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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 5 (August 1, 1938)

Palette and Lyre — New Zealand's Achievement in Painting and Music

page 9

Palette and Lyre
New Zealand's Achievement in Painting and Music

The other day I was seeing, or rather hearing, a musical moving picture called “The Broken Melody.” It was made in Australia by a brilliant young friend of mine, but the outstanding feature of it was the fascinating music. It was original and haunting, and, to my ear, had qualities I had not met before in this type of musical background. There was also an attractive theme song which had no possible likeness to the flimsy tunes usually adorned with that title.

The music was by Alfred Hill, our own famous fellow-countryman, and it occurred to me that it would be a pleasant task to see what had been done in the realms of music, painting and the kindred arts, by New Zealanders, in the time since our country made its start.

The article which follows can only be a brief sketch, but even in its short compass, there is material for just pride in what has been achieved by our own people in these august regions of higher art creation.

(Earle Andrew, photo.) Miss Valerie Corliss, a leading New Zealand musician and lecturer, who is the moving spirit in the British Music Society in this country.

(Earle Andrew, photo.)
Miss Valerie Corliss, a leading New Zealand musician and lecturer, who is the moving spirit in the British Music Society in this country.

There is a healthy trend all over New Zealand to take stock, preparatory to our Centennial celebrations.

I n the quiet and earnest way which has become traditional in these islands, an effort is being made to look carefully back over our first hundred years, and see what the count looks like on all the aspects of our achievement.

We have already written into history a considerable chapter of world leadership in social endeavour and experiment, but we have performed no exceptional miracles in the arts. It is not undue enthusiasm to say that we will—as the centuries go by.

Music in one sense is the oldest of the arts, and, in another, it is the newest. Primitive man probably chanted and sang even before he put his drawings into cave temples in the dawn of time.

But music in its modern European sense is not more than five hundred years old. Until the fifteenth century, music was identified with singing; there were musical instruments, but they were all “one note at a time” affairs, and no accompaniment to singing was possible, in our sense. The difficulty also existed that there was no system of notation, no method of recording a melody, much less a harmony. Just as the failure of the Romans or Greeks to invent a practical sign language for mathematics held back their development, so the evolution of music was arrested by this lack. However, some genius thought of putting notes above and below a line, someone added other lines, and soon there was the full stave of to-day.

This enabled harmony to be put down on paper and a new world of beautiful sound was born.

Strangely enough, it was an Englishman, John Dunstable, who was the first great pioneer in this world revolution.

The English choir became the model for choral singing. Then came Palestrina, and music took permanent, living form, and commenced to grow into the vast and glorious flower garden of beauty we know to-day.

There is a difficulty in considering musical history. We know as much today of the Greek theatre as many of their own provincial inhabitants. We can know nothing of their music for there is no way of hearing it. In the future this will not be a trouble. In addition to the written records, we have world libraries of sound records, from Gladstone's voice to the last number by Jessie Matthews.

Music is the most plastic of the arts; it changes most. According to one great authority, “the advance is so tumultuous, and so revolutionary are its banners of change, that in a hundred years' time, Beethoven may appear on programmes now and again, as a musical curiosity.”

Music, then, being the newest and the most fluid of the great arts, would seem to be the best medium for the expression of our new nationhood, if and when we attain it.

Our Maori predecessors had a fine and established art of rhythm and melody, and this is having its direct effect in our composition. The Maori flute was a start towards a distinctive instrumentation, and the Maori ear for intervals is extraordinarily acute. Bernard Shaw was amazed and enthusiastic on his visit here about the Maori sense of rhythm and said it was the best in the world.

(Spencer Digby, photo.) Miss Imelda Fama, the New Zealand musician, fresh from continental triumphs.

(Spencer Digby, photo.)
Miss Imelda Fama, the New Zealand musician, fresh from continental triumphs.

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Mr. Terence Vaughan, winner of the Agnew Composition Prize. A London figure at 21.

Mr. Terence Vaughan, winner of the Agnew Composition Prize. A London figure at 21.

Alfred Hill, to whom I referred above, has gone a long way towards interpreting, for European ears, the essential Maori melodic ideas. “Hinemoa” and “Tapu” were full dress grand operas of distinction and of Maori cultural descent. A number of his songs such as “Waiata Maori” (incorporating the “Komate War Chant”) and “Waiata Poi,” have passed into the current fare of concert hall and old boys' dinners, and rival “The Deathless Army” and “Keys of Heaven.”

Many Maori composers have written sound compositions, and Maori choral work has its own charm and a haunting beauty that has found a permanent place in New Zealand hearts. Much of the best of this is permanently enshrined in good recordings, thanks to the public interest so warmly manifested when the ZB stations started to make regular features of Maori concerted numbers.

