Normal and Formal

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 284, 1 December 1944, Page 8

Normal and Formal

HERE was a time when I imagined that a group of singers who had functioned for a number of years under the intriguing title of "The Choir of the Auckland Commercial Travellers and Warehousemen’s Association" would have evolved a few folk songs of their own appropriate to their calling-songs with which they had roused themselves from sleep at the steering-wheel in solitary midnight drives through the King Country; songs that had kept them to the forefront in that wild, bleary-eyed surge for the refreshment counter at Palmerston North station in the pale hours of the morning; and a type of warehouse-shanty born of the task of heaving bolts of cloth and cases of tea. But life has a habit of handing out the prosaic when we expect the romantic, and what I found when I once went to

one of their concerts was a number of normal-looking citizens in formal evening dress singing the sort of songs that any other choir sings. It was a jolly concert all the same, with pleasant, hearty singing, and I look forward to hearing them again from 1YA on Saturday evening, though it is apparent from their programme that these gentlemen have still not found their own idiom.