one ever thought it would last long, and now it has given place to this beautiful and tuneful instrument. Softness and wistfulness will be the note of this year’s dance music. Anyone can learn the banjulele in half-a-dozen lessons. You need only the most elementary knowledge of music. It is ideal either as an accompaniment for a ballad or for syncopated music.” The Christchurch Male Voice Choir recently took a vote to discover the most popular of the items it had included in its programmes during the season. The first 12 numbers were as follows i Votes. “The Bells of St. Michael’s Tower” .. 130 “Violets (boys only) 110 “Rolling Down to Rio” 95 ‘‘What Shall We Do W’ith a Drunken Sailor” (chantey) 94 “Soldiers’ Chorus” 89 “Drake’s Drum” 87 “Dashing Away” (boys only) .. .. 80. “Cargoes ’ 73 “Hail, Smiling Morn” (with boys) .. 73 “Oh, Hush Thee, My Baby” (with boys) J. 63 “The Londonderry Air” (with boys) 63 “The Long Day Closes” 62 ‘Breathe, My Harp” (Bishop), “Love Wakes and Weeps” (Calcot), “Absence” (Hatton), each of which secured but one vote, and “Landerkenning” (Grieg), with two votes, and “Shades of the Heroes” (Cooke), with three votes. Feodore Chaliapin is touring in the United States. The Sistine Choir in U.S.A, is under the leadership of Mgr. Rella, successor to Perosi. Vladimir de Pachmann’s statement in an interview that he played with a “stiff wrist” caused a great disturbance in musical circles and the pianist is still engaged in explaining the error which caused the appearance of the statement. What Mr Pachmann said was “a straight wrist.” In an interview with John Alan Haughton of Musical America, issue of September 8, 1923, Mr de Pachmann said regarding the “stiff wrist”: “Could anything be more absurd? Can you imagine playing the piano or doing anything else with stiffened muscles? They simply misunderstood me, those reporters, or they didn’t know a lot about the piano. Now what I did say was this: ‘I now play without any lateral motion of the wrists, and the line from the angle of the second joint of the hand to the elbow is the diameter of a circle.’ In other words, such lateral movement as is required has the elbow as the centre of a circle and not the joint.” The Verbruggen Quartet opened the New York season of chamber music with six concerts, October 2 to 12, at Aeolian Hall with quartet op. 51, No. 2; Mozart’s quartet in C and Beethoven’s in F. op. 59, No. 1. “The popularity of Scriabin seems to be on the wane,” says The London Times, "if one may judge from the comparatively small attendance at the Queen’s Hall when the ‘Poeme de I’Extase’ was the chief item in the programme. The performance was suaver and less hysterical than some we have heard under other conductors; but this merely served to disclose more clearly the real poverty of the music, once the first glamour of its strange harmony has passed away. But Scriabin is a composer about whom it is futile to argue. To some he is the evangelist of a new gospel; on others his music produces the unpleasant effect which one experiences on witnessing the hysterical outburst of a neurotic person. We prefer to regard this music as the work of an extremely clever man, who might have been a genius had he not been turned aside from the true aim of music by his megalomaniac egocentricity.” And it goes to speak of his “cloying harmonies.” I Arthur Bliss’s concerto for tenor voice, ' strings and percussion, though not new to 1 the London concert halls, afforded material for discussion. The Times finds that “there is an individual melodic invention in this oomposer’s works which compensates for his tendency (less noticeable, one may add, in more recent productions) to be too clever by half. One wondered why, if the words the vocalist has to sing have no particular meaning, they were printed in the programme. They are not intrinsically beautiful and their significance is certainly vague. But they do seem to have a definite relation to the moods of the music. Might one suggest that what Mr Bliss has really done is to set words, a kind of programme, to his music, reversing the ordinary process of setting music to words?”

