RE: Giora Feidman (and getting attention)

[music <music...>]

>  One thing that I have learned from watching [Feidman] is that the best way
>  to get an audience's attention when it is waning it to play softly. 
> (See?  Didn't you listen?)
> 
>> came as a speaker.  Besides reading his poems and reminiscing, he also
>> sang, accompanying himself on guitar.  He spoke and sang just loud
>> enough to hear, and the audience gave him their full attention.  But I
>> don't think it would work for everyone.  He was always interesting
>> enough to hold their attention.

from Brendan Gill's HERE AT THE NEW YORKER, re one-time New Yorker
fiction editor William Maxwell:

"Once, in the midst of a lecture at Smith College on 'The Writer as 
Illusionist,'
Maxwell said in his gentle voice--indeed, in what amounted to a whisper--'It 
would 
help if you would give what I am now about to read to you only half your 
attention.'
It was surely the first time that anyone had proposed such a thing to the 
hundreds
of girls who made up his audience; they leaned forward in their seats, listening
intently to every word.  Afterward, they would never forget what he had said."

--Robert Cohen

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