Word: gerschefski
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Last summer, fortified by a $500 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, Gerschefski settled down in a farmhouse in West Cambridge, N.Y., above the Ramapos, with his wife, who is also a composer and pianist, and their five children, aged one to 13 and ranging in talent from piano and trumpet through the cello. The nearest piano was an old upright in tiny Whiteside Church some miles away on a dusty country road. Gerschefski went there on foot each morning to work on his ballad, repay ing the parson on Sundays for the use of the piano by playing...
...afternoon, while Gerschefski was working, a sudden summer thunderstorm came up and lightning struck the church's furnace, filling the structure with sulphur fumes. Gerschefski is not certain but what some of the lightning and sulphur remained in his composition. By summer's end the ballad was finished...
Although the music is Gerschefski's the lyrics are taken verbatim from TIME'S story in National Affairs, which was writen by Robert Hagy. The ballad's production became a Spartanburg communal project. It is arranged in four parts for orchestra, women's chorus and baritone solo. The baritone was a local coal and sand man; the orchestra and chorus were made up of college music students, housewives and Spartanburg businessmen. They rehearsed for weeks, not only for the ballad but also for the rest of the 35-year-old festival's program...
Gratified by the audience's reception of Half Moon Mountain, Gerschefski, who is 39 and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale with degrees in music and philosophy, said: "It is the kind of thing which Americans are trying to identify themselves with in a world that makes it impossible...
...that his ballad has had a hearing, Gerschefski is carrying another TIME clipping around in his pocket. It is a story called Man Overboard (TIME, March 1) and is concerned with the ship's carpenter who fell off the Grace Liner Santa Clara one bright day in the Caribbean and was miraculously recovered by his ship, which had discovered his absence and put about for him. Gerschefski doesn't know whether it will make a ballad like Half Moon Mountain, but he is strongly inclined...