PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 638, 15 April 1929, Page 9

PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC

AVERAGE MAN’S LACK OF UNDERSTANDING

ADDRESS TO ROTARY CLUB “Advertise a lecture on how to make 6d into Is and you get an audience, but advertise a lecture on music and there is quite a different story.” said Mr. Arthur Hirst, F.R.S.A., addressing the Rotary Club to-day. He was speaking on the views of the average man to music. "Usually he regards both music and musicans as, well, all right, and if the musician is of particular note, he gets some respect from the average mar, particularly if the average man knows nothing whatever about music,” continued the speaker. There was an immense field of joy and pleasure open to the average man in music, without any technical understanding, but to understand the music he must understand something of the mea-ning and origin of music. Music was the universal language, the language of the feelings and the spirit. It was a great servant of brotherhood. It was the language of heart to heart. Mr. Hirst mentioned the lives and aspirations of the greatest composers their fellowship with the world at large, their hope of benefitting and giving joy. When the average man knew of their struggles and ideals he didn’t say “poor fellow.” Music came from great hearts, and it found others. He urged that New Zealand should not place mechanical efficiency before all, but should, as it remembered its sons in Flanders and Gallipoli, strive for the highest emotions, those which reached the finest of the spiritual planes attainable by the human race In reply to a question, Mr. Hirst said the modern tendency was the cultivation of the ego, whereas the best music was only produced when the ego was absent. The striving for effect, and the desire for sensation was one of the evil 3 of the age.

It so happened that at the present time all the scientists were turning back to religion. They could not. do anything else. it was the same in music. The iconoclastic: striving after effect, this general forgetting of the principles of music, w-hich remained the same in music as they did in arc. would come back into their own in the not very distant future.