ON

CHRONICLES

WIRELESS

N August the twenty-first the British Broadcasting Corporation inaugurated their first alternative programme and "Daventry Experimental" superseded Birmingham," a station which has done some very sound and conscientious work in the past and given a great deal of pleasure to thousands of listeners in the midland counties. It is too early yet to give an opinion about the success or failure of the experiment, as it will obviously take time before the B.B.C. is able to decide on the composition of the programmes from the two stations. At present " Daventry Experimental" is being used to provide an alternative form of entertainment to that broadcast from 5XX. It is not intended that the two stations shall relay respectively high brow" and "low brow " programmes, but rather that they shall offer something for the listener who wishes to concentrate, as well as for the person who only asks to be allowed to listen after a hard day's work. The new enterprise has been helped enormously by the fortunate revival of the "Proms," saved by the B.B.C.'s intervention, and Sir Henry Wood must feel that he has realized an ambition which must have been merely a fantastic dream in the past. One feels that the B.B.C. has wisely made no concession to the people whose Elysium would be a place where continuous entertainments by concert parties and jazz bands succeed one another in endless inanity.

It is not suggested that the listener can always be in the mood to appreciate classical music, talks, and drama; the point is, and the B.B.C. has grasped it, that it is possible to provide programmes which are light and yet not rubbishy in their composition. In a recent issue of the Radio Times there appeared a note on the art of listening to broadcast programmes which emphasized the necessity of choosing one's entertainment with care and of refraining from too much listening. This was a word spoken in season. Those who are compelled to attend the theatre or the concert room night after night for weeks on end know the boredom that can be bred from this constant demand for response from them. As time goes on, they are not able to give it, and so it is with those who listen in a haphazard manner, without taking the trouble to choose those items which really appeal to them. One noticed with regret that the Radio Times recently gave space to correspondence from individuals who proudly claimed that they spent more time by the side of the loud speaker or with the head phones to their ears than any other listeners. This is surely the same kind of silliness that animates those who glory in drinking more cups of tea or in taking part in any other of the innumerable varieties of modern Marathon to which the" stunt " press delights to give a liberal publicity. It is important that mood and environment shall be allowed to play a part in selecting one's programme, and discrimination should be used in order that a spell of listening shall not be followed by a violent attack of mental indigestion.

Before discussing recent programmes I would like to repair an omission by expressing thanks to Mr. Agate and to Mr. Scholes for their admirable fortnightly causeries on the plays and music of the day. A necessary educational feature, faithfully done, is Mr. Basil Maine's "Next Week's Broadcast Music," which is designed to help listeners to make up their minds beforehand as to which broadcasts are likely

to appeal most strongly to them. Mr. Maine must be added to the small and select band whose voices are particularly well adapted to the microphone.

For the majority of listeners there can be no doubt as to the most important event of the last few weeks. Music lovers all over the country rejoiced when they heard that the "Proms" were not to cease after all, and the substitution of the microphone for the fountain and the gold fish has given pleasure to millions in addition to those happy people who are able to be present at the Queen's Hall when Sir Henry Wood pilots his forces through an evening's programme. Various eminent musical critics have told us that the standard of the orchestra is not as high as usual this year, but there have been some notable performances all the same, as, for instance, those of the fourth and fifth symphonies of Beethoven. It is probable, too, that the "Proms " will be the means of introducing to wireless audiences some artists who have never broadcast before, and the fact that they are singing to a visible audience will certainly rob the ordeal of most of its unpleasantness for them. I am inclined to think that a great error has been made in omitting to relay the Saturday night concerts. These are usually composed of popular music with the addition of works by contemporary English composers, and the B.B.C. would have done well to relay them all, now that alternative programmes are available.

No lover of music can afford to complain of the opportunities which are placed before him now. The variety offered is bewildering and includes music of all kinds ranging from the famous Three Choirs Festival, held this year at Hereford, to the first annual Competitive Musical Festival at Bournemouth. Mr. Joseph Lewis continued the good work he has done for some time at Birmingham by conducting a studio performance of Judas Maccabaeus from Daventry Experimental in addition to a number of orchestral concerts, while the Wireless Orchestra and the Wireless Military Band maintain their usual high standard. The B.B.C. seems to be paying considerable attention to programmes formed to appeal to a definite mood. It does not always follow that one feels in a mood of" sad-sweet" recollection at nightfall, but if one does, the " Vesper " programmes, designed to exercise a soothing influence by the means of such compositions as Finlandia and Hark! Hark! the Lark, may have the desired effect. At any rate, one is bound to admire the honest effort which sets out to try every possible means of enlisting the sympathies of such a tremendous audience, but one feels that the gentleman responsible for the programme entitled Charms to Soothe," composed of " pleasant things with a tune and perhaps something to make you smile "overdid the button-holing method which seems to have crept into the pages of the Radio Times recently. A programme of good light music can afford to stand on its merits without being heralded by a sugary" puff" and I hope that the excellent traditions of dignity and urbanity are not to be allowed to lapse in favour of attractively worded advertisements which would not discredit the vendors of a patent medicine, eager to sell a commodity in which they had no great faith.

