A Seivant of Music
GOOD books on music are sufficiently rare to justify a warm welcome to Mr. Gerald Moore's unpretentious but valuable book on a much neglected aspect of the art, namely, accompaniment at the pianoforte of solo vocalists and instrumentalists. It is unfortunate that the words " accompaniment " and " accompanist," with their suggestion of a secondary role ever came into general use. That they did so is in itself sufficient evidence of a low musical standard, for there can be no such thing in the making of concerted music as an inferior part. It is true that the majority of music lovers are amateurs in a definitely derogatory sense. They love music, but imperfectly, and like imperfect lovers in all spheres they tend to take their own defects for merits and ascribe their own lack of appreciation to faults in the object of their love while being generally quite incapable of real critical discrimination.
Those who have heard Mr. Gerald Moore " accompanying " vocalists or instrumentalists in the concert hall will not need to be told by me that he is one of the very few accompanists in this country who are born good musicians and artists. When he sits down to the pianoforte with a good singer we are sure to enjoy an hour or two of delight, and if you cannot hear the reason why with your own ears you may find the explanation in this honest and sensible book. It is a book which every young music lover should read, for it will send him into the concert hall with re-awakened ears. It is no exaggeration to say that to a large proportion of 'every audience at a song recital the pianoforte part is inaudible, even when an artist such as Mr. Gerald Moore is accompanying. This is because their musical sense is so rudimentary that their attention can only take in the vocal line ' • just as at the opera a very large percentage of every audience can only grasp the dramatic action on the stage— helped by a vague sense of the emotional background supplied by the general character of the music—but actually hears nothing in detail of what is happening in the orchestra.
It is the detail that matters and Mr. Gerald Moore's boat helps to explain to the listeners what this musical detail is which makes all the difference between dullness and art ; in the listener between boredom and delight. A fine artist like Mr. Gerald Moore should be asked by concert-givers (especially by organisations .such as C.E.M.A.) for his advice in the selection of singers. He could tell them better than anyone who should be allowed to sing Schubert, for example, to the forces and throughout the provinces. One real singer accompanied, in a double sense, by Mr. Gerald Moore, sent round the provinces to sing Schuber;'s songs would do more for the musical education of the people of this country than twenty
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