 There are hungers other than the hungers of the body. Each traveler at the gate needs more than bread and meat, more than wine and shelter from the storm, for we are complex in our simplicity. Not bread alone, we ask, but nourishment of a subtler kind. A child knows and invents his own legends, contrives his own poetry. Homer knew. Homer with his wine, dark sea and rosy-fingered dawn. Dante, inventing a world out of a woman's eyes, Raphael and the unwanted Leonardo, Beethoven, death, but pouring out his music lest his brain should burst with too much beauty. And Milton, blind but seeing with an awful vision. They knew about it all, and he is rich who wins their legacy. He is wise who seeks them out to claim his own. This is every man's journey, and the moment to set out is now. For it is always later than you think, and now the time for beauty. The national broadcasting company in cooperation with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation presents Time for Beauty, the 11th in a series of programs on the changes that have lately come to the American South. This week we would like to discuss the resurgence of cultural interest, a revival in literature, music and the theater. In order to trace this new world renaissance, NBC assigned Henry Cassidy to travel the roads of the South to seek out these things and tell us what he saw. Here with his 11th report is Mr. Cassidy. It's not an easy thing to go searching after culture in a land that is not your own. For art and beauty are subtle things, and they do not willingly reveal themselves to the transient or the passerby. I suppose it would have been quite possible to have walked the streets of Athens in the fifth century before Christ and never know that huge and tremendous things were in the making here. You might have inquired of Plato the way to such and such a place, received your information and gone unknowing on your way. Socrates may have been indistinguishable from the bearded fisherman who bargained with you for last evening's meal. And so it was with me, a New Englander, moving for the first time in this land of soft voices and gentle ways. But I did not come completely unprepared. Somewhere in my luggage was a letter of introduction to Mr. Paul Green of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the distinguished author of In Abraham's Bosom and The Keeper of the Flame that has started across this land. Here I knew I would find one who could guide me on my journey, and more than once, I found myself in his pleasant book-lined study seated in a chair where so many had sat before me who had come to take the nourishment of his wisdom and his kindness. Tell me, Mr. Green, I asked about this new culture that has been born again in your land. There is a new culture in the South that goes along with the new economic and industrial era of this part of the country. It is a glorious thing that is true because there are some nations, some sections of the world that may have a tremendous industrial and economic and engineering power and not a company of that with what I would call things of the spirit. We needn't smile at the word spirit, but maybe it's a good word. Take the case of Sparta, ancient Sparta. Her citizens were trained to fight, and Sparta gave no culture, no art, no music, no drama, no great epic poetry to the world. But think what Athens did. In the South we have something of the spirit of Athens working among the people. There is a new and powerful dynamic of beauty in the South. The grace, the decoration, even the fire and inspiration and glory of the people's lies is now being realized in their sense and in their urge to cultural values. And there were other voices that sang the same song, Atlanta, Georgia, Peachtree Street, houses that played reluctant host to the history-haunted men of Sherman's command. But one no longer hears much talk about this, for Atlanta now is one of the capitals of the new world, and it's the future, not the past, that commands their attention. It was here that I kept meeting a fellow laborer in the Vineyard, a newspaper man, Wright Bryan, former editor of the justly famous Atlanta Journal. Here was a man who knows the craft of words, the joy of contriving a sentence that says precisely what you wanted to say, who knows the equal despair of staring at a blank page in a typewriter when the words will not come. How goes it with our business, I asked him. Tell me about the people who are writing down the story of the South. There's been quite a renaissance of writing throughout this section. The famous example in the literary field, of course, has gone with the wind. That novel that Margaret Mitchell wrote that she thought might sell 5,000 copies, she told me, the week before it was published, and it sold several million and is still selling. And I asked Wright Bryan about the colleges there and the universities, the training ground for the young writers who are even now, as I speak, learning the harsh lesson that those who would write well must write often and long, and that professors like landlords prefer not to wait for inspiration. We're proud of our universities. We have here in Atlanta Georgia Tech, which is recognized, I think, nationally as one of the top technological institutions of the country. The university in Athens is the oldest chartered state university in the United States and is doing some very good work in many fields. Dr. Adho, the president, was telling me only a few days ago that one of the things he most wants to do now is to develop his extension services and his various institute activities which take the work of the campus out to the people of the entire state and make it available to them. And then, of course, we have here in Atlanta Emory University, which is a very