I am glad to find that the pianists who play so acceptably after the News Bulletin in the evening are now announcing the title of the composition after they have played it. The alternative programme enables operas to be repeated on successive nights, which must be extremely valuable to students of music. Recently the operas of Puccini have been given studio performances under the direction of Mr. Percy Pitt, and the artistes have included prominent members of the British National Opera Company, who have also broadcast, from Newcastle, Rossini's The Barber of Seville. A very interesting dramatic experiment began with the broadcasting of six full length plays which are to be given fortnightly during the hours set aside for school

transmission. The first batch is excellent in every way, for it includes Richard II, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, She Stoops to Conquer, Prunella, and Abraham Lincoln. If the first three of these are done with spirit, they will go far to remove the cloak of unnatural respect which covers Shakespeare in too many schools at the present time. They may even induce some sorely tried English children to realize that the spirit of our greatest poet is not to be found lurking among the copious notes at the end of the "school" editions so thoughtfully provided for them by their misguided elders.

Among the plays have been Harold Chapin's amusing and discursive comedy The New Morality with Mr. J. H. Roberts as the unfortunate E. Wallace Wister, and In Chinese Waters, a "thriller" by Vivian Tidmarsh. Both these plays were broadcast from the Cardiff studio, which maintains a high level of theatrical production. Without really good team work it is impossible for a studio performance to be effective and one must continue to stress the importance of frequent rehearsal upon all those who are responsible for producing plays for the microphone. In the past playlets with only two or three characters have failed completely because they have not been given enough attention, and it is clearly better to have a good monologue or character sketch if conditions do not allow time for adequate preparation. Excerpts relayed from plays during their representation in the theatre have not been invariably well chosen. A chunk of musical comedy acted and sung by people without very pleasing voices, to the accompaniment of commonplace music, does not seem likely to appeal even to that much maligned individual, the tired business man, who will probably discover that the fooling of a comic genius like Mr. Leslie Henson loses most of its point when it is listened to dispassionately from an arm chair in the smoking room.

Followers of sport have been given countless chances of hearing about all kinds of games and athletics during their actual progress, and among many excellent eyewitness accounts Mr. P. F. Warner's cricket talks have earned him the gratitude of cricketers all over the country, while Mr. H. M. Abrahams' description of the athletic contest between England and France at Stamford Bridge was sufficiently racy and colloquial to arouse in his hearers many of the emotions experienced by those on the ground. Mr. Bernard Darwin was so overcome by Mr. R. T. Jones' prowess in winning the Open Golf Championship that his story became an epic in which the English golfers figured as a shadowy background to the hero's triumphant progress. I saw the name of Mr. Neville Cardus in the B.B.C. programme with unmixed pleasure and regretted that circumstances made it impossible to hear him.

The proceedings of the British Association caused much heartburning this year because, it seems, they were not invariably intelligible to the layman. This fault could hardly be said to apply to Sir Arthur Keith's presidential address," Darwin's Theory of Man's Descent as it stands to-day," which was very clearly delivered, as were the introductory remarks of Sir Oliver Lodge, who might be taken as a model by all those who speak into a microphone. There have been instances lately when the B.B.C. announcers have seemed to take their duties a little less seriously than is usual. One gentleman is guilty of imparting a distinctly continental flavour to his announcements and I feel that this is seriously overdone when the very Irish name "McGuire " is pronounced as though its owner was a Frenchman.

The "Children's Corners" continue to be done as well as ever. It is impossible to have anything but admiration for the astounding impression of spontaneity given by all those who take part in them. These "uncles " and " aunts aunts" would contrive to make a grown-up birthday tolerable.

ERIC GILLETT

MUSIC

THE FRANKFORT MEETING

"T

HIS modern music," we fling out with contemptuous indifference. "That is not the phrase we used in the 'eighties when new chamber music of Brahms was coming to a hearing, and dim rumours came of a new work at Bayreuth and we wondered if we should ever be able to go there. That great pair divided the allegiance of the musical world; this crowd unites them in puzzlement and weariness. Yet it also divides; it divides age and youth by its adventure, and energy and listlessness by its challenge. It was said once that the best way of meeting the objections to Milton was to read him, and it is certain that the best way of removing prejudices to this modern music is to hear it.

To hear it in driblets from the running tap of the Contemporary Music Society in the Court House does not really meet the case. We must soak ourselves in it in a way that is not at present possible here. For two things are imperative; the music is difficult, but it must be both skilfully and sympathetically performed, and the audience must come with a real desire to take pains and a faith that the composer meant what he says. Music is not yet on that eminence in this country that enthusiasts will work without hope of payment or that the rich will pay for what they only hope one day to enjoy, or that audiences will be content to place the ideal aspect before the utilitarian; to mention such things even as possibilities is apt to raise a smile.