A somewhat unusual novelty at the Promenade Concerts was a set of four old choral preludes originally composed for organ and now arranged for orchestra by Dame Ethel Smyth. They are all very beautiful, says The Telegraph, and the new arrangement—aptly simple and straightforward—adds here and there a touch of colour enhancing the nobility and the devotional mood of the music. The strings form the mainstay of the score. In the first the trumpet, in the third a trumpet and a trombone, in the fourth the flute—these

are the only instruments which support or rather underline the quartet. The orchestra, conducted by Dame Ethel Smyth, played them well. After much discussion during the summer on the neglect of Elgar’s music in London, his violin concerto was played at one of the Promenade Concerts by Margaret Fairless. The performance, according to The Telegraph, aroused the audience to “an extraordinary pitch of enthusiasm.” It goes on to say: “When we consider what Elgar means, what he stands for in contemporary music, there is every justification for impatience with the slow progress of public appreciation. Yet the progress is very sure. How many other vioun concertoes, modern t or ancient, could have stirred the audience as Elgar’s did on Wednesday? We know only of two works of equal rank—Beethoven’s and Brahms’s. Of the two other works of the so-called classical repertory, Mendelssohn’s is weak in the second movement, for an age which has done away with the bread-and-butter Miss has no use for sugary sentimentality, and Max Bruch’s G minor concerto lacks proportion, owing to the substitution of a formless introduction for the usual first movement. There is no doubt that Elgar's violin concerto is rapidly gaining the fame it deserves. The rest will assuredly follow in good time. Handel’s opera entitled “Julius Caesar” has been exhumed from the dust of library manuscripts and performed in Berlin with success. The opera was written in 1724. Nicola Hayne was Handel’s librettist. Contrary to managerial hopes, Gay’s “Polly” has not proved a second “Beggar’s Opera,” in respect |o its appeal to the public. Still, when it was withdrawn last month, it had completed more than 300 performances. Said a New York critic recently: “John Philip Sousa, with the men of his own band and those of I cannot saw how many others, occupied the vast platform of Madison Square Garden, on the night of October 7, where they gave a programme of marches and other selections, appearing under the auspices of the National Navy Club. Sousa’s rhythm greatly charmed me for the half hour that I was present at the end of the evening. It remained a delight, even when the march time became monotonous. Everything I heard was in twos and fours except the closing number, the ‘Torchlight Dance’ of Meyerbeer, which brought the relief of threes. It occurred to me as I listened that symphony concerts would be a greater rhythmic joy than they usually are if conductors would study the beat of Sousa.” DE PACHMANN IN CANADA. Vladimir de Pachmann opened his American tour in Toronto on October 1, ’although the famous pianist declared that the recital did not open his American tour, but completed his British tour. De Pachmann drew a greater crowd to hear him than he ever did before in Toronto, even when he was in his prime, and the audience behaved as Toronto audiences, which are notoriously staid, seldom have been known to do. They remained after the final number and pressed up to the platform to cheer and applaud the artist, who capered and laughed delightedly in response to the ovation. So far as mannerisms are concerned, De Pachmann has not altered in the least (says one writer). He talked to his audience not only between numbers but during them. He explained that though he was still the "greatest pianist in the word,” his memory had not remained as perfect as his hands. He had to have his music in front of him for some numbers—so he said. But he used the score only for the unfamiliar Chopin E major scherzo (op. 54) and the Grande Polanaise in F sharp minor, and as a matter of fact, be hardly seemed even to glance at it. He gave caricature demonstrations of how other pianists did certain things, and even repeated part of the F major Etude to show how he used to do it years ago, when he “played as badly as Rubinstein,” as he put it. There has been no falling off in the perfection of De Pachmann’s Chopin interpretations. He still ’plays with a wonderfully silken quality of tone, with exquisitely delicate shadings and modulations. He is not so satisfying, perhaps, in heroic passages, but after all, the mazurkas were always the compositions in which the perfection of his art was seen. One Toronto musician, with mole temerity than most, remarked after the concert thab the old clarity of tone was not always there. He suggested that the C sharp minor Nocturne was clouded. De Pachmann replied in despair, bemoaning the stupidity of audiences. It was his new tone, softened and shaded, that had been mistaken for clouds. De Pachmann has the same old liking for explaining himself and his genius. AMERICA’S LYRIC LAND. WHERE THE CRAZY SONG CRAZES ARE LAUNCHED. In New York is a place called Tin Pan Alley, a narrow street in the older part of the city and there, it is stated, the great song crazes have their birth; there a crowd of lyricists, mostly Jewish, make the songs which millions buy and millions sing. Irving Berlin, the dean of the Tin