The Musical Society

This coming year considerably more art and craft work will be carried out in the time-table than previously, but any person wishing to work in the Art Room at other times will be able to do so.

Most of the requests up to now have expressed the desire to paint in oils, but it should be remembered that almost any craft subject can be carried out in our present accommodation with a little ingenuity.

Etching and engraving equipment are recent additions to the Art Room equipment, opening up several new fields of development in printing processes, be it Christmas cards or bookplates.

The Summer Term proved to be one of the busiest of the year. The Friday lunch-hour gramophone concerts were continued with great success until the approach of the examinations made it advisable for them to cease for the time being. Several lectures given by members of the Society proved very successful. Carlill gave a lively account of the organ and its evolution from a small portable affair of a few pipes to the present-day marvels of engineering and acoustic art like the organs in the Albert Hall, York Minster, and the Convention Hall, Atlantic City, reputed to be the largest organ in the world. J. F. W. Addey gave a carefully prepared and well-documented lecture with gramophone illustrations on "Contemporary Music". Arising from discussions relating to electric amplifiers and the differences between them and acoustic gramophones, an excellent lecture on "Distortion in Amplifiers", showing, by means of a cathode ray oscillograph how wave-forms change under certain conditions of amplification, was prepared and delivered by K. G. Harrison, assisted by M. Cross.

RECITAL BY DR. HAROLD ROYLE AND MR. WAINE

One of the warmest and sunniest evenings in the Summer Term was partly responsible for the poor attendance at Dr. Harold Royle's Song Recital. His programme was divided into three groups, interspersed with two pianoforte solos by Mr. Waine. The first group was of songs set to words by Shakespeare, proceeding from a pastiche of an earlier style by Dom Thomas Symons set to "Come away Death", through Dr. Arne and Schubert, to Rogert Quilter's setting of "It was a lover and his lass".

The second group was an agreeable introduction for many people present to the Song Cycle. Each of the poems by Stevenson in Vaughan Williams's "Three Songs of Travel" breathes of the open air, and the music adorns and unifies them.