Symphony in the Air

Back in the U.S. last week was a 92-man team of ambassadors to the Far East.

Behind the Symphony of the Air lay a 42-concert tour of Japan, Korea. Okinawa, Formosa, the Philippines. Thailand, Malaya and Ceylon that endowed the U.S. with musical glory and cultural good will, and provided the indefatigable 92 with eight weeks of experiences that will give them anecdotes for years.

They flew the 30,000 miles mostly aboard Military Air Transport Service and Air Force planes. Unpressurized cabins brought ear trouble. There was a running gag of one violinist asking his neighbor, "How did I play tonight? I couldn't hear myself." One flight, between Tokyo and Seoul, ran into a storm so Wagnerian that everyone but Director Don Gillis became violently ill. Gillis. with an oxygen tank but no mask, dashed up and down the plane spraying groaning musicians in the face with oxygen. "It may or may not have helped," he says.

Unstuck. Far Eastern atmospherics were punishing to Western instruments--and instrumentalists. The glued parts of viols and woodwinds regularly came unstuck; humidity snapped the strings of three violas during Beethoven's "Eroica" in Ceylon. The heat could untune a piano half a tone in two hours and rot a dress suit in a matter of days. In Bangkok, with a temperature of 105DEG onstage and no fans, U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy came backstage to insist that the men take off their white jackets. After that they often played in shirtsleeves, delicately abandoning suspenders in favor of belts. In Manila an enthusiast presented them with sport shirts decorated with pictures of Maestro Arturo Toscanini, who trained the orchestra (as the NBC Symphony), and left in the spring of 1954.

As the tour progressed, the musicians in Panama hats, sport shirts and shorts, began to look less and less like a symphony orchestra. Most of them bought cameras and camera equipment in the PXs; some went about festooned with three cameras. So avid was the search for souvenirs that the airplane pilots would kid them: "Just tell us the next time you guys are going to buy another 2,000 Ibs. of stuff so we can get lighter by feathering the props."

Converted. Everywhere the reception was enthusiastic--even from people who had never heard live Western music, e.g., the Okinawans, who kept moving their heads to see where each new sound was coming from. In one community, between Kobe and Osaka, Conductor Walter Hendl, 38, stepping outside between numbers for a breath of air, discovered hundreds of Japanese who had been unable to get in standing with their ears pressed to the wall.

"I'm going back," said Pianist Hendl last week. "Probably before the end of this year I'm going back by myself. Whatever I am capable of contributing to Eastern culture in the way of Western music, I want to contribute. The tour we just concluded clearly affirms something I've always believed: that the greatest of music, which transmits the greatest of human messages, is understood everywhere."

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