Made to Order

Music-loving Dr. Gustavus Capito of Charleston., W. Va. used to get a lump in his throat when he listened to Smetana's Moldau. He wondered why some American composer couldn't write as good a piece about the Kanawha, the river that flows through his home town (pop. 92,000).

A year and a half ago public-spirited Physician Capito put a proposition to Conductor-Composer Antonio Modarelli of the 85-piece Charleston Symphony Orchestra: Capito would pay $1,000 for the kind of composition he had in mind. Modarelli agreed. Last week, along with West Virginia Governor Okey Patteson and the biggest Charleston symphony audience in history (2,500), Capito heard the result: a six-section program piece entitled River Saga.

Composer Modarelli had spent his spare time for months reading up on West Virginia's history and folk literature. To get more ideas he made trips up & down the Kanawha, which with its main tributaries winds on a 450-mile course through fertile farmland, timbered hills and industrial valleys.

He gave River Saga a steady flow of hummable melodies and pounding rhythms that hit his West Virginia audience right where they lived. One woman who had traveled 36 miles from Gauley Bridge to hear the premiere was pleased as punch with the third section, which described the stretch where the upper branches of the Kanawha join forces, roar over Kanawha Falls. "There's a song I've heard every day of my life on the river," said she. "You can hear it right in the music."

Superintendent Thomas Ragland of the Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Corp. plant at South Charleston, who had played host to Modarelli when he was trying to get "a feel" for the industrial section of Saga, beamed at the sound effects of whirring machines and the tripping of interrupter switches. "Precisely as they are heard in the plant," said he.

Elderly Dr. Capito, more than delighted, sent Composer Modarelli his $1,000 check and expressed the hope that River Saga would "flow on and on and on," and give other U.S. cities the notion of doing something like it.

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