On the Move

Honking merrily, the red & yellow buses bumped along the back roads of North Carolina. At Laurinburg (pop. 5,685) they pulled up in front of an old Air Force camp theater, and 60 musicians tumbled out with their instruments. An audience of kids, who had trekked in from all over corn-and cotton-raising Scotland County, was there already, waiting for one of the 117 concerts that Conductor Benjamin Swalin's peripatetic North Carolina Symphony Orchestra (and its 23-man task force) will play at more than 60 highway & byway spots in the state this spring.

While the orchestra tuned up, "kids swarmed over the stage, inspecting everything from tubas to tympani. But when husky Conductor Ben Swalin rapped his baton for attention, they scrambled to their free seats, got set to listen. Swalin gave them excerpts from Schumann's "Spring" Symphony (No. 1), a Mozart rondo, a serving of Vaughan Williams and Berlioz and a chicken-reel. Before each number, the musicians held up the instruments to be featured so the kids could see them. And when the last chicken was reeled the youngsters hollered for more. So did the grownups at a second concert that night.

Beethoven in Ballparks. Last week, with his orchestra midway through its fourth annual tour, Conductor Swalin was proud of his boast that "in North Carolina, the word 'symphony' is no longer something to be afraid of." Minneapolis-born and Vienna-trained, Ben Swalin had had his big idea for a traveling symphony while teaching music appreciation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There was hardly a city in the state that was large enough to support a regular symphony. Swalin decided that if people couldn't come to the music, then the music should be brought to them.

Since the symphony's first touring season in 1944, when Swalin rounded up his musicians (mostly from the North) and a tiny $2,000 subsidy from the state, he has played hundreds of concerts for barefoot kids and grateful adults, in churches, schoolhouses and ballparks. Once he even shipped his "Little Symphony" aboard a Coast Guard cutter to play for the isolated people living on sandy Cape Hatteras. This year he hopes to cover 7,000 miles. To Swalin, now 48, "good music can uplift and ennoble people, and help them to better themselves."

Good Will & $2. North Carolinians appreciate their orchestra, and more & more of them have been signing up in local branches of the symphony society which Ben and his wife Maxine have organized. Today, he has some 20,000 supporting members, and "even if most of them are $2 members, the support and good will are there."

The North Carolina legislature has upped its contribution too. Last year, they supported Ben's orchestra to the tune of $12,000 (to let the legislators hear what they're voting for, he takes the orchestra onto the floor of the state capitol at Raleigh every year for an evening concert). Last week, they voted him $15,000 to carry on next year.

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