BORED TO DEATH?

Taranaki Daily News, 9 November 1935, Page 18 (Supplement)

BORED TO DEATH?

JAZZ IS DYING AGAIN. PROPHECY OF MUSICIAN. _ Dr. Thomas Wood, of the; Associated Board of Music, has been assuring a body of his learned friends at Oxford that jazz music is dying, killing itself by its monotony. Lovers of music would be glad to see this prediction swiftly realised, but the same happy assurance has been so often given before, with only worse jazz, and more to follow, that hope wearies, and one can only shut off the wireless to escape its boredom, says ■ the Children’s Newspaper.

There is a mystery about jazz and its development, the whining mockery of singing called crooning. Everybody with a musical ear enjoys melody, but jazz has forsaken melody for rhythmpunctuating noise, yet it claims more and more time from the 8.8. C. Who maintains this crooning business? It is an offence to anybody who appreciates singing. It has been denounced by the leaders of bands which persistently play it. They vowed not long ago that they would abandon it, but more and more the performers croon. Future historians who examine the music to which England submits with such marvellous patience will form a very low estimate of the people’s artistic tastes. They will wrong a generation for the mistakes and debased tolerance of the class to whom this stuff passes for music. It will be one of the severest indictments of the 8.8. C. that it fed the nation on such stuff for so many hours a day. Perhaps the historian will be charitable and rightly say that England was suffering from the effects of a world war. Great wars are always followed by disastrous consequences such as these. The terrible emotional stresses to which the strife and plagues and epidemics submitted the Middle Ages produced such effects; sufferers were reduced to leaping and dancing accompanied by strange cries and gesticulations. It lasted so long that there was time to try many cures, whereas England has sought only one. Some of the victims were gently but firmly buried up to the neck in earth until they confessed themselves cured. For others music proved a remedy, and the Tarantella, a suave and lovely dance measure, was evolved as medicinal melody. Its name is supposed to have been given owing to the actions of the victims resembling those who had been bitten by the tarantula spider. By what have those who leap and dance to jazz been bitten?