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CETHA by ARIELLA EASTERLITA

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Cetha is a regular-weight typeface that enhances Bible reading for young adults. It blends teardrop terminals and rounded corners for a welcoming appearance. With tabular numbers, Cetha suits diverse applications, especially extended body texts. Ariella Easterlita, an architect turned self-taught graphic designer, introduced Cetha to make the Bible more accessible to young readers.

CETHA REGULAR

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Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

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I want to remind you now of what I said earlier in the evening, that the proper concern of art is humanity, and that human qualities are always being formulated in a particular context. It is this context or environment of ours which is slowly but inevitably shaping us into characteristic ways of living, developing in us those qualities that make us different from the English or the Americans. Or putting it in another way, this environment of ours is shaping us into characteristic rhythms of living. I bring in the word rhythm here because it seems to me to be the key to the whole problem, the link between those two things I’ve been talking about, ourselves, and the discovery of that music which will be an expression of ourselves. As musicians we tend to think of rhythm as being metrical patterns, and we probably seldom give thought as to where all these patterns of movement had their origin or why they should have developed at all. But we all know that different countries have produced their characteristic rhythms, just as they’ve produced differentiations of language and religion. To simplify matters I ask you to accept my statement that environment, using the word in its widest sense, is the chief force working to produce these. We all know too what’s meant by the rhythm of the seasons, or the rhythmic cycles of our bodies, by rhythm in verse or in painting. The word itself comes I think from a Greek word meaning ‘flow’, and there was a Greek definition of life which said simply ‘everything flows’. This may be taken as a concise way of saying that everything about us, the patterns of our landscape and seacoasts, the changing of our seasons, and the flow of light and colour about us, that all these things show patterns of movement or characteristic rhythms. And these things in a subtle way affect our manner of living and I believe that they impress themselves on our minds in a way that will ultimately give rise to forms of musical expression. So having told you earlier that we have no traditional rhythms of our own as the older countries have, I’m now saying that we have an enormous potential of characteristic rhythm in this environment about us provided we can become sufficiently aware of it to be able to make it articulate in sound. I feel that a musician in this country must develop his awareness of the place he lives in, not attempting a mere imitation of nature in sound, but seeking its inner values, the manifestations of beauty and purpose it shows us from time to time, and perhaps using it as something against which he can test the validity of his own work. This is a matter which surely affects all of you, that in all your musical activity, whether it’s studying to become a Bachelor of Music, or playing or singing, that you should spend a little time considering in what way it is related to the lives we lead and to this country we live in. I’ve talked at this length about rhythm because it seems to me to be the fundamental thing in music and the thing that is most neglected in all our study of music. It determines the shape and vitality of any melodic line, and in its larger sense of movement or How it is the basis of musical form. If we can get to grips with this primary problem of rhythm, then these other things will look to themselves. And if we can discover these rhythms of our ways of living and our relations to the environment about us, then we will see the beginning of a music of our own, a music that will to some extent satisfy that spiritual need I think we all have, that sense of belonging somewhere. Again I want to remind you that this music will not in any way be a substitute for the great music we know, but simply a necessary complementary part to it. In a sense this has been a very lop-sided talk. I’ve said that art is concerned with humanity, and that humanity is always located in a particular environment, and yet I’ve talked nearly all the time about environment and hardly at all about humanity. I’ve done this because the essential human and universal qualities in art remain fairly constant from age to age, and these qualities are something you are all aware of. But the variations on them that are constantly being thrown up seem to spring from the changes in outlook that the passage of time and the impact of a new place will induce. It is this factor of our new and unique environment in New Zealand, and the change of outlook it is producing in us, that will mark our departure-point from the older traditions of music. Whatever disadvantages we labour under in a small and isolated country, we have the advantage of being able to come closer to those fundamental and rather simple things that are the fountainhead of any art, and we have the opportunity if we can take it of seeing these things with a freshness of vision. Out of them I believe that with faith and hard work we can make something of value to ourselves, and that the effort involved in doing this is infinitely worthwhile. By doing this they inevitably learn something of that relationship between musical symbols and their own emotions. It’s possible for a student to do textbook exercises for years on end without relating anything of his own emotions to the musical symbols he is committing to paper _ making a travesty of the intention of the art. Later, as soon as they have any facility at all for expressing themselves, they should begin to alternate periods of free composition with their periods of strict study. Then when they’ve produced these compositions I would like to see the universities arrange some means of having them performed, not necessarily in public, but simply to let students hear in actual sounds what they have been doing. Later still, when they come to write their exercise for a degree I think their work should most certainly be given a public performance—it could be written for one of the local choral societies or chamber music groups—and it should be judged as live music and not simply as acquaintance with a set of dubious textbook rules. I mention this last because in Christchurch round about Christmas-time the papers told us that we had five new Bachelors of Music produced there during the year, and yet not a single note of music from one of them was heard during-the year. I want to move now to something rather more specialised, the situation in which a young composer finds himself when he has completed his student training as far as it can be completed in New Zealand. Let us assume for the moment that he’s able to do what he wants to do, spend his time or a reasonable part of it in writing music, though I have already said something about the practical difficulties of this. Let’s assume too that he’s not a wonder-child of the Mozart or Schubert order, but simply an honest musical workman, one of the thousands who go to make up the conditions that will produce a Mozart or Schubert for us. Now ask yourselves where he is to begin, and what is he going to do about those things which are the basis of music, rhythm and melody. He may of course shelve the whole problem for a few years by going off to England for further study, and there he may find himself able to ht into an older tradition, becoming in effect an English composer, or perhaps a denationalised one like Stravinsky. And he may find himself eventually in a good job teaching at one of the musical colleges, or with the BBC, as many colonial musicians have done. Or he may continue to feel a foreigner, that foreigner speaking the same language that I mentioned at the beginning, and failing to find his musical soul there he returns hoping to discover it in his own country. In the meantime he has acquired some experience and technique, and at least he’s found out some of the things he doesn’t want to do, but in most essentials he’s still up against the same problems as the composer who has not been away. The first thing he finds is the lack of any tradition to guide him, either of folk music or of Serious music written in his own country—he is poverty-stricken. Yet in another sense he is immensely rich, because being heir to no particular tradition he inherits the whole world’s music, but of course this doesn’t so much keep him well-nourished as keep him in a state of chronic indigestion. First let’s consider the question of folksong. I feel that the English and Scots and Irish folksongs are no longer the real influence on our music that they might have been even twenty years ago.

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