Radio Digest (Nov 1930-Apr 1931)

79 destitution, just one year after that Titan Beethoven, already famous the world over, closed his earthly career in the Schwarzspanier Haus not so many streets away. The two lie today almost side by side. Melody, Sweet Melody That which most attracts about the Unfinished Symphony is its astonishing melodiousness. The tunes are sweet almost to lusciousness, the harmonies are as smooth as oil, the tone-coloring is shimmeringly lovely. There are no problems set to the hearer. There is no vast intellectual effort of concentration required. The listener may just bathe his senses in the sheer delight of lovely sound. I strongly recommend every Radio listener to be on the lookout for this music, which is frequently played by one or another orchestra each season. Those who have never heard it before can, as I said, simply bathe their senses in its luscious beauty. Those who know it and are by now a little bit acquainted with symphonic form may mark the immediate entrance of the main theme in the first movement after the "motto" has been intoned darkly by the basses during the first two or three measures, the singularly lovely second theme from which the Blossom Time tune was drawn, the clear cut and simple form, and the charming, simply devised, and intelligible closing-piece or coda. The second movement is perhaps even more luscious than the first, which in fact has its moments of passion and almost of pain. This Andante is pure beauty. Note the opening tune, its contrast with the second tune which comes out a little later on the clarinet against accompaniments in the strings, and the perfectly beautiful reiterations of the first tune by one and then another group of instruments as the movement comes to its quite lovely close. There is a magnificent Victor phonograph recording of this Symphony, by the way, from the inspired playing of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski. The Musicians vs. The Engineers I have been listening again to broadcast music from the New York Philharmonic, the Roxy, the Curtis Institute and other symphony orchestras. It would be all wrong to deny to the broadcasting art the merit of excellent intention, but only a gross flatterer would say that the results are perfect. The truth is that the conductors of orchestras and the broadcasting engineers are still standing apart from each other. This indeed is a great pity. for broadcasting is already the biggest and most important factor in contemporary musical activity. That is to say, apart from any other consideration, the most important, the most active and by far the biggest factor in the practical enterprise of making music and of getting it heard is being done by the broadcasting interests. For that very obvious reason then, the men who have in their charge the great orchestras which are coming more and more into the orbit of broadcasting, ought to be getting themselves into the closest possible relations with this new means of extending music to their audiences. After all, that is what it comes to. Broadcasting expands the size of the audience to which the musician plays. Ernest Schelling, for instance, is one of the most hard-worked conductors of orchestras that this world knows. Last year his children's concerts, in New York, Boston and Philadelphia attracted some 90,000 young people of all ages from five to twenty years. Now 90,000 young people are a great many, yet they are but a handful compared with the vast audience which broadcasting furnishes, an audience potentially of millions. Yet the fact remains that when this remarkable man broadcasts he reaches young people by the hundreds of thousands, and does something, at least, to teach them that early love of beautiful music which is one of the finest accom plishments any human being can have, or can acquire. This indeed is true, in one degree or another, of all the famous orchestral conductors who weekly during the season guide their great armies of highly trained musical artists through the measures of great music. All these gentlemen with their orchestras either now are. or soon will be, broadcasting regularly. My point is that there is nevertheless something more to broadcasting than the merebringing of an orchestra into a studio with instruments and notes. The whole process, from the actual playing by the instruments under the conductor's baton, to the hearing of the result at the loud speaker end of each among tens of thousands of Radio sets scattered over half the country, is in reality a single continuous process. Unfortunately, the present way of doing things tends to break it up into two parts. The orchestra plays. It is supposed only to play. On the other hand the transmission of its music to the unseen Radio audience involves a vast and elaborately organized series of electrical engineering processes, which, very naturally, have been designed by, and are under the control of. engineers. The musicians tend to think that they have done their part when they have, so to speak, put the music into the microphones. The rest is left to the engineers. Technical Improvement in Broadcasting Is Needed Now there is a mistake here, and a big one. The thing ought not to be quite so simple. It is not quite the same thing as telephone engineering. Telephone engineers are dealing with human speech, and they design apparatus to transmit that speech over long distances. They wisely do not even try to teach the telephone user to speak correctly, for that would be both impertinent and impossible. They therefore confine themselves to discovering what speech sounds are and then they design telephone systems to do the best (Continued on page 102) The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which broadcasts on the Canadian National Railways Chain each Sunday atternoon, is glad of the opportunity to doff formal concert attire and dress for the mike in shirt sleeves. Dr. Luigi von Kunits, conductor, stands in front center.