Why are Musical People Quarrelsome?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVI, Issue XXI, 25 May 1901, Page 967

Why are Musical People Quarrelsome?

Music is credited with "power to soothe the savage breast,” but, like a good many other reputations, this seems to have been somewhat easily acquired. As a matter of fact, it is to be doudted if (even if it has the power) it ever exerts it. If it does, how comes It that musical people are the most irritable and quarrelsome, and (on occasions) the most childishly unreasonable in the world ? The latest musical squabble in Wellington once more brings the subject somewhat ludicrously before the public. Here are a number of grown and otherwise sensible persons bickering like a lot of silly school-children and throwing up positions and throwing down instruments in a manner strongly reminiscent of the “sha’n’t play” tactics of the nursery. And it is the same elsewhere. Wherever one or two musical lights are gathered together there will certainly be trouble. The power of music seems less to soothe than to inflame the passions, and to bring out a side of character usually decently disguised or repressed. Your musician, especially your vocalist, takes liberties which others would be ashamed to do, and which, indeed, society would not tolerate from anyone else. The petulance which would gain an infant a spanking is excused to the tenor as one of the “eccentricities of genius,” and insolences which would gain a kicking for any other member of society are condoned. It is this attitude of the public which has led the musical fraternity into the slough of childish squabbling and snarling and sniping which is now their abiding place. A prolonged treatment of contemptuous ridicule would probably effect a cure in a very brief space of time, and the public would be spared a somewhat ridiculous spectacle which seems to grow worse and worse as the years go by and threatens to become permanent.