The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. Gloucester Street and Cathedral Square CHRISTCHURCH NEW ZEALAND. SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1934. THE SOUL OF MUSIC.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20363, 21 July 1934, Page 10

The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. Gloucester Street and Cathedral Square CHRISTCHURCH NEW ZEALAND.

SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1934. THE SOUL OF MUSIC.

London Representatives: R. B. BRETT & SON NEW BRIDGE HOUSE, 30/34 NEW BRIDGE STREET, LONDON. E.C.4.

OINC.E PEOPLE have drunk music so constantly from the radio, a sort of inebriates’ stupor has settled over their powers of discrimination. Music and noise have become synonymous. Great masters come over the air almost on the same ether wave as jazz in nearly every restaurant. They are both served like a sort of auditory hors d’ceuvre before, with, between and after soup, meat, sweet, and savoury. Music is fairly eaten, but it is not listened to. At public and private parties the same hotchpotch of classics and jazz stirs at once cultured sentiments and primitive instincts, if indeed the senses react at all to the blanket of sound perfunctorily provided to hide the rents in polite conversation. Before long the nerves are fighting the music as they fight the noise of motor horns and exhausts in a busy street, and the strenuous days are blamed because the young are old and life is tasteless. Gone are the evenings when the great symphonies, so easily heard to-day, would have been a feast to turn over in the mouth and draw out to the last essence. All are sated now. But when a great artist passes by one has a nostalgia for music flowing from beneatli the artist’s hands, fresh music in.which Thoughts are .singing swallows And the brooks of morning run.. Perhaps it is the mark of a master that he can lift the soul clean out of the muddy vesture- of ourselves, forward to a vision splendid and back to childhood’s dreams, in the thin and delicate air of music. To some, music is an intellectual occupation, to others it is a sensory experience, but if the visit of a great pianist can renew in jaded spirits the feelings of sobbing and laughter as when intent children first dip their fingers in the stream of melody, then the heart of the people is sound. Old .men will still walk with their feet in the dew; children will pause in their play as the swan flies over the lake. For in an aesthetic sense the visit of a master calls one back to the hills of home, to the virgin mountain stream and the birds’ cry, riding the night wind. But these renewals come too seldom. The end of this year may see a resurgence of music and drama, in the forecast visits of artists like Backliaus, and of theatrical companies moving on from the Melbourne Centenary celebrations, and their coming may be the harbingeb of happier times when people will return to a normal appreciation of personal interpretation in music.

MASTER AND SERVANT. PARLIAMENT MUST • always stand in danger of losing its authority to a swollen and bureaucratic. government service, and it will be noted that the bitter Parliamentary debate about the reduced relief payments to unfit'workers was really a protest against an autocratic .line of action by the Unemployment Board, which lias been in hot water already this week over its attempt to set the courts at defiance. We have seen, this week, a protest by a Supreme Court judge against a piece of tyranny by the Railway Department, for which 116 could hardly find strong enough words of condemnation, and we have also had a Minister apologising for an unconscionable action by the Unemployment Board against a poor relief worker. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that Parliament is very largely to blame for vesting too much authority in its civil servants, but the blame must be shared by the Cabinet for the laxity of Ministers in failing to check a very objectionable type of official tyrant, of which we have a few very choice samples in New Zealand to-day.