GIVING POPULARITY

Taupo Times, Volume I, Issue 10, 19 March 1952, Page 2

GIVING POPULARITY

Figures made available recently by the American Symphony Orchestra League emphasize the remarkable growth of interest in orchestral music in the United States during the past half century, with many smaller communities providing their own musicians. Before. 1900 there were nine symphony orchestras in the country; during 1951, according to the League, there were 702, of which 125 were suported by cities or tovvns of less than 25,000 population. Since 1922 people of the small farming and industrial centre of Columbus, Indiana, have been enjoying concerts by their own orchestra of 75 to 100 local enthusiasts. The State of North Carolina has a symphony orchestra on wheels, directed by Benjamin Swalin, who, with a fleet of buses, takes his musicians over 8,000 miles of highway, playing in one town after another. The orchestra gives free concerts for children all along their route which takes them through rural tobacco & cotton raising country as well as into the larger towns of North Caroline, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. The boys and girls listen entranced when conductor iSwalin talks to them about ballet music and symphonies, and oboes, clarinets and French horns. He gives them Taydn and JBeethoven and Ravel, Moussorhsky and Kahelevsky, Percy Grainger and Eric Coates, Richard Strauss and Rodgers and perhaps a folk dance or two as well. The children love it all and never fail to beg for more. In rural Pennsylvania there is an orchestra "vMhich draws its players and its audience from as far as 40 miles away. An orchestra at La Junta, in the fruit belt of southern Colorado, draws on ten communities, some as much as 50 miles away from the home base. One of the newest and liveliest of these amateur symphony orchestras is at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a name well-known on both sides of the Iron Curtain in connection with atomic energy. Its conductor, Waldo Cohn, a bio-chemist at the national laboratories there, is also a cellist. He started the symphony in 1943 with informal music sessions in his home. As Oak Ridge grew and its population swelled with inhabitants drawn from all over America, its music kept pace; scientists, teachers, sctidents and housewives now play toget' er as an organized symphony orc.i estra.