Barge Man

Barge Man Toward sundown, people began drifting down to the riverbank. A few kids impatiently paddled their toes in the water. A young husband shushed a baby on his shoulder. On the far shore a car pulled up, waited, drove away; the ferry was not running tonight. Then, from the barge floating a few feet out in the rippling Ohio River, the music danced deliciously across the water. This was the big day of the year in Ravenswood, W. Va. (pop. 4,500), and almost everybody was on hand to enjoy it.

Conductor Robert Boudreau and his rather grandly named American Wind Symphony Orchestra are bringing something precious to the river towns of Appalachia, the Kentucky bourbon belt and the Mississippi Valley. Essentially, Boudreau has a barge and an idea. The barge is an old coal carrier he got 15 years ago and converted into a floating concert hall. The idea has been with him ever since he graduated from Manhattan's Juilliard School in 1952 and found that there were just not enough jobs available for brass and woodwind players. Being a trumpeter, he understood the problem firsthand. To get his orchestra started, Boudreau walked the streets knocking on doors, until H.J. Heinz II, head of H.J. Heinz Co., gave him $15,000 and Duquesne University matched it. Ever since, he has been floating his barge up, down and around the Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio and Mississippi rivers, drawing audiences to the riverbanks for the kind of experience more often enjoyed in the past by kings --notably King George I, who ordered up the Handel Water Music.

Boudreau's winds have stirred up the whole area; now housewives in town after town do much of the door-knocking for him. He gives his audiences rousing toe-tappers: selections from My Fair Lady, Stars and Stripes Forever and, predictably, Down by the Riverside. He stages a fireworks display at show's end to hold the very young. But he has greater ambitions than that. His programs are heavily laced with contemporary works like Penderecki's Pittsburgh Overture, Badings' Armageddon and Mayuzumi's Concerto for Percussion--just three of the 200 scores he has commissioned and published. Not content merely to bring music to the local wharf or ferry landing, he sends chamber groups into homes for lecture recitals, and he himself can often be found rehearsing the local high school band. It may just be that there is no greater innovative force in American music than Robert Boudreau.

Certainly there is no organization quite like the fine 50-piece orchestra that Boudreau builds anew each summer with young (average age: 23) wind and percussion players from all over the U.S. and, this year, Japan and Canada. It may not match the luxurious silkiness of the Philadelphia Orchestra, but then it has no strings attached. Drawn from 300 to 400 auditioners a year, the orchestra is a crisp, vibrant sounding ensemble that can give its conductor just about anything he wants. What Boudreau wants is as much style and excitement in an electronic-and-live composition as in a Richard Rodgers medley, and he invariably gets it.

Visual Delights. At Ravenswood last week, Boudreau unveiled yet another newly commissioned work, Report, by an up-and-coming Czechoslovak composer named Lubos Fiser (pronounced Fish-er). Report is a mesmerizing symphonic tattoo in which marchlike rhythms blend effortlessly with geometric splashes of sound. It was hardly a hit with the audience, though. "That doesn't matter," says Boudreau. "As long as they're sitting there, they're absorbing it, getting used to the sound of today." The rapt attention now given "favorites" by Penderecki and Badings seems proof enough of that.

If the audience does nothing else, it can always enjoy this year's new visual delights within the 75-ft. proscenium. At stage rear and stage right are two modular kinetic sculptures by Czechoslovakia's Milan Dobes, 41, that provide a light-show backdrop of spinning whites, reds and blues for Mayuzumi's Concerto for Percussion. Even the players' chairs are part of a huge steel stage sculpture designed by Japan's Yasuhide Kobashi. Perhaps "chairs" is not the best word: the seats are actually wood slats fastened like steps up and down vertical tubes that rim the rear of the stage. Some seats are as high as six feet; no two are in the same sight line. It pleases the players that each of them is entirely visible to the audience, although a trombonist who gets up carelessly to take a bow can easily topple to the floor.

The barge itself is a motorless wonder. While the orchestra members travel overland by bus, Boudreau moves the barge from stop to stop, like a kind of riverside hitchhiker. All the tow captains know the Point Counterpoint, as the barge is officially known, and willingly put a towline aboard and move it on to the next town. That saves the orchestra $12,000 to $15,000 a summer in tow charges. Placed against the orchestra's annual $90,000 budget, the saving is substantial.

Goats and Cows. Boudreau does his own summer traveling in a Dodge Sightseer with his wife Kathleen and their three children--Jonathan, 6; Robert Josquin, 3; Tanya, 2. The rest of the year, home is a 20-acre farm outside Pittsburgh where he raises goats and cows, grows corn and tomatoes and listens to tapes of new composers who may be worth a commission.

Boudreau turns positively sentimental when he talks about the beauty of the land. "What a wonderful world we would have if we could see beauty all the time." Sentimental or not, he personally ensures that every community he visits cleans up its riverfront. In that, he may or may not succeed this week when he takes his charges to New York. On a barge provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, Boudreau will sail the superpolluted Hudson and East rivers to give concerts at Yonkers and the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Then back to the farm. How about a conducting job in New York? "It would kill me. I'm a barge man. And besides, I gotta get back to my tomatoes."

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