"March, American March!"

Since 1952, when the Boston Symphony toured Europe in triumph, visiting U.S. orchestras have repeatedly demonstrated that they are now the world's best. But few orchestras have attracted quite the attention accorded the 87-member Eastman Philharmonia, which returned home last week after a 13-week, 34-city tour. Though Europeans expect excellence from the U.S., they were unprepared for such quality from a student orchestra, most of whose members are in or barely out of their teens.

Organized four years ago, at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, the orchestra's function is to round out the students' musical education by giving them practice in the full orchestral range. Its public appearances were so successful that the State Department decided to sponsor a full-scale European tour. At first, Eastman's Howard Hanson, who directs both the school and the orchestra, worried that three months was a long time out of school. The tour turned out to be an education in itself.

At a concert in Madrid, the lights went out during a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird; the orchestra played on in the dark from memory. When a flight to Luxembourg was canceled, the orchestra arrived by bus 15 minutes before concert time and with no luggage. The musicians played in sweaters and slacks. In Seville, the orchestra arrived during a flood (the concert became a benefit for flood victims), and in Aleppo, Syria, a bomb exploded outside the hall during the concert. Inside, the orchestra played calmly through a new orchestral version of the Syrian national anthem, hastily drafted by Conductor Hanson. Syrians liked it so much that it will probably be adopted as the official orchestral version.

Audiences everywhere were impressed by the orchestra's youth and skill. Even in Germany, musicians confessed that there is no student orchestra with the Eastman's professional polish. "It got to the point," says Hanson, "where if we didn't have five or six encores and a standing ovation, the students thought the concert was a failure." Nowhere was the Eastman a bigger hit than behind the Iron Curtain. In Lvov, Russia, the theater management had to turn off the lights before the audience stopped demanding encores. And in Moscow, the audience shouted "March, march, American march!" at concert's end, clamoring for the stirring piece of U.S. music that had been the Eastman's show stopper in other cities. The march: John Philip Sousa's The Stars and Stripes Forever.

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