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WINTER 1953 ta. EDITORIAL ANTED â€" MORE MUSIC â€" At the Canadian National Exhibition last year, a chorus of three thousand house- wives from Indiana, members of home demonstration clubs, provided an evening’s programme of songs â€" classics, folk songs, Negro spitituals, such as they sing in their little local groups all over the state. We may not be interested in a massed chorus of Ontario Institute women, but wouldn't it give a lift to our whole institute programme if we had more singing in meetings, more glee clubs or choirs for members and their familâ€" ies, more singing at home? Almost every Women’s Institute has a member who could lead the group, who could even teach them new songs. And it should not be hard to find someone to direct a chorus sponsored by the Institute but made up of men as well as women and financed by those who take part in it. In parts of the States the women's farm bureaus make a fea- ture of what they call "sink singing.” At each monthly meeting the women learn a song. They take the words home with them, hang them over the kitchen sink, and all through the month they sing the song as they wash their dishes. Soon the children are singing it too, and the men whistle the tune as they work in the fields. So, each month, a good song gets into the homes of the community. We might never have a threeâ€"thousand voice Women's Institute Chorus in Ontario, but if singing should become a feature of our programmes, how a few hundred women assembled at a convention could raise the roof with “O Canada,” or an old folk song or a good standard song that had been practised at Institute meetings all over the province! This would not be the really important thing of course. What matters is that we have the recreation and the joy and the emo- tional outlet that comes of making music. We hear a good deal about the culture to be had through listening to good music. There is culture, too, in admiring a good woodâ€"carving; but there is quite a different culture, and a greater thrill, in taking a piece of wood and whittlng out our own wood-carving. It isn’t enough to appreciate music; we have a right to the joy of making it. The Women's Institutes could do a great deal to bring in the day when, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, "W'e bear Ontario singing.” WM