Music in the Making. By Wilfrid Metiers. (Background Handbooks, published
by the Bureau of Current Affairs, 117, Piccadilly, W. r. 25.) A GREAT deal of original and interesting re- flection and speculation is packed into this small brochure. Mr. Metiers is himself a composer as well as a scholar, and the "personal testimony" with which he opens describes very well the unsatisfactory_ position in which the modern composer finds himself. He returns to a consideration of our amorphous civilisation and its effect upon music and musicians in his last two chapters ; but not until he has taken his reader—who must be attentive as well as . intelligent—on a tour of the European musical past, following the art from "church and home" to the court, from the court to the concert-hall and thence to the Ivory- Tower, from which our contemporaries are only beginning to plan somewhat tentative escapes. Musical history is_ described and explained in terms of economics and socio- logy in a way that is often convincing and nearly always provocative of thought, though occasionally (" The quartet form itself was middle-class ") the simplification which is the danger of this method provokes the reader to an indignant grunt rather than to thought. The great value of these chapters lies in Mr. Mellers' determination to hold up music as an integral, part of life,. in every age and every place, and his furious rejection of those who would, however politely, reduce it to the private amusement of a few aesthetes. An admirable list of relevant gramophone records and some well- chosen musical examples complete what is a most remarkable instance of inultum in parvo and an astonishing two-shillings- worth.
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