Tone-Deaf Concert Manager

The drums of doom and the trumps of wrath sounded last week in Columbia, S. C. While an orchestra in Township Auditorium thumped and surged, soloists and chorus gave tongue to the great Requiem of Giuseppe Verdi. When the long work reached its hushed close, 4,000 people applauded. Few of them had ever heard the like. Next afternoon and evening, they sat down to easier music. Punch-pleased were Columbians by their seventh music festival. And peacock-proud were they of the outfit which had engineered the festival: the town's own Southern Symphony, the only 100% professional outfit in the Southeast.

It all began when comely, iron-whimmed Anne Guerry Perry, wife of husky Lawyer Jim Perry, resolved that Columbia should hear good music, whether or no. She persuaded Conductor Hans Kindler to bring Washington's National Symphony to Columbia, to play with a chorus she had helped get up. She commanded Husband Jim, a onetime footballer who is so tone-deaf that he failed to recognize the march at his own wedding, to find the money. He did his job so well that Columbia's concerts, mostly at $1 top, never lost their backers a penny.

For conductor the Perrys got a young German, Hans Schwieger, onetime maestro in Danzig and Berlin. For players, the Perrys wanted chiefly Southerners, but when they failed to find enough, they settled for Northerners and refugees.

After putting the Symphony on a $50,000 budget and a modest paying basis, Jim Perry turned his job over to Edwin F. ("Bully") Farr, who runs Columbia's Piggly Wiggly stores. In an account of his work in last week's Saturday Evening Post Lawyer Perry gave his successor some pointers: "Be sure to lay off opera; the most important thing about symphonies is the number of minutes it takes to play'em--hold out for the short, noisy ones . . . They got you for the same reason they hooked me--first, you are a sucker and second, you are tone-deaf. That i; the type they want."

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