THE FIRST Inter-American Music Festival opens April 18 in Washington. The festival originally had been scheduled for April of last year, and New Orleans, which aspires to be the modern hub of the Americas, was the site chosen. The selection aimed to blend the old musical tradition of the city with the more recent Latin American hue that has covered the port commercially. But several months before the scheduled opening, with almost all commissioned music completed, officials mysteriously called everything off. And the music has marked time for a year.

In calling off the event, the authorities concerned mumbled an odd excuse: the postponement was due to a delay in construction of an outdoor concert stage near the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. This was the first inkling most New Orleanians had that anyone ever contemplated building such a stage, and since then there has not been another scrap of information about it. Last December 8, The New York Times, while discussing the upcoming event in Washington, offered a more logical excuse: the festival was postponed last year so that it would not conflict with the program of the Institucion Jose Angel Lamas in Caracas and the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. But this, while justifying a change of time, does not explain the change of place. Both the initial announcement and the Times interpretation were too polite to hit the mark. New Orleans did not have a music festival last year because its businessmen, who have spent quantities of money and energy in the last fifteen years to attract Latin American trade, did not feel like wasting either to attract Latin American culture.

THE roots of the difficulty stretch to the nineteenth century, when New Orleans was the center of French Opera in the United States. Today its opera company, which presents no more than twelve performances a year, wiggles on and off its deathbed, and the city’s improving symphony orchestra is not of the first rank. This decline in culture had accompanied a decline in power during the last one hundred years. After the Civil War, and the resulting weakening of the cotton economy, New Orleans, the only major Confederate city occupied by Union troops for a long war period, lost its place of importance among American seaports. From then until World War II, the city had three industries — food, Mardi Gras and jazz.

But during World War II, New Orleans trade leaped in awesome bounds, and the city flourished economically. After the war, businessmen shuddered to think that the trade would whisk back to New York. Some imaginative men formed International House to hold on to the foreign business and, with the help of an energetic and peripatetic mayor, young deLesseps Morrison, succeeded so well that port activity not only failed to decline after the war, it tripled within six years.

International House found the key to New Orleans trade in geography and turned the city toward Latin America. Today three-quarters of New Orleans’ imports come from Latin America. The new partnership has been happy, for Latins like New Orleans: the climate is hot and humid, the architecture is Spanish, the residents are Roman Catholic, the streets are lined with palms.

With this background it seemed fitting for the Pan American Union and International House to push New Orleans as the site of the first music festival. The staff of International House knew that if New Orleans was to find a vitality reminiscent of the early nineteenth century, it would have to be linked culturally as well as economically with Latin America. This was made clear, in fact, when the State Department sent the New Orleans Symphony two years ago on a tour of Central and South America, giving the orchestra the only national notice it ever has received.

But this idea of attracting Latin culture was hard to sell to New Orleans businessmen. The typical fellow could not see any immediate dollars-and-cents value in serious Latin music. It was hard for him to peek into the future and visualize the economic benefits that would come if Latins some day felt that New Orleans was their city, the only place in the United States to talk about, to visit, to buy a hat. And, if he did understand the lasting importance of culture, he had a tough time associating it with Latin America. The New Orleanian has been trained to feel that the only true culture of his city is French, even though any vital Gallic influence has long disappeared. International House could not convince its members — the businessmen of the city — to put up the money for the festival or to spend time organizing the program.

THE EXCITING display of largely unfamiliar music now will stimulate Washington, instead of New Orleans, for three days. New Orleans has lost seven world premieres: the piano concerto of Argentina’s Roberto Caamano; an orchestral suite, “New England Episodes,” by Quincy Porter of this country; a quartet by Juan Orrego Salas of Chile; another quartet by Alberto Ginastera of Argentina; “Music for Little Orchestra” by Jose Adrevol of Cuba; “Choro for Clarinet and Orchestra” by M. Camargo Guarnieri of Brazil; and, perhaps the most anticipated, the twelfth symphony of Brazil’s Heitor Villa-Lobos.

In addition, there will be performances, some for the first time in the United States, of music by Antonio Estevez of Venezuela: Roque Cordero of Panama, Juan Jose Castro of Argentina, Blas Galindo of Mexico, Aurelio de la Vega of Cuba, Violet Archer of Canada, Luis Sandi of Mexico, Rodolfo Hallffter of Mexico, Hector Tosar of Uruguay and Gustavo Becerra of Chile.

The Inter-American Music Center of the Pan American Union, credited as the festival organizer, has lined up the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, the National Symphony of Mexico, the Juilliard String Quartet, the Claremont String Quartet and the Howard University Choir to perform.

No doubt the music center will be satisfied both by the performances and the reception of Washington audiences. But a regret will linger over the festival. There would have been a touch of the exotic in spotlighting the festival in the warm, Latin-like Southern city that claims to try so hard to reach the heart of the Americas. As it is, the festival lost its perfect setting; New Orleans lost a perfect chance.

STANLEY MEISLER, a wire-service newsman, recently transferred from New Orleans to Washington.