Generations of hymn-singers have glibly commented on the little town of Bethlehem, making a point of its quietude, its somnolence. These well-meaning vocalists, if endowed merely with the serviceable nasal sinuses of their kind, would never for a moment be tolerated in Bethlehem, Pa., where, last week, the annual Bach Festival* was given by community singers, assisted by members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, directed by John Frederick Wolle.

Except for the distant roaring of the steel foundries of Charles M. Schwab, and the irreverent cannonade of a thunderstorm whose salvos rocked high heaven and shook the windows of the church wherein burghers and visitors had gathered to hear the trombone choir and the local soloists deliver Bach's Christmas Oratorio, the little town of Bethlehem, Pa., lay still. Conductor Wolle raised his baton. A clap of thunder split the sky like a peasecod. Lightning assaulted the darkness through every shivering window, and the place seemed, for a moment, to be filled with whirling laughter, like the mirth of demons. Conductor Wolle brought down his baton with the air of a man casting out a devil. The festival began.

As in 18 other years, the voices were unremarkable, the conducting was scholarly rather than inspired, the orchestration adequate rather than brilliant. As in other years, all who listened were impressed with the earnest intelligence of the performers, the remarkable community spirit that made the festival possible. Next day, Bach's famed Mass in B minor was given as a finale. Once again Bethlehem's choralists surmounted the immense technical difficulties of the score.

* The Bach Festival in Bethlehem results from the musical inheritance of its citizens--descendants of Moravian pioneers from Bohemia who packed up their fiddles, their trombones, came to the Colonies in the late 17th Century. On board the dipping cockleshell that bore them o'er the ocean's watery floor, they chanted a hymn:

Not Jerusalem Rather Bethlehem Gave us that which Maketh life rich-- Not Jerusalem!

Impelled by the resistless logic of this thought, the musical Moravians called their Pennsylvania town Bethlehem. Upon their arrival, they built a stockade, a church, organized the trombone choir. Legend maintains that, when predatory Indians beleaguered the town in 1755, the strains of the trombones so enchanted their savage bosoms that they buried their tomahawks and sought salvation with glittering eyes, clad only in belts of wampum. The concerts of the Bethlehemites, however effective in war, were for long informal, unorganized, until M. Woole (born 1863) went to Germany, studied under Rheinberger, became the passionate admirer of Composer Sebastian Bach, organized, on his return, the Bach Festivals.