Page:Essentials in Conducting.djvu/100

88 leader must be able to raise a hearty laugh occasionally, and he must by the magnetism of his personality be able to make men and women who have not raised their voices in song for years past forget their shyness, forget to be afraid of the sound of their own voices, forget to wonder whether anyone is listening, and join heartily in the singing.

There is no one way of securing this result; in fact, the same leader often finds it necessary to use different tactics in dealing with different crowds, or for that matter, different methods with the same crowd at different times. The crux of the matter is that the leader must in some way succeed in breaking up the formality, the stiffness of the occasion; must get the crowd to loosen up in their attitude toward him, toward one another, and toward singing. This can often be accomplished by making a pointed remark or two about the song, and thus, by concentrating the attention upon the meaning of the words, make the singers forget themselves. Sometimes having various sections of the crowd sing different stanzas, or different parts of a stanza antiphonally will bring the desired result. By way of variety, also, the women may be asked to sing the verse while the entire chorus joins in the refrain; or the men and women may alternate in singing stanzas; or those in the back of the balcony may repeat the refrain as an echo; or the leader and the crowd may sing antiphonally. In these various ways, considerable rivalry may be aroused in the various sections of a large chorus, and the stiffness and unfriendliness will usually be found to disappear like magic. But if the director is cold and formal in his attitude, and if one song after another is sung in the conventional way with no comment, no anecdote, and no division into sections, the people will be more than likely to go away criticizing the leader or the accompanist or the songs or each other, and the next time the crowd will probably be smaller and the