The little country girl stood watching as musicians piled out of a bus onto the gravel parking lot of a motel, unloading tubas, kettle drums, and oboes. The North Carolina Symphony had arrived for yet another in the thousands of concerts it had given over the years in every remote corner of the state.
“Honey, do you live around here?” one of the musicians asked.
“Yes, sir,” the child replied earnestly, pointing to a house in the distance. “Right over yonder, ‘side the hard-circus road.”
Benjamin Swalin, the orchestra’s musical director and conductor from 1939 to 1972, never saw that little girl again. But her phrase (for “hard-surface road”) so endeared itself to him that he used it as the title of his 1987 book about a career spent bringing culture to the masses: “Hard-Circus Road: The Odyssey of the North Carolina Symphony.”
There have always been elements of a traveling circus in the peregrinations of North Carolina’s uniquely mobile state orchestra, whose members have been described as “a gypsy crowd.” And the roads have indeed been hard, as Swalin wrote: “miles upon hundreds of miles, asphalt and concrete, unyielding, frigidly cold, steaming hot, straight, curving, twisting, ascending steeply, falling away fast to the flatlands, unrolling for us changing panoramas of sights and sounds and places and people.”
Lamar Stringfield organized the North Carolina Symphony in 1932 as a federal make-work project for down-at-the-heels musicians. But Swalin, through a bulldozer-like force of will that won him many friends and some enemies over the years, was the one who almost single-handedly brought the orchestra into existence in its present form and won it recognition as one of the nation’s great symphonies. He had grown up in Minnesota, never setting foot in North Carolina until he was well into his 30s, and he spoke his immaculate English with a noticeable Scandinavian accent to the end. But traveling all those highways for all those years made him more familiar with North Carolina and its people — and he more familiar to them — than most born-and-bred Tar Heels. Untold thousands of adults all across the state still treasure childhood memories of the day the distinguished-looking Swalin and his petite wife, Maxine, showed up in the school gym with their entourage of players to delight and enlighten them.
“At a time and in a place where others despaired that great music had no place,” said Voit Gilmore of Southern Pines, former president of the Symphony Society and Swalin’s longtime friend, “he stuck to the battle and converted even a tough rural legislature. He helped North Carolina grow and enjoy one of the dimensions that other Southern states just didn’t have. He was a very independent and heroic character who well earned the title of one of North Carolina’s all-time greats.”
Born in Minnesota
Benjamin Franklin Swalin was born at the turn of the century in Minneapolis. Showing an early proclivity for music, and especially the violin, he auditioned with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (later the Minnesota Symphony) after graduating from high school in 1919. He was accepted as the orchestra’s youngest member. The Minneapolis Symphony spent a lot of time on the road, a factor that may have proved greatly influential in a later time and in a distant place.
“During my two years with the orchestra,” Swalin wrote, “I learned a great deal from its experienced musicians; while on tour in Winnipeg, Canada, I bought a handsome Panormo violin, still one of my treasured possessions. And I developed a desire for a university education, inspired by the numerous stops made by our touring orchestra at colleges and universities.”
But first, Swalin felt a need for more violin training. So he headed to New York in the spring of 1921 to study with renowned violinist Franz Kneisel. After two years of private lessons under Kneisel, he studied further under him at the Institute of Musical Art, which later became the Juilliard School of Music.
“In New York — and in Blue Hill, Maine, during the summers of 1921-23 —“ he wrote, “I learned not only from my lessons with the great master but also from hearing some of the eminent violinists who were his friends and colleagues.”
Studied in Vienna
After Kneisel’s death in 1926, Swalin studied with Professor Leopold Auer. To keep body and soul together, he took up a number of musical jobs in New York, playing first violin with the Capitol Theater Orchestra, giving private violin lessons to the daughter of novelist John Erskine, working in the WOR Radio Orchestra, and playing in more than three hundred performances of a radio show called Up She Goes. At the same time, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in English literature at Columbia University.
In 1930, one of his Columbia professors, Carl Van Doren, persuaded him to accept an international fellowship to study in Vienna. He arrived at the Musikhochule with only a few sentences of German in his vocabulary, but eventually earned a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna after studying violin, composition, and conducting.
“I then set out in January 1933 to visit various sections of Europe in which I had a special interest,” he wrote. “In my travels — to Pisek, Czechoslovakia; to Berlin; to Sweden, the land of my parents; to Copenhagen; and to Cambridge — I sought out the scholars and musicians whose work I had admired, and I was fortunate to meet them. … Enriched, I returned to New York and the Depression, fearing that work would be hard to find for someone with no secretarial skills.”
