Music: Assembly Line Symphony

A white-haired repair man played sec ond flute and a lathe operator blew the trumpet. A few stuffy music critics regard ed the whole thing as a foolhardy venture.

But 76 musicians of the Sperry Gyroscope Co.’s orchestra — which claims to be the only industrial symphony in the U.S. —dared last week to put on a black-tied concert at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall.

Sperry’s symphony is no brash upstart.

Four years ago, Sperry executives started hiring experienced musicians who could also work on assembly lines. Thereafter job applicants were frequently asked first if they could play an oboe and second, if they could operate a lathe.

Today Sperry boasts some 30 ex-professionals who took jobs in the plant and found a chair in the orchestra waiting for them. White-collar workers fill a third of the chairs, but are by no means the top instrumentalists. A former Metropolitan Opera French horn player operates a lathe; the concertmaster (once a hot fiddler for Kate Smith) runs a milling machine. One of the touchiest problems faced by the coldly democratic organization was a none-too-musical Sperry executive who insisted on playing second violin.

Critics, somewhat to their surprise, found Sperry’s Carnegie Hall debut not at all bad. As one of them admitted after an earlier concert: the musicians do a much more professional job than the Boston Symphony could, turning out gyroscopes.