Music: Serge’s Dream

For six years pilgrims have gone to the No.1 U. S. summer music shrine, the Berkshire Symphonic Festival, to admire the precision of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the benevolent tyranny of its greying conductor, Serge Koussevitzky. This year, besides the festival, Tanglewood houses a new project also dear to Koussevitzky, the Berkshire Music Center, intended to be a top-flight summer school for musicians.

To Tanglewood he brought Composers Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith to teach composition; G. Wallace Woodworth, Chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Music, for choral instruction; Herbert Graf, Metropolitan Opera Stage Director, to teach opera dramatics; New York Times Music Editor Olin Downes, Composer Roy Harris, and many another to lecture. By last week the month-old centre, with its 300-odd students, had worked its creator up into a well-turned ecstasy. Said Koussevitzky: “How can I speak of something part of myself, so much of my heart, a cherished ideal? It’s like my child.”

Most notable feature of the school: a special class for conductors from which the Director hopes to turn out five top-rank maestros in five years. Long convinced that a conductor should handle himself as featly as his orchestra, Koussevitzky hired Manhattan Ballet Master Erick Hawkins, partner of famed U. S. Dancer Martha Graham, to teach his pupils podium gestures. Soon Teacher Hawkins had the pupil conductors pirouetting and posturing, trying to become as expressive as dancers. Some of them took it seriously, some were embarrassed. Grumbled one: “Makes a fellow feel selfconscious.