In the world of modern music-making, New Zealand is taking an important place. Miss Valerie Corliss, who is responsible for the impressive progress by the British Music Society group, says that the creative imagination of the young New Zealand composers of this decade is of high value and great originality. Among the young writers she mentions are Miss Mary Martin, Mr. A. Martin, and Mr. Eric Waters, whose work for string combinations and other media is of notable quality. Then there is the brilliant young Academy scholarship winner, young Terence Vaughan, who has rocketed into London prominence in quick time.

He has had a composition for full orchestra of sixty, conducted by Sir Henry Wood, and has won the most coveted of all composition prizes in the Old World, the Agnew Prize. He is just twenty-one, and is now being treated seriously as a conductor-composer in London.

The list could be largely extended, because I find, on enquiry, that since the inception of the British Music Society, even with its high critical standard, it has presented the works of no less than forty-seven New Zealand composers.

I have spoken first of the creative side of music, the music makers, but on the executant side, our achievement is of no less magnitude. Our singers of the front rank include such folk as Amy Murphy, Stella Murray, Hubert Carter, and the world figure, Rosina Buckman, and this list is also possible of much enlarging.

Our two leading men on the academic side are such great figures in the overseas world of music as to give us just cause for being almost overbearingly proud. Frederick Moore is the Professor of the Pianoforte at the Royal Academy of Music, and this Dunedin boy has become a towering force in this wide sphere of activity.

Arthur Alexander, younger than Frederick Moore, is Professor of the Royal College of Music, and exercises great influence on modern musical trends.

Trevor Fisher, Frederick Page, Lionel Harris, Noel Newson, and others have established fame.

Then we claim two very great women
(S. P. Andrew, photo.) Mrs. Murray Fuller (left) with her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lamorna Birch, during their recent tour of New Zealand.

(S. P. Andrew, photo.)
Mrs. Murray Fuller (left) with her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lamorna Birch, during their recent tour of New Zealand.

pianistes: Vera Moore, respected throughout Europe, and Esther Fisher, whose Wigmore Hall recitals are features of the London musical landscape, and who has been chosen by the great Englishman, Cyril Scott, for two-piano work with him.

Lastly, we have here in New Zealand, Imelda Fama, whose career in Middle Europe was a series of genuine triumphs. In super-critical Vienna, and in others of the musical capitals of Europe her recitals were accorded the highest possible praise. I quote from the “Wiener Gesellschaftsblatt”: “She plays with a fine living spirit, fresh and joyful,” and goes on to speak of “rapturous applause.”

We can claim, then, with all modesty, that in the great arena of Old World musical art, where music is subjected to the severest critical appraisement, that New Zealanders have, to use our own phrase, “more than held their own.”

About painting, and its companion arts, design, sculpture and architecture, there exists a tremendous body of exact knowledge. The reason is simple—the record is almost complete. When the Marquis de Sautola, in 1879, found some vividly coloured drawings in the dark recesses of a Spanish cave, it was definitely established, after much ridicule, that they were the work of prehistoric man, before the Stone Age. Man has been drawing and painting ever since.

The two practical problems of the artist were to get his colours, and then to make them stick. The disappearance of Grecian and Roman paintings, as well page 11 as those of earlier civilisations, was mostly due to the unreliability of their paints. But, of course, in pottery and wall designs, in architecture and general decoration, we have examples by
(Earle Andrew, photo.) The late Mr. Murray Fuller, who brought many great paintings to New Zealand galleries.

(Earle Andrew, photo.)
The late Mr. Murray Fuller, who brought many great paintings to New Zealand galleries.

the tens of thousands, and the modern science of archaeology is continually proving the high attainment in artistry of civilisations dating back to the misty past.

Strangely enough, but so very usual in the history of any art, modern painting became possible through a small practical discovery. We know that the Egyptians invented ink, and that they learned to make coloured inks. These were all right for stone walls and slabs, and similar media persisted in the lovely illuminated missals of the early Middle Ages. The artists of this period struggled with all sorts of articles to get a medium which would make the colour stay—among them vinegar combined with white of egg and countless other notions. In the early part of the fifteenth century two Flemish brothers, the Van Eycks, stumbled quite by accident on the solution; they mixed their colour-powders with linseed oil. The news flashed all over Europe, reached the vast assemblage of Italian art workers, and the new world of painting was born.

As with music, therefore, the art of painting, in its modern sense, is not more than five hundred years old. It is the source of endless humbug and imposture, but it is also one of the greatest living forces in the culture and uplifting of mankind. The new vision of a great creative painter brings new vision to his fellow beings. The new beauty that he sees becomes the permanent possession of the world.

It is this perpetual discovery, and rediscovery, that gives the art of painting its final and lasting values.

