Blue Ridge Beethoven

Lumber and cigarette paper? Yes. But good music is about the last thing travelers on U.S. Highway 64 would expect to find in the Blue Ridge town of Brevard, N.C. (pop. 3,000). Last week, nonetheless, with its Transylvania Music Camp in full swing for a fifth consecutive season, Brevard was momentarily the music capital of the South.

Some 200 students and teachers have been hard at work all month. The students, who come from 20 states, had paid about $250 tuition apiece for the six-week summer session; the teachers, many of whom play for northern symphony orchestras, got their expenses only. At week's end, the hard work paid off in a lively concert by the yo-piece student-teacher band before a crowd of 1,200. Main event of the evening: Grieg's Concerto in A Minor, with Guest Pianist Eugene List, the ex-G.I. who played for Truman and Stalin at Potsdam, as soloist.

Said Camp Director James Christian Pfohl: "[Up to now] imported music has peeled off Southern hides like bark off a slippery elm . . . We do not have a topflight professional music school in the South. We hope the students we train will lift the South's musical life."

The attempt.began in 1945 when hustling Jim Pfohl, then a 32-year-old music professor at Davidson College, came upon an abandoned summer camp for boys in the woods near Brevard. The lake was a weed patch; the buildings were gone to rack & ruin. Pfohl made a pay-you-later deal with the owners, rebuilt the camp and opened it. After three seasons in the red, he persuaded Brevard's civic leaders to back the camp.

They have not had cause for regret. Every week of the season, the camp concerts bring hundreds of visitors. The Brevard Music Festival, which is held in August after the camp itself closes, brings hundreds more. Big event of this year's festival: the first complete performance of Beethoven's Ninfh Symphony ever given in the South.

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