"Music and prisons both have necessary functions, but they sure don't go together," Boston Symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa said a week ago before a packed auditorium in Tanglewood, Mass. Tanglewood, in the Berkshires, is the summer home of the Boston Symphony and the state is planning to establish a medium security prison there. The proposal to convert a vacant Jesuit seminary near Tanglewood into a facility for 260 prisoners has met vociferous opposition from townspeople, area business and Symphony players who view the intense security and the omnipresent barbed wire that would accompany the prison establishment as threatening.
Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops, who handed the microphone over to Ozawa last week, declared that the freedom, peace, and music that made Tanglewood a favorite tourist resort area in the state (second only to Cape Cod) would be destroyed by the prison installment. "It's taken many years to build up a facility like Tanglewood," Fielder said. "To place a prison across the road from it would ruin the whole thing overnight."
A representative for the BSO said this week that the referendum would probably not go through, but not on account of the opposition from townspeople and orchestra-members. The wooden doors on the seminary, she said plus the Tanglewood water shortage and the fact that the prisoners might start riots watching the tourists "indulge in the wonders of the area" would probably account for a vote to divert the facility to another town.
