VOICES OF PROTEST

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20503, 22 August 1936, Page 14

VOICES OF PROTEST

SEQUEL TO MALCOLM SARGENT CONCERT Many protests have been voiced by music-lovers (says “The Dominion") who are radio listeners at the action of the authorities in transferring the broadcast of the Wellington Symphony

Orchestra’s concert from station 2YA to station 2YC. As a result of this the great mass of listeners outside

Wellington and the nearby areas—not to mention many listeners in Wellington itself—were unable to enjoy the privilege of hearing the Wellington Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Dr. Malcolm Sargent, on Tuesday evening.

Station 2 YA, which is powerful enough to be heard by reasonably efficient modern sets from almost any part of New Zealand and from many parts of Australia and even further afield, began at 7.30 p.m. to broadcast the proceedings of -the House of Representatives. Station 2YC took over the major station’s programme at that hour, and at 8 p.m. station 2YC proceeded to broadcast the concert, continuing until half a minute after 9.30 p.m.

A radio expert told “The Dominion” that Australian listeners would

have no chance of hearing the first hour and a half of the concert from 2YC, while only the most powerful sets In New Zealand centres outside Wellington would hear it. It would certainly not be heard further afield in other parts of the world.

From 9.30 p.m. until the close of the concert the broadcast was carried on by 2YA, when many listeners, near and far, who had been endeavouring without success to tune in were able to enjoy the closing stages of the concert. Several people residing in the suburbs of Wellington expressed surprise at the concert not being broadcast from 2YA. “I get 2YC fairly well when conditions are good,” said a listener, “but there is greater security of volume and certainly a better tone from 2YA. It was a surprise and a disappointment to me to find that the concert, conducted by such a man as Dr. Sargent and partly financed by the national broadcasting service, should be so

shabbily treated. I think for once Parliament might have treated this great conductor with more consideration, to

say nothing of the manner in which many listeners-in were deprived of the privilege of hearing the best part of the programme, as many up-country people do not get 2YC with anything like the clarity they get 2YA.” Broadcasting and the Public “What is the situation in music today, as compared with that of a decade back?” asks Sir Walford Davies, and he answers his own question thus: “Though it must be admitted that there is prevalent at the moment much depressing broadcast evidence of a debased taste for senseless music sensationally rendered, there is also a strikingly healthy and rising tide of musical understanding and taste for the art itself, as apart from its associated uses. “You may safely picture millions listening nightly; among these, tens of thousands are doubtless listening with ever-increasing critical discernment; and among these again, hundreds of

young listeners of outstanding musical sensitivity are listening creatively (including, maybe, a genius or two), feasting on the good things, but mentally vowing never, when their chance comes, to afflict the world with the banalities that are still so frequently heard. Public taste must needs go up and up, as well as down and down to the nether regions of deadly unthinking iteration. And if I may here be pardoned a violent analogy, even decay makes for good fertilising. “I expect, as listeners, we roughly differentiate the various nationalities in music by general impression rather i than by any details of melodic or har- 1 monic pattern; by uses of mass and j colour and by rhythmic behaviour . rather than by the bend or turn of the ■ composer’s melodic lines or chords. In , this general way I have been surprised | to hear a person, self-styled as being j musically ignorant, exclaim while I listening-in, ‘That’s Debussy, isn't it?’ | when not only was the guess correct, | but when the composer was being (as I imagined) very faithfully French in j his elusive orchestral ways.”