Yet it is these things that made the Frankfort meeting at the end of June so valuable. Performances were uniformly good, sometimes much more than good; the audience was sincere and attentive; and we got more than our money's worth because the Frankfort authorities were so hospitable and forthcoming, lending us their opera house and orchestra, managing and entertaining. The last two things we could do, but we have no State opera-house and orchestra to lend; we have the players, but not the audience that can induce them to put out their best. We saw once that the State Church must be endowed (though we seem to be forgetting it); we have not yet seen that endowment is equally necessary (and much cheaper) for art. National appeals are made for our tottering cathedrals; our concert halls and the spirit that animates them are left, through all the vicissitudes of unsettled times, to private enterprise. We once paid an aristocracy to keep the house of art in repair for us; now that we are ceasing to pay them we must do the repairs ourselves, if we do not wish to see the neighbourhood" go down."

When, as at Frankfort this year, we hear twenty-four composers one after another, the "crowd" soon begins to split up into individuals. Some have a taste for miniature (J. Bentzon, sonatina for flute, clarinet, bassoon, and W. Pijper, flute sonata), some for the vague (C. Delvincourt, "L'offrande à Siva") and grandiose (H. F. Gilbert, "The dance in Place Congo"). Some seek their inspiration in rhetorical figures (W. Vogel, string quartet) or mathematical puzzles (J. M. Hauer, Suite, Op. 48) or acrostics (A. Berg, Chamber concerto for pianoforte and violin, with thirteen wind instruments). Sometimes the exuberant content ran ahead of the formal technique (E. Axman, first symphony), sometimes the concise form hardly concealed the poverty of idea (M. Castelnuovo-Tedesco, "Dances of King David," for pianoforte), sometimes the two balanced happily (K. Beck, third string quartet).

Three works stood out from the rest. Carl Nielsen's fifth symphony, in two

movements, has a fine momentum. It slowly gathers strength in the first and puts it out in the second. We are conscious all the time both of the old and of the new; it is firmly rooted in the diatonic but makes free use of modern improved machinery. The themes are as unpromising as any of Berlioz, but the development is as much finer as counterpoint is greater than orchestration. Ernest Toch's piano concerto, Op. 38, is frankly modern; it exhibits such advantages as ferro-concrete has over stone when there is a thinking mind behind both-a swift directness replaces a laboured solidity. We feel that this man is a master of his method, not a servant. Yet the divinity he worships is brilliance, not beauty. There is no filing or polishing ; a clear brain works confidently to its set purpose; the heart is not engaged. Of Bela Bartok's piano concerto I can say nothing positive as yet. It is like a man pleading earnestly in the next room; the tone of voice assures you that the subject is important if you only knew what it was.

I have kept Busoni's Doktor Faust to the end, though it came first, and is not a new work; because it undoubtedly had more drawing power than the rest of the festival put together. Gounod and Berlioz had extracted from Goethe's Faust what they felt they could best use, and had irritated Goethe scholars not a little by their misuse of it. Busoni goes back behind Goethe to the legend, which was always being told and retold in Germany, and which was the basis of Marlowe's play among others. But since legends are not legends unless they grow, he takes in Goethe's characters as accretions, and disposes of them allusively in two preliminary "intermezzi." After that, the general line of the opera is that of Goethe's Part II, but the details are different. A Duchess of Parma is introduced in order that Faust may prove the stedfastness of his character by seducing her openly now, instead of Gretchen then in secret. This takes time, and as there is no room left for Helen to come on and speak her iambics to the strophe and antistrophe of a chorus, she is shown merely as a vision. The scene with the Baccalaureus is expanded into a philosophical disputation in Auerbach's cellar, to which Faust's contribution is "Nothing is proved, nothing is provable." The clinching argument is a bundle which Mephistopheles throws on the floor-perhaps a doll, perhaps a baby-perhaps the Duchess's, perhaps Gretchen's, perhaps baby in the abstract. No, the Duchess's comes later; she lays it at his feet and disappears. He tries to pray, but an armed soldier (Valentine) bars his entrance to the church; he kneels, but the crucifix turns to the figure of Helen. In despair he bends over the child and utters the aspiration that it may build, as he could not, "the edifice of man's eternal will to freedom." The devil is known, as a god is, by his incarnations. When Mephistopheles threw the bundle he was "a messenger "; he had been a "monk" and a "herald," and now, as he spurns the lifeless Faust with his foot, he is a "watchman." By these and similar touches we are made to move in an abstract and brief chronicle of philosophy, instead of in a world of men and women ; it is more riveting and convincing than Wagner's supernatural world. With Wagner, gods put on the passions of men; with Busoni, men divest themselves of human passions and act with the immediacy of gods, though they remain men.

The music he has conceived to fit such a drama is one of steely brilliance. It does not characterize like Mozart nor deify like Wagner. It does not pander to passions at all; there is nothing lyrical, no climaxes, neither scena nor leitmotiv. The only connecting link is a ubiquitous stress, a hard driving quality, repellent but fascinating, insistent but elusive; the rainbow's span always ends in the next field, and the solidseeming arch is built of a thousand refractions. Technically, the music is a locus classicus for "upward resolution" and "deceptive cadence"; musically, we should shudder if we were not agog to know what came next.