For instance, here in New Zealand, such men as Nugent Welch and T. A. MacCormack, have provided their fellow New Zealanders with new eyes. They pluck from our everyday sights and scenes, the inner loveliness, make a record of it which is permanent, and “a joy for ever.”

I give their names first, for they have remained in New Zealand, devoted to the sacred duty of picturing New Zealand for us.

Only the future, too, will show the full value of the growing collection of good portraits done by Mrs. Elizabeth Kelly.

Painting is an art which, of necessity, flourishes best in the soil of the older cultures.

In this far-off land we lack the thousand examples of great work which must surround the worker in this branch of the arts. The verse, the drama, the novel and the music, written by a great genius in any Old World centre, reaches us within a week or two of its making. Our workers and students in these can study them, absorb their beauty and derive help and inspiration from them.

The paintings of Michael Angelo or Cezanne, Titian or Matisse, remain in the great galleries of the Northern Hemisphere.

Many a man here with a good library has nothing but coloured prints on his walls. It is a matter of numbers; fifty thousand copies of Bernard Shaw's last provocative play come into the world at a blow, so to speak. Sir William Orpen's Self Portrait is a single copy. I mention this last work for the reason that this picture happens to be here in New Zealand, and it enables me to pay a tribute to the two missionary people of New Zealand who made such a marvel possible.

The late Mr. Murray Fuller, and Mrs. Murray Fuller wrought even better than they knew when they initiated the enterprise of bringing the best modern painters' work to New Zealand. They managed a miracle when they secured the hearty goodwill of such world figures as Orpen, Augustus John, Dame Laura Knight, Lamorna Birch, Hugh Speed, and others of the great ones of the earth, and the works of these leaders are in many of our houses and our galleries. Just what noble effect this will eventually have on our large and growing legion of painters it is difficult to estimate; it is incalculable. However, the residual difficulty remains, and it would seem necessary for anyone with talent to trek to older lands to enable his genius to burgeon.

Two great men must be mentioned who really founded whatever approach to a school of painting exists here. These were Van der Velden of Christchurch, and James Nairne of Wellington, Dutch and Scottish respectively. Their influences were widespread and of enduring value. Further back still are the remembered names of Gully and Goldie.

Our list of painters who have won world place is small, but contains names of importance. The greatest of these, the Katherine Mansfield of our painters, is a woman, Frances Hodgkins. She has passed from our ownership, as it were, to be the prized idol of the international community of art. Frances Hodgkins is always in the van, a pioneer in abstract art, with all the qualities of a great painter, a “Beethoven in her chosen sphere.”

She is known and worshipped in Europe, Japan, the Americas and China, as the greatest woman painter of the day. In future histories of the arts, hers will be a glowing page, causing students centuries hence to find New Zealand on the map.

(Earle Andrew, photo.) Nugent Welch, one of the great New Zealand landscape painters.

(Earle Andrew, photo.)
Nugent Welch, one of the great New Zealand landscape painters.

She is our countrywoman, the daughter of an Otago surveyor who was himself a talented amateur painter.

Another woman painter of international distinction is Eleanor Hughes, page 12 formerly Miss Weymouth of Christ-church. Her pointed roofs and brilliant poetry in paint are known everywhere where good art is cherished.

Then there is Sidney Thompson, the son of a Canterbury farmer, who went to Europe, settled finally at Concarneau, in the South of France, and became a striking figure in the Paris exhibitions. He almost paints light itself, and has a method which is peculiarly his own and has brought him international respect. Miss Edith Collier is known abroad, and the great etcher, Heber Thompson, is a Dunedin boy who left New Zealand before the Great War.

Before I close this part of the story, I must plead the difficulty which assails the growth of this art in New Zealand. Our galleries, notably the great National temple in Wellington, have ample room for pictures. It is a sheer question of money, and nothing else, unless it be intelligent selection.

The native ability is here, deriving from our pure British heritage of race, and our British cultural tradition. It can only be made to reach its full growth, if the best work comes here to adorn our walls.

Before I finally end this article I must mention Miss Mary Butler in sculpture, and in architecture, the great Uren, and those two lads, Messrs. Connel and Basil Ward, who made their way to London in the stokehold and won the Prix de Rome.

Lastly, a word must be said as to the estimation of the arts in New Zealand. I have always been amused at the suggestion that the cultural average of the million and a half New Zealanders is in some way lower than that of Shropshire or Manchester. It simply is not true. It was probably said of the Greeks by the inhabitants of the vast old cities of Asia Minor.

Good pictures, good music, good books are as necessary to the fulness and the joy of life as good bathrooms or a new car. All these are produced by artists, in endless tribulation of toil and anguish of creative effort. Let us as a community, see that they are rewarded not only in the commonsense bestowal of decent living conditions, but in the far greater reward, that of full and generous appreciation.