reat
interest in singing? Why, there is a Choral Society in every village of
Wales. Between village and village, between city and city, there are
competitive tests, and this annual event is the outcome of all the
smaller ones, the crowning engagement for the highest honors. How much
must this mean to the people of the villages! What a comfort to the
isolated ones! For twelve miles about any village or town center the
people come walking in every Sunday evening, to attend rehearsals for
practise in sacred music, hymns and chorals being their mainstay. In
northern England we find the same musical feeling, and in Italy. Why
these special parts of the world should move in this direction, who can
tell? It is enough to know that those rougher, more hilly, and more
secluded regions do this service for the people. They make them feel the
impulse and the necessity for song.

That the case with us is not by any means hopeless is shown by the story
of Norfolk, Connecticut. Here a great musical movement has been led by
the Litchfield County Choral Union, a musical society that was founded
and led by an inspired man, the keynote of whose life may be found in
his own words when he said: "Had I my life to live over again, with such
slight knowledge as I may have gained, I would become an humble laborer
in a primitive and ignorant farming community where by word and example
I might perhaps help to raise its members to a higher standard of life
in material and spiritual matters; and could I but implant one better
thought into a single soul, life would not have been lived in vain."
Such was the quiet but radiant ideal of Robbins Battell, the man that
tuned all the life of the lower Berkshires to lofty music. The Choral
Union as it now stands is a federation of the musical societies of the
larger towns of the county, and includes seven hundred members. Each of
these societies has many concerts and festivals for the expression of
its own skill and joy in the compositions of the masters; and besides
this there is an annual three-day meeting and concert at the great
"Music Shed" in Norfolk.

In the festival of 1912 they gave the _Elijah_ with a chorus of four
hundred and fifteen voices, all chosen from the members of these county
Unions. The year before, the same chorus gave excerpts from Gluck's
_Orpheus and Eurydice_ and the _Hora Novissima_ of Horatio Parker; the
year before that they gave _Verdi's Requiem_ and _The Song of Hiawatha_
by