giddy, young girls, whose main object in singing in the choir is obviously not based upon their interest in the spiritual advancement of the community! But we believe that under the right type of leadership most of these bad conditions will in time disappear, and that, through the chorus choir, music may well become a vitalizing force in the life of many a church in which a revitalizing process is badly needed.
In order to make ourselves perfectly clear, let us summarize at this point the qualifications especially needed by the conductor of a volunteer church chorus.
- He must be a reasonably good musician, possessing not only familiarity with music in general, but in particular an intimate knowledge of vocal music, and knowing at least the fundamentals of voice training.
- He must understand the purpose of church music, and must be in sympathy with the religious work of the church.
- He must be young in spirit, and thus be able to take a sympathetic attitude toward the members of his choir as human beings, and particularly as human beings who are still young, inexperienced, and frequently thoughtless. This implies, of course, a certain amount of personal magnetism and this is as necessary in the volunteer choir for holding the membership together and securing regular attendance as it is for inspiring them musically.
THE DANGER OF INDIVIDUALISMOne of the chief difficulties encountered in more or less all choral organizations, and especially in the volunteer church choir, is the tendency on the part of many members to do all they possibly can in the way of dress, actions, loud singing, and lack of voice blending, to call attention to themselves as individuals. This not only results in frequent offense to the eye of the worshiper because of clashing color combinations (the remedy for which is, of course, some uniform method of dressing or perhaps a vestment), but what is even more serious, it often causes a lack of voice blending that seriously interferes with both the religious and the artistic effect of the music. For this latter state of affairs there is no remedy except to learn to listen to individual voices, and when some voice
