STRIKE OF CHOIR BOYS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1180, 4 December 1913, Page 4

STRIKE OF CHOIR BOYS.

A BLISSSING IN DISGUISE. The industrial troubles ot the Mother Country, grave though they are, provide occasional glet ms of humour. For instance, a Loudon paper to hand by the last mail remarks that a strike of choir boys, the latest manifestation of strike fever amongst the immature, opens up various possibilities. Such an event, it says, might plunge a great church into gloom ; but it might also sensibly relieve the anxieties of churchgoers in country districts. It might also teach the cougregation to use its own voice. Ordinarily, it must be confessed, efforts to persuade a church congregation to vocal praise are somewhat lugubrious. Either because, under the direction of a clergyman who ardently wishes to hear his parishioners taking their own part in the services, the choir is commanded to be mute during one verse of a hymn, or because the choir is making holiday, the hymns in certain churches have at limes to depend upon the unison of the cougregation—not unjustly sometimes called the audience. The effect is apt to be that of a thin, wavering whisper which perhaps dies away to a morbid silence. That is not because the congregation does not know the hymns, but because, berelt of the choir’s leading, each man and woman is too ridiculously self conscious to use what voice he or she may have. Indeed, it would take some moral courage to sing from one’s pew, without the aid of a choir, amid the reverberating majesty of St. Paul’s or the Abbey. In cathedrals a choir, and a fine choir, is not only proper, but essential, to the warm dignity of a magnificent church service. In villages, however, where such a choir as there may be, cannot dispose of trained voices, where harsh treble voices with throaty bass and racous baritone struggling with a tenor part, the vocal efforts of the cougregation would add much to the harmony of the services. The reformer, in fact, doing good by stealth, might deliberately organise strikes among village choirs without being ashamed by the result. Here is an opportunity for the N.Z. ‘‘Red Feds." So far the most they have been able to accomplish in the realm of the church has been the roping in of one or two injudicious parsons. Why not send round a vocal quartette to agitate the choirs.