Mary Lamont, a 25-year resident of East Cambridge, hadn't heard a live orchestra for over thirty years.

That changed last year when a small, local chamber group "thrilled" Lamont and fellow residents at the Miller's River Apartment complex.

The reason: the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center (CMAC).

The arts center is a three-year-old umbrella group of several local arts organizations which supplies funding to struggling artists and brings performers to parts of the city previously left out of the arts picture. The organization was formed in 1981 by the City Council in order to pull together in an organized fashion a panoply of grass roots arts groups that had been doing much the same thing, but only in an ad hoc fashion.

Anti-Establishment

The old system, center officials say, unduly favored more established artists and groups in the perennial quest for funding, support, and technical advice. By streamlining the process under one roof, the city hopes "to attract untraditional audiences--to bring people to the theater who wouldn't normally participate," says one project director, Geraldine Guardino.

But they hope to go beyond that and achieve an even more lofty goal--improving city race relations.

"The CMAC is a way to bring the races together, so that they can enjoy and appreciate each other's culture," says City Councilor Saundra Graham, a staunch backer of the center. Adds the center's director, David Kronberg: "We're presenting different forms of culture and we're bringing different racial and ethnic groups together."

An example of one of the center's more successful projects, in fact, has been a program to train low-income teenagers in the performing arts through a summer paid internship program. More than 250 youths have passed through the "Youth Performing Arts Training and Employment Project" and have received professional instruction in drama, music, dance, and technical production.

Guardino says of the multiracial troupe: "They're not traditional kids--they wouldn't dare participate in regular high school drama."

Their training culminates each winter in an original production; this year's, entitled "Freeze in Three Speeds," was performed two weeks ago at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church. Like many of their productions, it deals with problems associated with growing up and the feeling of alienation.

The center also tries to target other kinds of Cambridge groups. For instance, the center's "Arts for Life" program organizes artistic performances in Cambridge's senior citizen housing projects and nursing homes. It was under the rubric of this group that the center brought an orchestra to Mary Lamont's apartment complex.

"T" For Two

In addition, the center's money goes to sponsor, among other things, musicians who play at "T" stops, crafts classes, and Suozzo a virtual monopoly on medallions and allow him to dominate the taxi.

All told, the arts coalition has spent approximately $200,000 on its program. This money comes from a variety of state arts organizations--such as the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities; none comes from the city tax coffers.

Permanent Institution

Moreover, the center is hoping to institutionalize itself more permanently, through finding itself a regular headquarters. A grant of $80,000 from the federal government is going to help the center in its renovation of a 170-year-old building in East Cambridge.

The building is scheduled to open in early 1985 and will include several workshop rooms, practice rooms, administrative offices, and a large theater.