If any of you were among the audience of 1,500 music-lovers at the annual Spartanburg, South Carolina, Music Festival on Friday, April 30, or, later, tuned in radio station WSPA at the proper time, you witnessed or heard a novel event in TIME'S history: the first performance, by a symphony orchestra and chorus of 70 voices, of Half Moon Mountain, a modern American ballad inspired by a story in TIME.

We have known about Half Moon Mountain almost since its inception. About a year ago Composer-Pianist Edwin Otto Gerschefski, dean of music at Spartanburg's Converse College, wrote us about his plan. He said he was a weekly reader of TIME with a habit of clipping stories and depositing them in the pocket of his jacket for easy reference. One such story, from the May 26, 1947 issue, had impr es s e d him so much ("I couldn't get it out of my mind") that he wanted permission to set it to music.

The story, titled 55 Minutes from Broadway, was an account of the life and death of Gilbert Pitt, recluse, who had lived for 81 years in a dirt-floored shack in the Ramapo Mountains of New York, 30 miles northwest of Manhattan. Together with his housekeeper, Maggie Gannon, he had passed much of his time avoiding the so-called conveniences of modern society. Last spring, suffering from a heart attack, he waited for the dogwood to bloom; then he died.

Last summer, fortified by a $500 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, Gerschefski settled down in a farmhouse in West Cambridge, N.Y., above the Ramapos, with his wife, who is also a composer and pianist, and their five children, aged one to 13 and ranging in talent from piano and trumpet through the cello. The nearest piano was an old upright in tiny Whiteside Church some miles away on a dusty country road. Gerschefski went there on foot each morning to work on his ballad, repay ing the parson on Sundays for the use of the piano by playing for the congregation.

One afternoon, while Gerschefski was working, a sudden summer thunderstorm came up and lightning struck the church's furnace, filling the structure with sulphur fumes. Gerschefski is not certain but what some of the lightning and sulphur remained in his composition. By summer's end the ballad was finished.

Although the music is Gerschefski's the lyrics are taken verbatim from TIME'S story in National Affairs, which was writen by Robert Hagy. The ballad's production became a Spartanburg communal project. It is arranged in four parts for orchestra, women's chorus and baritone solo. The baritone was a local coal and sand man; the orchestra and chorus were made up of college music students, housewives and Spartanburg businessmen. They rehearsed for weeks, not only for the ballad but also for the rest of the 35-year-old festival's program.

Gratified by the audience's reception of Half Moon Mountain, Gerschefski, who is 39 and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale with degrees in music and philosophy, said: "It is the kind of thing which Americans are trying to identify themselves with in a world that makes it impossible to do so."

Now that his ballad has had a hearing, Gerschefski is carrying another TIME clipping around in his pocket. It is a story called Man Overboard (TIME, March 1) and is concerned with the ship's carpenter who fell off the Grace Liner Santa Clara one bright day in the Caribbean and was miraculously recovered by his ship, which had discovered his absence and put about for him. Gerschefski doesn't know whether it will make a ballad like Half Moon Mountain, but he is strongly inclined to try it.

Cordially,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.