notable, privately endowed and operated institution. Its resources have multiplied many times in the last 25 years and we think is quite wise in concentrating on quality rather than size, but it doesn't strive for greater size, it's striving for greater quality. Later, I had the good fortune to meet and chat for a while with Mr. John Richard Kraft, director of the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina and president of a most remarkable organization, the Southeastern Museums Conference, a sort of clearinghouse for intellectual exchange among 350 Southern museums. It's a commonplace, I suppose, that anyone who creates uses the tools that I handed him from the past, and no matter how new the form of conception of his art, the matrix is blended with time long past. And he who would know himself best needs must know what once he was. It was the giant museum at Alexandria that marked it more than anything else as the greatest city of its time. And here in the South, this new interest in the ancient arts is a symbol of the giant forces that are coming to life. I asked Mr. Kraft to tell me of the revival of interest in the art of other lands and other times. Well, there is a tremendous interest in the arts. We were talking about people taking up more and more painting, ceramics, the sculpture and the rest of these associated fields. There's a terrific interest in that, clay, for instance, in South Carolina. Clay is one of our greatest natural resources, but we do nothing about it. So in our art school at the Columbia Museum of Art, we have set up a very active program under the sponsorship of Richland County delegation to use that clay in promoting ceramics. And now we know that ceramics have been done a great deal in Ohio, in Florida, in California. Now we want to do it in our particular section right through here in the southeast. There has more over than a tremendous impetus given to us in the southeast by the same L.H. Chris collection of art. How about museums, Dr. Kraft, has there been any increase in the number of museums in the south? I have been in the southeast area about three years, and I know from personal experience there have been at least five or six brand new museums, but it's more than the new museum. It's a revitalization of the museums which have been here. They are being taken out of the mothballs and being put to use as vital tools in a community. Tools of education and creative activity, tools of recreational value. This is Mrs. Margaret Limley, assistant to the director of the Isaac Art Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her story was one of many. This coming fall, we hope to have a show which will include a hundred paintings and pieces of sculpture, et cetera, from the Louvre in Paris, the first time this will ever have happened in the United States and also in New Orleans. There is quite a group of artists in the French Quarter as in past years. Some of them have been winning prizes in national contests and also out in the museum at contests we hold out there. There are quite a few, not only painters and sculptors, but designers of various types, ceramists, people who design furniture and all sorts of things going on here in the city. The art activity has been increased. One of the main reasons is that the Delgata Museum has had a director only in the past four or five years, and before that, of course, it just sort of died, but now we're coming back to life and he's trying to encourage work, local work, here in New Orleans and also in the state of Louisiana. And although our exhibitions are not confined only to local work, we try to encourage local people to enter them. I think a great outstanding point is the fact that here in the South, for instance, people like William Faulkner are being so greatly recognized today, whereas before they were not. And I suppose you know that William Faulkner's first work was published here in New Orleans in a small, blue newspaper called The Double Dealer, among other famous writers. I believe the same is true all over the South. If you read books or look at paintings, see sculpture, any part of the arts, I believe that there's a reawakening here in the South. And I hope that we'll become even more so in the future. From the looks of things and from the number of works which are being produced in art and literature here in the South, it certainly points that way. The South has a unique contribution to the culture of the Western world. You must go first to New Orleans and there, if you are fortunate, you will meet Mr. Charles Dufour, newspaper man extraordinary and keeper of the files and a type of music that went out from this city along every road in the world. New Orleans has always been a great seed of music. We like to pride ourselves in saying that it was through this country that two of the great musical media were introduced to America. Grand Opera and Jazz. Grand Opera was introduced into America here and we had the phased home of permanent opera many years before New York or the Met. For example, the old French opera house which burned in 1919 was a going concern on a yearly basis with the troops coming from Paris and some of the great artists from Europe as 1859. And for many, many years, premiere performances of great operas which are now in the operatic repertoire had their phased American performance here in New Orleans. All the great artists of the period came to New Orleans just as they were to New York. It was one of the more pleasant aspects of my assignment to travel with the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, a splendid organization of talented men and women who travel like the minstrels of Elizabethan days to the tiniest crossroads to bring their music and their message to many folks who hear this