But typing proved unnecessary, because he had soon landed a job as a professor of violin and theory at DePauw University in Indiana. While studying at the Institute of Musical Art, he had met and fell in love with a fellow student, a vivacious Iowa girl with the alliterative name Martha Maxine McMahon. They spent as much time together as possible in New York, but soon their academic paths took them in different directions. The years passed, and she returned to Iowa to teach, enduring his various wanderings with increasing impatience. The last straw before the DePauw move was Ben’s sojourn in Bolshevik Russia, from which he returned with a Trotskyite-looking goatee that horrified her conservative parents.
While listening to a sermon entitled “Time for Decision,” Maxine experienced a moment of truth that she described in her own book, “An Ear to Myself,” privately published in Chapel Hill in 1996. Overwhelmed by a longing for marriage and tired of waiting, she ran out of the church and into the manse next door, where she called Ben long-distance. When he expressed alarm at her breathless sobs, she explained that she had just heard a sermon.
“About decision.”
“You mean…now?”
“Yes. I do.”
Then, reverting to the exaggerated Swedish accent that was a family joke, he asked: “Maxine, vil you mar-ry me?”
Alien Territory
When the Northern newlyweds arrived in the alien territory of Chapel Hill in June 1935, it was supposed to be just a temporary stay while Swalin taught in the summer session at the University of North Carolina. But the move became permanent when he so impressed Music Department Chairman Glen Hayden and University President Frank Porter Graham that they invited him to join the teaching staff. The Swalins settled into the comfortable and stimulating existence enjoyed by Chapel Hill faculty members and spouses, and there they might have stayed for life.
But various factors converged to pull — and push — Ben Swalin in an unexpected direction. After several years, he began to weary of faculty politics and to worry about his future with the university. His violin classes were full, and his book on the violin concerto was selling, but his expected promotion to associate professor and raise in pay were slow in coming. Meanwhile, the university orchestra he had inherited was of poor quality, with too few trained musicians. His efforts to encourage an increase in string classes in the state’s high schools, and thereby assure a steadier flow of new talent, came to naught.
Then came a pivotal day, early in World War II, when Swalin was asked to get some musicians together for a “Bundles for Britain” concert in Greensboro. He had a nucleus of players from Chapel Hill, Greensboro and High Point, but he needed more. He found them in some former members of the old North Carolina Symphony, which had faded from existence in the mid-‘30s. Their hastily organized performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto was a hit.
“That night,” Mrs. Swalin wrote, “leading citizens asked why this group could not stay together and become a new North Carolina Symphony.”
And that, despite initial opposition to the idea from Chairman Hayden, is exactly what happened. The old North Carolina Symphony Society was reorganized, with Colonel Joseph Hyde Pratt of Chapel Hill as its president. Support began to solidify.
“Of course there was no money, rehearsal hall, office, secretarial help, publicity chairman, personnel or business manager,” Mrs. Swalin recalled of those bleak but bracing early months. “There was no music available. Two great friends and enthusiastic supporters, Johnsie Burnham and author Paul Green, accompanied Ben to the Bank of Chapel Hill to borrow $200 for tympani. … Musicians pooled their wartime gasoline to rehearsals and concerts. Salaries were never spoken of, only ‘honorariums’ from a shared pool.”
After the orchestra played at Raleigh’s Sesquicentennial Celebration in 1942, Swalin managed to get an appointment with the governor, J. Melville Broughton. Making the most of his audience, he poured out his hopes for a new orchestra: that it be an educational institution with broad popular appeal, that it go on the road to bring great music to North Carolinians from every walk of life in towns and schools from Murphy to Manteo, and that it receive regular financial support from the General Assembly.
The governor was taken with the idea. His wife lobbied for it with legislators. And on March 8, 1943, in the depths of war, the legislators approved Senate Bill 248 —which became known far and wide as the “Horn-Tootin’ Bill.” It declared the symphony a quasistate agency under the “patronage and control of the state.” The North Carolina Symphony had become the first in the nation to enjoy support, however minimal, from a continuing state appropriation. Swalin was granted a leave of absence from his teaching duties. Less than a decade after he and Maxine had taken one leap of faith by coming to Chapel Hill, they took another one in separating from the university and hitting the road in pursuit of his dream. He was 45. She was 43.
“The Horn-Tootin’ Bill was laughed at and ridiculed at first by many a rural legislator, who thought that was the last thing anyone needed,” recalls Gilmore. “But Ben would load the symphony into one or two buses and take them to legislators’ home districts. And when they saw little kids just stomping and whistling and being taught not only Tchaikovsky but also American melodies, he began to get under their skin and into their hearts. He toughed it out and built up a network of supporters like me that finally got him entrenched all across the state. He was stubborn enough to make the damn thing work where fainter hearts would have given up long before. He did it through determination — and also through the strong support of Maxine, his second heartbeat in anything, who was a charming but equally dedicated lady who gave incredible amounts of time.”
