Symphonic Therapy

A year and a half ago, Ernest Salisbury was committed to a mental ward in Eloise, Mich. as an alcoholic. He spent days there scribbling musical notations on scraps of paper. When the hospital's music therapists got a look at them, they found that

Ernest, who had had a little musical education, had written some simple but appealing melodies. The doctors encouraged him; he was soon writing popular songs for his new friends among the staff and forgetting his need for a drink.

Last November, with help from the therapists and a Detroit Conservatory professor, Ernest started something bigger. Last week at the Michigan State fair grounds he heard the Detroit Symphony Orchestra play excerpts from his first symphony, to an audience of 10,000. The music was pretty murky in spots, and full of borrowings from Tchaikovsky. Said Conductor Valter Poole, "It interested me as psychiatry, not as music." But the audience gave Ernest an ovation. Said he in a bashful curtain speech: "Ladies and gentlemen, I enjoyed the playing of the symphony . . . Have confidence in mental hospitals--it did me good." This week, Ernest Salisbury,25, learned that he would shortly be released from the hospital.

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