Page:Essentials in Conducting.djvu/174

162 course sing with the crowd, for here he is striving for quite a different sort of effect.

See to it that the practice room is well ventilated, especially for a chorus rehearsal. Plenty of fresh air will not only enable your chorus to sing with better intonation, but will allow them to sing for a longer period without fatigue. (We are tempted to add a corollary to this proposition: namely, that sleepy congregations are not always due to poor preaching, as is generally supposed, but are as frequently the result of a combination of fairly good preaching and a badly ventilated auditorium!)

In directing a chorus rehearsal, have your singers study without accompaniment much of the time. The organ "covers a multitude of sins" and practising without it will not only enable you to discover weaknesses of all sorts but will help the singers themselves enormously by making them more independent, improving the intonation, and compelling them to make cleaner and more definite attacks and releases.

Finally, in concluding both this chapter and the book as a whole, let us commend once more to the conductor that he cultivate "the saving grace of humor." This quality has already been commented on somewhat at length in an earlier chapter (see ), but it is in the rehearsal period that it is most needed, and the conductor who is fortunate enough to be able to laugh a little when annoyances interrupt or disrupt his plans instead of snarling, will not only hold the members of the organization together for a longer time, because of their cordial personal attitude toward him, but will find himself much less fatigued at the end of the rehearsal;