music for the first time. Folks who come out of curiosity, perhaps, but stay to wonder. The orchestra is a state-sponsored institution and paid for in part at least by state funds. It was Mr. Green again who told me the story. I remember when the efforts to found the symphony were congregating or coming to a fermenting boil. One of the leading educators stood up in the meeting and said that he was against having an orchestra here because musicians were notoriously lax in their morals, and if we had such a group here at Chapel Hill, this group would contaminate the student body. Well, I got up and tried to make a reply to that, and I said, Take a great professional tennis player. They come by here and we let the boy see them, and it has tremendous effect on the playing power of these boys. We felt that here in North Carolina, where is collected the greatest and the most wonderful folk music of the United States, we felt that somehow if we could get an orchestra started, that we could get people writing for this orchestra, not only performing the works of great musicians, but also it would stimulate our own people to creativity in the field of music. The other night, no doubt you heard a folk song out of the mountains of North Carolina. I think the name of it is Johnson's Old Gray Mew played by the symphony, arranged here, and I heard it the other night in the midst of the legislature of North Carolina and the legislators listened to it, shouted their applause, and one of them on the money committee said, I say let's give Benjamin Swalene every cent he wants. We have chosen one of the compositions which has won a composition award by the North Carolina Symphony. Margaret Vardell's composition called the Mary's after a painting by an Italian painter. This is Benjamin Swalene, conductor of the music and a guiding light in the efforts to found this symphony. After rather vague beginnings that go back as far as 1932, I made it clear to the board of directors that we could best help the people of the state in terms of musical education by having a professional orchestra that would in every sense of the word be a state symphony. Did you have any trouble getting started through the legislature? Many people thought that we could never get the legislature to take a very definite interest in the work that we were trying to do, let alone have them recognize the symphony orchestra as a fundamental educational institution. But I went to see the late Governor Broughton in 1942. I tried to interest him in this project. And with the help of his wife and other citizens, the celebrated horned tootin bill was passed on March 8, 1943. Would you like to tell us some of the special characteristics of this organization? Mr. Cassidy, I believe that the orchestra is unique and for several reasons. First of all, the North Carolina Symphony is a symphony on wheels. Its home is the entire state. Then, too, the North Carolina Symphony has two units. It has a pocket edition called the Little Symphony of 25 Musicians. And this little symphony visits the small, remote and rural communities, in addition, of course, to the larger communities which are visited by the full symphony of 65 musicians. I don't know of any orchestra, for example, that plays regularly, that is annually in a town with only 400 people as the population. Then this orchestra dedicates a great part of its program to educating the children. We believe, for example, that it's rather difficult to change the minds of the adults. And if they haven't been brought up on fine music, perhaps it might be best for us to work with the children. And so last season, the North Carolina Symphony and its Little Symphony played 82 free children's programs for audiences of 125,000 children. And then another thing, too, that's unique about this orchestra, is that it dedicates itself to fine music as education more even than as entertainment. Mount Erie, North Carolina. This is a special day. The North Carolina Symphony is here for a concert. And long before the specified hour, the little gymnasium here is filled with youngsters of all shapes and sizes, with shirts and frocks of all colors, and a hubbub of conversation, as if they had all suddenly discovered the art of conversation and had a thousand things that needed immediate telling. Now at the first notes of the music, the sounds are skilled and it's a wondrous thing to look upon these faces. These children presented for the first time many of them with the miracle of real music. Here is this education Mr. Swalin was talking about, and it is Mrs. Swalin who stands now before the audience. You're going to let you guess, first of all, the name of the familiar melody. And then secondly, the instrument that is being played. We're going to watch the audience and see the hands go up. And when I think that you know both of those answers, I'm going to point to you and ask you if you'll come up to the microphone and tell us, first of all, the name of the melody. And secondly, what the instrument is that's playing the tune. All right. Yes, you. I'm afraid you can't get over all those heads and arms and feet. Can you? Well, you're making good progress over those shoulders. That's fine. Now, what is your answer? Yes, Yankee Doodle. And what is this strange looking instrument with that curve at the bottom? Can you guess? No, we just have half an answer. Yes. It does look a little like a saxophone. Yes. The bass, bass clarinet, there you have it. You think that is to be there? Yes. Greensleeves, you've just heard it this afternoon on the concert. And what was that fair looking instrument that has four of the keyboard instruments? Would you like to speed up a little bit? Well, now, what do you think that is? You haven't seen that before. Perhaps somebody over