sk demands from him two things:

1. A careful, painstaking study of the work to be performed,
so as to become thoroughly familiar with its content and to
discover its true emotional significance.

2. Such display of emotion in his conducting as will arouse
a sympathetic response, first on the part of orchestra and
chorus, and then in turn in the audience.

[Sidenote: EMOTION IN INTERPRETATION]

Real interpretation, then, requires, on the part of the conductor,
just as in the case of the actor, a display of emotion. Coldness and
self-restraint will not suffice, for these represent merely the
intellectual aspect of the art, and music is primarily a language of
the emotions. This difference constitutes the dividing line between
performances that merely arouse our judicial comment "That was
exceedingly well done"; and those on the other hand that thrill us,
carry us off our feet, sweep us altogether out of our environment so
that for the moment we forget where we are, lose sight temporarily of
our petty cares and grievances, and are permitted to live for a little
while in an altogether different world--the world not of things and
ambitions and cares, but of ecstasy. Such performances and such an
attitude on the part of the listener are all too rare in these days of
smug intellectualism and hypersophistication, and we venture to assert
that this is at least partly due to the fact that many present-day
conductors are intellectual rather than emotional in their attitude.

It is this faculty of displaying emotion, of entirely submerging
himself in the work being performed, that gives the veteran choral
conductor Tomlins his phenomenal hold on chorus and audience. In a
performance of choral works recently directed by this conductor, the
listener was made to feel at one moment the joy of springtime, with
roses blooming and lovers wooing, as a light, tuneful chorus in waltz
movement was being performed; then in a trice, one was whisked over to
the heart of Russia, and made to see, as though they were actually
present, a gang of boatmen as they toiled along the bank of the Volga
with the tow-rope over their shoulders, tugging away at a barge which
moved slowly up from the distance, past a clump of trees, and then
gradually disappeared around a bend in the river; and in yet another
moment, one was thrilled through and through with religious fervor in
response to the grandeur and majestic statelines