Pan Alley coterie is only in his early thirties. He began his career pounding a tinny piano for pitched nickels in Nigger Mike Salter’s sawdust-coated emporium in Chinatown (says a writer in the Cosmopolitan). From this obscurity “Little Izzy,” as Chinatown knew him, has become the master syncopater of his day. A million dollar theatre bears his name. He typifies the romance of popular song writing. Born in Russia, this frail young man with dreaming, sad eyes has gathered a fortune composing tintinnabulations for a jazz-mad age. Tortured by insomnia, he is rarely seen in public, and when he is he moves about like Banquo’s ghost, lost in reverie. There is little flubdubbery among the “Ivory benders.” They have no illusions about their art nor do they claim membership in the intelligentsia. Any number of them have never had a music lesson, and the arpeggios that drip from their busy fingers are often inspired, they confess, by the old masters and jazzed up in the syncopating style of the period. Plagiarism is not in the Tin Pan Alley lexicon. Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt have done their bit for the Alley. The deathless work of the master may become a dreamy, peachy banality in the Tin Pan Alley adaptation. One of the most accomplished composers of jazz stratagems picks out his tunes on a zither. Another is able to play only a harmonica. Earl Carrol plays the piano with one finger. Dave Stamper learned to play by ear while “slinging beer” at Coney Island. Gene Buck, the most successful of lyricists, began his career in Tin Pan Alley drawing water colour pictures for song title pages. Bud de Silva was a theatre usher. George Gershwin was a salesman. In all America only about 200 stand out in their profession. The greater number of these are attached to composing staffs of music publishing houses or are retained by musical show producers. The average income is around 20,000 dollars a year. Not more than ten song writers have had huge financial returns. The blind musician who wrote “The Sidewalks of New York,” made less than 100 dollars. The song to-day, with the same popularity, backed by the Alley’s dynamic selling power, would make a half-million. Paul Whiteman’s estimable jazz band playing a week at the Palais Royal would result in a sale of one hundred thousand copies. America’s youngest song writer, i little Betty Gulick, of Brooklyn, aged io’ made 10,000 dollars this year with a song that had lyrics about a mother singing her child to sleep. Charles K. Harris wrote “After the Ball,” and made Tin Pan Alley’s first fortune. Came such songs as “Good Bye, Dolly Gray,” “Break the News to Mother,” and “In thA Baggage Coach Ahead.” America was in a sentimental snivel after the reign of such senseless hyperbole as “Ta-ra-ra-boom-

de-ay.” It thrilled to the tawdry sentimentality of “The Curse of an Aching Heart,” and “My Mother Was A Lady.” It is quite easy to imagine that such songs would fall short of the mark to-day. Again the public’s capricious taste; for only two years ago a song called “They Needed a Songbird in Heaven—so God took Caruso Away,” had a wide sale. Then the lovd theme gained ascendancy. Albert Von Tilzer wrote “Take Me Out To The Ball Game!” and garnered 50,000 dollars. “In The Good Old Summer Time,” and “In The Shade of ! the Old Apple Tree” swept the country, and every lovesick Romeo played them on his mandolin under “her” window at night. Next came ragtime. It was simple in structure and composed in part from Negro melodies. The most sensational ragtime bit was “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” written by Irving Berlin. It made him nearly a half million dollars. Perhaps Berlin’s most ambitious effort was “When I Lost You,” written in his hour of almost inconsolable grief for the death of his young bride. Berlin tells me that in his opinion the best ragtime song ever written was “Waiting For Robert E. Lee,” the work of the late Lewis Muir. t It is Berlin’s favourite tune and was indeed the pioneer of our present two-four syncopated melodies. The next period was that of the song which had a double meaning. It began with “I Love My Wife, But Oh! You Kid!” Others of the period included “My Wife’s Gone To the Country, Hooray! Hooray!” “Who Paid the Rent for Mrs Rip Van Winkle when Rip Van Winkle Went Away?” “Who Are You With To-night?” (incidentally, it was not written “whom”). “Billy” and “Experience.” These songs were of an audacious mould with salacious implications, and to the credit of Tin Pan Alley were stopped by its organisation—the Song Writers’ Association. Two members of a jazz band at Murray’s old restaurant composed “Yes, We have No Bananas!”—a slang phrase popularised by Tad, the cartoonist—and it swept the country like wildfire, making a fortune. The first royalty split of this meaningless ditty was 60,000 dollars. To this will be added the one hundred thousand phonograph record sales. The publisher was doubtful of the song winning its way. So much indeed that he organised an auxiliary company so that the stigma of failure would not be his. The composers, Frank Silver and Irving Qphn popped into worldwide fame over night. It is in such instances as this that make Tin Pan Alley a modern El Dorado. Von Tilzer’s nut song “Oh, By Jingo!” has sold more than two million copies. Sophie Tucker singing “Tut, Tut, Tut,” and “He May Be Your Man But He Comes To See Me Sometimes,” has caused them to reach a high mark.