here knows. Yes, in the green sweater. What is it? Celeste, of course. And here is the final one to guess now. I'm glad if you don't have shoes on because it doesn't make any noise when you come up. That's treating this gym floor in the right way. Yes, she is coming around the mountain. That's what it is. All right. Intermission time now and time for me to speak if I can with some of the youngsters. Here's a young man in overalls. Could I ask your name? Paul Dunovan. Paul Dunovan. And how old are you? Fourteen. Fourteen. And where do you come from, Paul? Salon. Well, now tell me, what did you think of the concert? All right. You liked it? Yeah. Had you ever heard symphonic music before? I never had. Never had? Well, I suppose you'll expect to go to more concerts now, won't you? Yeah. There'll be one here again next year this time. Coming again. OK, that'll be good. Thanks very much, Paul. Could I ask your name? I'm Star Stas. And how old are you, Star? I'm ten. Ken, and where are you from? Smart Lane. Have you ever studied music, Star? Yes, I've been studying for seven months. Oh, so then you had some experience of what you were going to hear this afternoon, had you? Well, a little bit. A little bit? Did you like it? Yes. What part of it impressed you the most? The piano. The piano, wasn't she wonderful? We hope to talk to her in just a few minutes. I'll take music lessons, piano lessons. Oh, you already take them, do you? Well, it's good, and this must have been very interesting for you. Now we have the soloist of the day, Miss Lee. I want to congratulate you. I'm not a music critic, but as a reporter, it seemed to me you put on a splendid performance. Oh, thank you. How did you feel about it? Well, I think I did pretty good. I mean, I hope everybody enjoyed it. I enjoyed playing with them so much. I'm sure they did, and some we've interviewed have said that they appreciated your part of the program the most. Tell me, had you ever played solo in a concert before? One time before. With this orchestra? Yes, sir. Well, at the age of 15, you have a lot more solos to perform, I'm sure. How did you happen to be with this orchestra? Well, I had to go through two auditions, and then after I passed both of them, I was selected to play with them. Were those competitive auditions? Yes, sir. Other people also trying out? Yes, sir. But how many would you say? Well, I wouldn't know if you had to go through a preliminary audition, and then I wouldn't know how many people went in for that one, but there were three at the last one. But you were the winner of the audition, and therefore got your chance to play here? Yes, sir. What are your plans for the future? Well, I hope to major in music. And do you tend to be a concert pianist? Oh, I don't know about that. I want to do something with my music when I grow up, but I haven't decided definitely what you want. Well, I would think, from what you've done here today, that your ambition has a great chance of being fulfilled. Thanks very much, Miss Lee. Thank you. And so they sat and watched and listened, leaned forward as if to catch this treasure almost before it came from the horns and the violins and the deep-throated drums. And there's a great infection in music, and these children, many of them shy and quiet-voiced in the presence of strangers, were soon to fill this place with music of their own. Well, boys and girls, before we close, let's all rise and sing. She'll be coming round the mountain. We will all have chicken and dumplings, and let's clap the rhythm and sing it together. We will all rise and sing it together. I think that music is a very important factor with respect to the elevation of taste. I should like to say that I believe music and the arts in general are permanent cultural values, and I mean by culture the sum total of the best that man has lived and fought and expressed throughout the ages. Music is certainly the international language of the world, and should be used as a factor for peace and harmony and understanding among men. Music is an art that can convey the most intimate and personal feelings, for man is married by it and he's buried by it. Music is a great social art, and certainly a symphony orchestra is an exemplification of that. Music can be utilized for enjoyment, though not necessarily for amusement, and music can be utilized to glorify God. That thought, the great Bach, was its essential purpose. Today man may be lost in the forest, and if he is, maybe he'd better climb a high hill or a high tree and find out where he is. But we believe that fine music will elevate and uplift people, and that is the creed of the North Carolina Symphony and the creed by which we live. And so through fine music we believe that we can help build a greater South and a greater America. The North Carolina Symphony is young. We believe if we can go on with this program in the new South that is unfolding with its manifold opportunities, that all ears will be listening. And so I found the treasure I had been seeking in this land. The dawn was slow in coming, but once the light began to show against the east, the night was banished, went fleeing down a thousand roads, and they have come these people to claim their legacy, for it's always later than you think, and now is the time for beauty. You have been listening to Time for Beauty, the 11th in a series, Heritage Over the Land. The series is written and directed by William Allen Bales and produced by Ms. Lee F. Payton, Dick Dudley speaking. Heritage Over the Land will not be heard next Sunday when NBC will cover the annual Antoinette Perry Awards over most of these stations. However please join us the following Sunday for the 12th in this series of 13 programs dealing with the changes that have come to the American South.