THE HYENA BARK.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 50, 28 February 1923, Page 8

THE HYENA BARK.

WOW TO TOUCH THE HEARTS. TRINITY COLLEGE MUSIC TIPS. (By Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, January 11. Yesterday, Trinity College of Music began work for a Lent term, and at the formal opening by the chairman of the Hoard, <ir Frederick Bridge, formerly organist at Westminster, and of worldwide repute in his profession, gave on address in which he expressed out of the mines of knowledge at his command, some notes of guidance for the budding musicians entering on their studies at the college.

''Always look at the audience," he said. "Nothing is more distressing than the sight of a young lady standing on a platform singing T love you,' and staring at the paper she holds in her hand as though she Joyed that. If she looked at mc she might touch my heart —in a dramatic sense."

Another speaker, Sir Frank Benson, who, as all the world knows, has trained more first rank actors than any one in the world, also gave them advice.

Speaking on "The music of your voice," he said that in the production of an opera recently he noticed that a singer picked out one small and uninv portant word in a sentence, and put his whole soul into the singing of it. The sound was melodious, but the effect jarred musically and dramatically. Sir Frank asked the singer why he did it, and he replied, "That is the one note 'on which 1 can show off my voice." Points which Sir Frank made were as follows:

Show in your face the thought you are going to express, so that at each new breath new life enters.

Sometimes an oratorio is more dramatic than an opera. The music ex? presses character, the scene and the circumstances by which the characters are surrounded, and it preserves the unities.

There is the "hyena.bark" method of elocution and the "nightingale" method. There is only one method that is wrong—the insincere or self-centred method.

"There is the problem of enlarging the voice," continued Sir Frank. "You must whisper *I love you' in such a way that the whole audience hears it, yet it must sound as natural as though it were the whisper of a lover who certainly did not want to be heard iby the whole house."

Our English singers, be said, bad never appreciated the enormous importance of making their words tell. We hod now made a great step forward in regard to elocution. Indeed, all over the world they were studying elocution. Many years ago he had the honour of performing a piece of his own before Queen Victoria, at the time of the Jubilee. He took a distinguished singer with hira, and the Queen said afterwards to Canon Prothero that he bad a beautiful voice but he never modulated it. The singer no doubt wanted to make a great impression, but the Queen spotted that he was not giving that colour and modulation that he ought to have done