Allan Taylor is a cool guy. If you need convincing that the conductor of the 165-member Hampshire Choral Society and the elite 20-voice Novi Cantori demonstrates grace under fire, just visit this column online at www.gazettenet.com and check out the video.

When an adorable miniature dachshund pattered insouciantly onto the stage just at the end of "He Was Despised," one of the loveliest and most somber contralto solos in "Messiah," Allan looked down at the dog briefly, then returned to his score and conducted to the end. Soloist Mary Brown Bonacci kept on singing and sat down gracefully. Meanwhile, amid an amused murmur from the audience, soprano soloist Anita Cooper calmly picked up the dachshund and handed it to someone at the edge of the stage who had arrived to collect it. Allan then turned to the audience and said: "And I was worried about cell phones!"

The back story of the canine incursion is that during intermission, the back doors of John M. Greene Hall were opened so that musicians could go out for some air. Then it turned out that a pipe had burst in a bathroom of the ancient building. As a result, the maintenance people who should have shut those doors again were busy dealing with the deluge. So it was easy for a little dog to make its solo entrance. But that wasn't the first thing that had gone wrong. It had been an afternoon of snafus: Before the concert, a string had broken on the harpsichord, and the principal violinist arrived just after the concert was to begin, thinking it started at 4 rather than at 3. Then there was the flood in the basement. When the dog showed up, Allan recalls thinking to himself, "Of course there's a dog onstage. What took him so long?"

It was an amusing interlude, but the show went on. Putting on Handel's entire "Messiah" with a big amateur chorus is a little like getting a herd of elephants to dance "Swan Lake." It's true that Allan had a professional orchestra to back us up, giving us elephants a solid stage to perform on, but still, there was a lot of conductorial magic that made it all come together.

We had been practicing the piece since January, a nice leisurely pace to get inside such an enormous work. "Messiah" is a familiar piece, and many in the chorus had sung it before, but even at the level of mastering the notes, there are many surprises and pitfalls where you think you know what to do and Handel trips you up. On top of that, there are many difficulties that simply have to do with managing to sing a very large number of notes very fast or very high or very softly. Then there is the additional task of making music. The best thing about Allan's conducting is that he spends a minimum of time helping us learn the notes and most of the time prodding us to shape those notes into something beautiful.

Here is part of what he wrote to the chorus members a few days after the concert - making us all beam with pride: "I will never forget that dramatic moment in 'Since By Man Came Death,' when we stretched the space after that beautiful first phrase more than we'd ever done in practice, yet everyone came in perfectly on the next phrase. Anyone can learn to sing in strict rhythm, it's just a question of math, really. To make time stand still the way you did, now that's making music."

The recent find of an ancient flute suggests that people have been making music nearly forever. Discovered in a cave in southwestern Germany, the flute with its five finger holes is carved from a gently curved bone and is probably 35,000 years old. Making music, it tells us, is one of the most elemental, one of the most human things we can do.

Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@earthlink.net.