n a late summer's afternoon, Harry Davidson gets a call in his office. A prospective student is visiting Duke with his family. He's interested in music. Does the conductor of the Duke Symphony have time to talk? Sure, Davidson says. Send them down.

The student, it turns out, plays the euphonium. He's not planning to major in music, he tells Davidson; maybe it will be his minor. He's not heading toward a music career, either. "Good," says Davidson. "If you were planning a career in music, I'd say, 'Duke is a great school, but go somewhere else.'"

Davidson has made his peace with this anomaly. He's a serious musician and demands serious musicianship of his players. But Duke is not a conservatory. Most of his student musicians will go on to graduate or professional schools to become doctors or lawyers or executives.

A prime example is Psyche Loui '03, his concertmaster last year and a phenomenal violin talent. She was selected to attend the prestigious Aspen Music Festival the summer after her junior year and won Duke's concerto competition her senior year. She played the Vieuxtemps Fifth violin concerto with passion and precision at the orchestra's final concert last spring. Loui is now a graduate student in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Loui and Davidson arrived at Duke the same year, 1999. She had played in youth ensembles in her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, and so it was only natural that she join the orchestra. The rapport with Davidson was immediate, she recalls. "He was an excellent musician to work with, and very approachable."

Davidson was also accustomed to dealing with professional musicians and conservatory students. He remembers when he came to audition for the job at Duke. He arrived in the hall punctually at 7:00, the orchestra's scheduled rehearsal time. "There was one person there with a violin case. Not till 7:30 were there enough people there to rehearse. You start on time. I couldn't believe it." It was one of the first things he changed when he arrived at Duke and was emblematic of other changes to come.

When Davidson took over as the Duke Symphony's conductor, he faced a more essential challenge than tardiness. The orchestra was made up primarily of freshmen. As students got more involved in their college activities, many became unwilling to commit the necessary time and energy and drifted away. Loui was among them. "I thought I was too busy," she says. She dropped out in her sophomore year, but Davidson kept up with her. He would run into her on campus and ask, "Why aren't you playing?" He'd nag her gently--"in a nice way," Loui says. Her junior year, she came back.

She returned to a different ensemble. Her freshman year, she recalls, they had taken on only easy stuff: Bach's "Air on a G String," things like that. By the time Loui returned, Davidson had led his student musicians on to more demanding things. By last spring, the easy stuff was a distant memory. "My senior year, I told the freshmen we had played Bach's 'Air on a G String,' " Loui says. "They couldn't believe it."

Ian Han, now a junior, also remembers being disappointed in the orchestra when he first arrived at Duke. A violinist since early childhood, Han began playing in youth symphonies in his native Cincinnati in the fifth grade. The orchestra at Duke seemed a little amateurish, he says. The lack of upperclassmen--and thus, players who had a history with the ensemble--limited what it could accomplish.

But Han says he was impressed with Davidson. The directors he had encountered in youth symphonies didn't have Davidson's commitment. "A lot of youth directors are trying to advance themselves in their careers," Han observes. For many, directing a youth symphony is merely a stepping-stone. "Professor Davidson is very passionate about what he's doing." He encourages his players to understand the music at a deeper level. Under his tutelage, "my appreciation for music has increased," Han says. "He's not a disciplinarian, but he's very serious about what he's doing. People respect that."

Students responded to the combination of rigor and warmth. "He knew everybody's name, unlike every other conductor I've known," says Loui. The orchestra's growing reputation began attracting more accomplished players. At first, Davidson had to take almost everyone who showed up. For concerts, he nearly always had to bolster the student musicians with professionals from the outside, particularly for obscure instruments like bassoon and harp.

Those days are gone. Now, at the beginning of the year, there are usually a few flutes that don't make the cut, and even for the uncommon instruments, Davidson says he finds he can be picky. "Last year I actually did turn down a couple of bassoons, which was a really rare thing to happen, and a couple of oboes."

Han says he has been pleasantly surprised at the quick progress of the orchestra. He notes that for its first concert this fall, the ensemble took on the Bruckner Fourth Symphony, a massive work that might scare even a much more accomplished ensemble.

The Bruckner, in fact, was a signal of sorts. It said: This orchestra has grown up. One person who picked up the signal was local music critic Roy Dicks. As a regular reviewer for the Raleigh News & Observer, Dicks hadn't paid much attention to the area's college orchestras; his time was taken up with the North Carolina Symphony and other professional ensembles, he says. He had seen a few concerts at Duke over the years, "but they were just doing the standard, easier things, not very challenging, not very interesting."