WITH PIPE ALIGHT

Southland Times, Issue 19540, 2 May 1925, Page 13

WITH PIPE ALIGHT

ABT AND GRAMOPHONE (By Critic us.) Man is a blunderer. He has a generous supply of paving stones for his Hell, but in spite of his output of good intentions he makes the road to Hades almost as rocky as the track leading to the rival hostel. With wrinkled brow and rumpled hair, he will slave mightily over the evils of his age and, being human, he will finally reach a solution which will cure the trouble and lead him and his fellows to indulge in pseans of pleasure; but it is a golden guinea to a green gooseberry that a few months will be enough to show that the curing of the one evil has raised another in its place. The position is not changed when he gives the world some boon, a gift to add to his fellows’ delights, for there follows in the train of the presentation some evil development which in the lang run will balance the credit created by the donation.

Take, for instance, the manifest advantages of the gramophone. The inventor, or inventors (there are no great inventions which owe their positions in the world to one brain only) of the gramophone gave to his or their fellowmen a simple means of destroying distance and harnessing time. A few years ago men and women lived and died in New Zealand without hearing the world’s great music. Some of them listened to amateur organisations struggling nobly but heavily with compositions intricate enough to daunt the greatest of the professional orchestras or companies in the art centres and while these exercises did a tremendous amount of good in stimulating the interest in music they could not hope to cover more than a small portion of the field. Then came the gramophone and to-day people whose lot is cast in the outposts of Empire may hear singers they have never seen in the flesh, singers who were dead before their hearers were born, orchestras which never will move from music’s capitals, soloists whose temperament and business acumen will make visits to the sparsely populated parts of the Empire unthinkable. The latest works from the most modern, and the rattiest of the world’s composers are theirs to hear dozens of times, where formerly, even if they had lived in the Old World, they would have heard them not more than once or twice in the year. There is available to everyone the opportunity to encourage and to cultivate taste in music through that best-of-all methods—familiarity. But there is a fly in the ointment, a dark gentleman in the stack of timber, a flaw in the flute and other things of the kind. The blunderer has given us the gramophone, but the usual procession of evils is now busily marching forward. The gramophone, it has been discovered, threatens to make people lazy. Where music can be won from a disc of shellac, why should anybody worry with hours of scales and years of Nellie Bly catching flies? Why should amateur instrumentalists slave at rehearsals for one laborious performance when the greatest orchestras can be brought into a dining-room for a few shillings? .Why should nimble fellows perspire over the production of jazz, when the supplest of the syncopators can be called to service through the gramophone's sound-box? And the singers, are they free from the evil effects of the gramophone? Of course, in the old days, few people of British forbears thought of singing as anything more than mere vocalisation and they never worried about the higher flights of interpretation, but to-day things are different, and the amateur, who is too lazy or too frightened to trust himself, copies a gramophone slavishly. To the discriminating the results of the method are sufficient to betray it, because in the interpretation of music imitation is the surest road to disaster. One may accept the generalisation of a greater brain, but the active performance, to be successful, must be stamped indelibly with the individuality of the performer. Actually it is better to be original and wrong than to be a copiest and right. And so the seriously-minded amateur (some bluffing professionals have also been caught using the gramophone method) eschews the gramophone in order that his own ideas may have free rein. He finds it desirable to take this stand, too, because amongst other evils the gramophone has given to the believers, to the jaundiced pigmies a new weapon for use in their envious warfare. They are able to accuse a seriousminded interpretation, whenever he rises above the rut, of being the imitator of a record. This jibe can easily deceive the unthinking mob, though it invariably fails where discriminators are present. Then, too, the amateur critic, ill-armed for his job, and, awed by great names the records bear, declines to tolerate any work which does not amount to an imitation of the whirling disc.

Another evil to be watched in connection with the gramophone is the threat it levels at the existence of orchestras. Proposals are already afoot for the design of special instruments which will make it possible for the gramophone to reproduce sounds that will duplicate those of the present-day instruments. If that is achieved special gramophone orchestras will be installed and they will pick the artists out of the great professional organisations which now are the delight of music-lovers. Composers, too, may take to writing music with an eye on the richly-stuffed coffers of the gramophone companies.

These are some of the more serious dangers of the gramophone which has done so much in the world to encourage a love of good music in all its branches; but while we may tremble for the future we have the consolation of knowing that it is the abuse rather than the use of the machine which is to be feared. The gramophone is the product of Man’s ingenuity and it is, therefore, subject to the effects of Man’s blunders. It is an aid to Art in encouraging and cultivating taste; it is a danger to Art in making things more difficult for the creative and interpretative artist.