With Swalin’s leadership, state funding, Maxine’s energy, and the support of symphony societies springing up in dozens of counties, the N.C. Symphony grew steadily in size and reputation over the years — becoming, in the words of the Durham Sun, “one of the most acclaimed and esteemed institutions of the state, and a model for similar organizations elsewhere in the United States.” Articles about this beacon of enlightenment in a still-segregated South appeared in Time, Life, and Newsweek, and NBC broadcast its concerts coast-to-coast in May 1948 and April 1958.
Barter Arrangement
In the early years, a trade arrangement developed. If supporters in a given locale raised enough money to bring the it to town for an evening concert, the symphony would play a free afternoon concert for any group of schoolchildren designated locally. In Southern Pines, Gilmore recalled a condition attached to the deal by Katherine Boyd, a publisher of the Pilot and widow of novelist James Boyd: “I will contribute enough to justify your playing at least two children’s concerts. And I want one of them to be for the black children.” Swalin was more than happy to comply.
In the weeks before an appearance, books written by the symphony’s education director, Adeline McCall, were distributed to the students. Local music teachers attended workshops ahead of time and brought recordings back to class to acquaint the children with the music to come. In stop after stop, Maxine Swalin spoke to the rapt children before a show and introduced them to the sounds of the various instruments. She took pride in the fact that many student musicians who had the opportunity to perform as soloists with the visiting symphony went on to professional careers. Since she and Ben were childless, their relationships with dozens of young musicians around the state often took the place of family.
As the symphony achieved national stature, Swalin received recognition for making it what it had become. He won the Morrison Award for Achievement in the Performing Arts, the Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina, the North Carolina Award for Achievement in the Fine Arts, and a citation and life membership from the National Federation of Music Clubs.
Gov. Terry Sanford, former Duke University president and U.S. senator, was one of Swalin’s most ardent admirers and defenders. Though he recognized that Swalin could be difficult to deal with, he also knew that that very cussedness was what had brought the symphony into existence when few others believed in it. He loved the democratic spirit that Swalin’s symphony represented.
“Determined that the job of good music should be brought not just to black-tie audiences in acoustically attuned concert halls but to all the people,” Sanford wrote in the foreword to “Hard-Circus Road,” “the orchestra traveled by bus and played in factories, school houses and churches across the hundreds of miles. This is truly a human story of two people. But for Ben Swalin, the North Carolina Symphony would not be. But for Maxine, Ben would not have prevailed. Bravo!”
The symphony, homeless for years, eventually came more and more to make its home in Raleigh. A major turning point came in 1966, when the orchestra received a grant of $1 million from the Ford Foundation. This helped relieve some of the financial strictures, but other tensions grew, both externally and internally. Swalin, though still a beloved public figure, found himself sometimes at odds with his younger players and longed for a slower pace. He retired in 1972 and suffered a fatal stroke in 1989. His body was returned to his native Minneapolis, where he was buried in Lakeside Cemetery.
His beloved Maxine, born in 1903, lived into the 21st century, still going strong and still championing artistic and musical causes, but still regretting that she and her husband had had no children. “Ben would have been a radiant father,” she wrote, “eager to guide, to teach, probably expecting too much too fast.”
‘Planted the Seeds’
When aging members recalled the North Carolina Symphony’s first three decades, they shared fond stories of being snowed in in the Appalachians, stranded by a storm on Ocracoke Island, getting lost, enduring fleabag hotels and endless cocktail receptions, getting interrupted in the middle of a piece by barking dogs, losing instruments, and getting locked in dressing rooms or out of hotel rooms. And in the middle of it all, they remember dapper Ben Swalin, usually gracious, sometimes imperiously demanding, always committed to bringing quality music to the –people and getting them to like it in spite of themselves.
“Through the years,” he wrote, “our programs were based upon what we regarded as good music. It was the kind of music we hoped our listeners would experience, for we believed that the symphony must lead the way … chart the direction of the public taste.”
In the matter of elevating the public taste of North Carolinians, Swalin probably did as much as anyone in the 20th century. “Rarely will you find a man with so vast a knowledge of music and a passion for making it heard,” the Charlotte Observer wrote at the time of his retirement. “He nursed the North Carolina Symphony to health and gave it vigorous direction. He planted the seeds for enjoying music among the state’s youngest audiences. He has served us well.”
Steve Bouser may be reached at (910) 693-2470 or via e-mail at sbouser@thepilot.com
