MUSIC NOTES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1436, 1 November 1917, Page 34

MUSIC NOTES.

(By

“G” String.)

Mr. H. Braithwaite, of Dunedin, now in London, has won a scholarship fbr composition at the Royal Academy of Music. The competition took place on September 19th, and the result is just announced, his mother, Mrs. Joseph Braithwaite, being advised by cablegram. Mr. Braithwaite chose as his subject Tennyson’s “Passing of Arthur.” The scholarship is tenable for three years. The news of his son’s death came to Harry Lauder while he was singing a comic song in a London music hall. They handed him the telegram when he came off the stage, and he fell into a chair, says the Kansas City “Star.” In his agony he rushed over to France, and saw the grave of his son and heard there the story of how the boy had turned to God in the trenches, and of how bravely he died; and then Lauder hastened to comfort his wife in their Scottish home. There a good old Scottish dominie went to console him. He found Lauder in an armchair by the 'fireplace. “Ah,” said Lauder, “the loss o’ my bonny boy greeted me sore” (greet is Scotch for grieve). “We were pals, my boy and I, and if you could have seen that little white cross in France you might imagine a little of the ache that came into my heart, and the emptiness that came into my life. When a great blow like that hits a man he takes one of three roads. He may give way to despair, sour on the world, and become a grouch; he may try to drown his sorrow in drink, and become a wreck; or he may turn to God. I have chosen my road. I have turned to God.” Since then Harry Lauder has been singing and preaching to the soldiers in the concentration camps in England and in the camps behind the battle-line in France and Belgium. A worker for the Y.M.C.A., recently returned from the front, tells of a meeting held one Sunday night in a big dug-out so close to the battle-line that bits of bursted shells, falling upon the board roof, sounded like the tattoo of hail. In the light of a few candles, a hundred men, fresh from the front and familiar with death, sat on the ground and listened while Harry Lauder told them how he had turned to God.