This story starts with a young musician who wrote an opera called Charms for the Savage. He couldn't get it produced, so he tinkered with it and changed the name to The Food of Love. He still couldn't sell it. But a few weeks ago, he did manage to get one of the opera's songs arranged for a CBS symphony presentation. The arrangement was rehearsed, and at the appointed hour, a conductor and full orchestra were ready to go on the air --but only as a "standby" in case an outdoor symphony broadcast from Chicago was rained out. It didn't rain.

This unsuccess story is about Carter Harman, TIME'S music critic and unofficial helicopter expert. These days, as the fall music season starts, he is working double-tempo to cover the concerts, operas and jazz sessions that make news.

Harman learned to play the clarinet when he was nine. He went to a progressive school in New Jersey which had a parents-and-children orchestra.

"My mother took up the cello and my father the French horn to play in the orchestra with me," he says. Later, at Princeton, he majored in music under Roger Sessions, whom he calls "the best composer in the country."

Harman got a music fellowship after graduating in 1940, and stayed on at Princeton. Somewhat to his own surprise, he soon found himself in a civilian pilot training course. "Other guys," he explains, "were taking the course who didn't seem particularly inclined that way either, so I tried it." His teacher, a former truck driver, liked to fly the Waco trainers upside down, and the "first thing I noticed was that my cigarettes in my jacket pocket were falling out and slipping past my face one by one."

After Pearl Harbor, Harman joined the Air Forces, and during training volunteered to fly a then largely untried craft, the helicopter. One trouble with the helicopter was that if, at low speed, the engine failed, the pilot couldn't glide down as a plane pilot could: no one had ever lived through a forced helicopter landing. So most of Harman's early training (at the big Sikorsky plant in Bridgeport, Conn.) was spent studying theoretical techniques for forced landings.

One day Harman and another pilot were flying over the plant area when, at the low level of 200 feet, the engine stopped dead. Obedient to the untested theory they had been taught, and against all their natural instincts, the two tilted the copter downward and dived it at full speed straight for the ground. It worked: 20 feet from the ground the rotor blades, spun by the dive, acquired enough lift to break the fall. The craft smashed up, but Harman and his friend walked away, "just as the fire engines and ambulances came roaring out to get us."

Later, in Burma, where he served as a squadron commander in Colonel Philip Cochran's famed Air Commando Group, Harman chalked up another first. in helicopter history. He made the world's first military helicopter rescue, bringing out three British soldiers and an American flyer who had crashed in the jungle.

"I guess there are some links between flying and music," says Harman, "sensory things, like the sense of spanning time and space. High in an airplane you feel that you are going very slowly; a scherzo sounds fast, but you know the actual passage of time is really slower."

Harman came to TIME after five years as a music critic for the New York Times. Among his notable stories: TIME'S cover on Rosemary Clooney (Feb. 23). Harman keeps constant watch for new talent, e.g., Concert Pianist Charles Rosen (Dec. 29), Jazz Pianist Dave Brubeck (Nov. 10). He also spends days in his soundproofed, hi-fi-equipped office reviewing the most interesting new records. Musician Harman is often hard on Critic Harman, for this reason: "There's often no way to describe music except by music. Words can be fifth-rate. So my problem is to describe the music in terms of the other senses . . ."

As for his own music, Harman's professional career really started when he was studying at Columbia University after World War II. Columbia's Otto Luening told him, "You've got more in your head than you can write. It's all clogged up. Why don't you only put down the simple things you're sure of?" So Harman wrote some children's songs. They came out on a record entitled Mary Martin Sings for Children. It sells well.

He also continues work on his opera, and I am sure it will get a hearing soon. As a matter of fact, Harman's story seems to be a success story after all.

Cordially yours,

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