CHORAL SPEAKING

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 3, 3 July 1937, Page 30

CHORAL SPEAKING

"It is perhaps only along" the waves of rhythm that any understanding of poetry can enter the child-soul," says Mr. J. W. Shaw, lecturer at the Auckland Training College, in a foreword to Miss F. Alexa Stevens's work on "Choral Speaking." And it is along those waves that Miss Stevens, one of the acknowledged leading exponents in New Zealand of the modern approach to poetry, has led her pupils, and would lead (through the medium of this book) pupils everywhere. There ara English publications on this subject, but they do not give explicit directions. To correct this omission, Miss Stevens has generalised only a little and has relied on detailed notes as far as is possible without actual demonstration. Again, to quote Mr. Shaw: "Her book seems to be an exceptionally valuable exposition of the new ideals and methods of teaching poetry. .. . She shows how a teacher of vision has tackled one of the teacher's greatest problems and achieved an outstanding success in a very difficult but most fruitful field." Miss Stevens defines choral speech as "the modulated, restrained, sincerely spoken, rhythmic interpretation of the chosen passage or verse," a blending of the awkward, the florid, the weak, the over-assertive voices, into one harmonious whole." She has seen the inadequacy of the old "elocution" style, the oftlimes dreary recitation of poems "round the class." Here is her alternative, which is in every way to be preferred. Miss Stevens came to her task well equipped. She is a keen psychologist of the child mind, an original thinker, and one of this country's most sincere poets. This lastnamed quality has stood to her in her suggested selection of individual poems (many of them by New Zealand writers) and anthologies for use in schools and for adult choirs.