MOBILE, Ala. — When it comes to multi-tasking, Ben Harper puts even the busiest of us to shame. In addition to serving as orchestra stage manager, box office assistant and preludes instructor for the Mobile Symphony Orchestra (MSO), the classically trained musician has become the orchestra’s Web site designer and photographer of choice.

“They’re skills I didn’t know I had until those jobs were thrown on me,” Harper confesses with a smile.

Harper’s ability to snap that perfect shot and capture that inimitable image of the MSO has become legendary. On Aug. 1, the Mobile Arts Council will mount a month long exhibition of his photographs — The Mobile Symphony Orchestra: Creative Force — in the Skinny Gallery at the Arts Council’s offices.

The gallery, which is located at 318 Dauphin St. in Mobile, is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“We often joke with Ben that beyond regular duties, he should ‘expect other duties as assigned’ — which means that when we need something done, we call on him,” says Executive Director Stephen Hedrick. “And just look what that’s led to. Recently Ben’s photos appeared in a national publication, Symphony magazine, and now they’ll be featured as an art exhibit. Bravo, Ben!”

“I haven't yet discovered what Ben Harper can’t do,” adds MSO Music Director Scott Speck. “He’s been a huge asset to the Mobile Symphony. Above all, I love the sheer joy that he brings to everything he does.”

The source of that joy is no mystery, according to Harper, whose father Andrew Harper, was chairman of the music department at the University of South Alabama for 18 years.

“Music is what I eat and breathe. It’s who I am,” Harper explains.

He is not exaggerating. For starters, Harper is the master of many musical instruments, including the flute — he studied with the MSO’s principal flutist Andra Bohnet — guitar, and bass.

“I play bass sitting in with as many jazz bands as I can fit into my schedule,” Harper confides, “as well as a lot of other instruments just well enough to impress the first- and second-graders in my preludes classes.”

Harper, who has a degree in music education, came to the MSO while working at WHIL Radio, where his duties at the classical station included stints, over 13 years, as a late night and morning drive announcer as well as program director.

“When I first met Ben, he was a superb radio announcer,” Speck recalls. “Then I found out that he’s an excellent guitarist, a terrific teacher, a wonderful stage manager and, now, a top-notch photographer and Web designer.”

Today, however, Harper is perhaps best known as a member of the Celtic band, Mithril. The ensemble weaves traditional Celtic music with American folk, classical and Middle Eastern melodies, and is fast becoming one of the most sought after Celtic/world music groups on the concert series scene … thanks in no small part to Speck, who hired the ensemble for its first orchestral gig, an MSO holiday concert in 2004.

“Scott Speck and the MSO are the single biggest reason we’ve been able to break into the orchestra circuit,” Harper recalls. “It was the ‘perfect storm’ of gigs. Scott and the orchestra were in top form, Mithril had really started to gel as a band and the audience was eating it up, hanging on every note. It was obvious that the concept really works and that we could take the show on the road with other orchestras.”

Those “other orchestras” include the West Shore Symphony (also led by Speck), Mississippi Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Fort Smith Symphony and Santa Rosa Symphony.

The ensemble will also return to the MSO for a “St. Patrick’s Pops” performance — again, with Speck conducting — on March 14 and 15, 2009. In fact, two of the ensemble’s four players — violinist/fiddler Tom Morley and Andra Bohnet, Harper’s former teacher — are members of the Mobile Symphony Orchestra, or “the family store” as Harper calls it.

In 1987, his father started the Port City Symphony, which eventually grew into the MSO as it is today.

Meanwhile, Mithril will travel to Enid, Okla. in November for two performances with the Enid Symphony Orchestra.

Enid, as it turns out, is only 30 minutes away from where Harper attended high school.

“I’ve contacted my high school choir director to invite him to the show to see what’s grown out of a musical seed he planted years ago,” says Harper, whose daughter, Ruth, starts Preludes next year and whose son, Billy, will begin cello lessons under the MSO’s Symphony Strings program.

“I’d love that to happen with one of my kids — my Preludes kids or my biological — in 20 years.”

And, yes, Harper adds, his former choir director has accepted his invitation. Stay tuned.