Shaping Things to Come

THE LP

"I don't know how we ever did with out the LP," says Composer Roy Harris. "It is to music what the printing press was to literature."

Comparing the influence of the long-playing record to Gutenberg is not as far fetched as it sounds. When they were first put out in 1948, LP records seemed to offer only an assortment of mechanical advantages: economy, convenience, less surface hiss. Like the 78 r.p.m., though, the LP at first was still just that -- a record, a means of preserving for posterity some of the leading concert-hall interpretations of the day. Twenty-one years later, all that has changed. In a McLuhanesque transformation of musical culture, the LP is no longer a mere documentary device. For composers, listeners and musicians, it is a dramatic shaper of musical progress.

Part of the LP's influence has to do with distribution. Today virtually every form of sound known to and made by man, from primitive African chants to serialistic chamber music -- "the old, the new, the modern, the academic, the screwball," as Conductor Erich Leinsdorf puts it -- is easily available to increasingly sophisticated listeners. What the composer writes is indelibly affected by that fact. Italy's Luciano Berio notes that Debussy was influenced by Javanese music, but had to discover it by pure chance. If it had not been per formed at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1889, he would -never have known of its existence. "Today," adds Berio, "re cordings provide a constant Universal Exhibition."

Beyond the LP's value as a source of information, however, is the precision and virtuosity of LP recordings as a means of encouraging and communicating difficult new pieces of music. To day's stereo records capture details often missed in the auditorium, and for many of the complex scores now being written that kind of clarity is its own kind of reward. Composer Elliott Carter admits that such works as his Pulitzer prize-winning Second String Quartet (1959) and the Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord (1961) were initially written with stereo in mind. In the dense antiphonal Double Concerto, for example, each solo instrument is set off against the other -- one to a stereo channel -- and each has its accompanying coterie of winds and strings. The resulting dialogue is almost Joycean in its plural textures and moment-to-moment subtleties. Recording studios also offer new technical means of composing, through such devices as the echo chamber, multi-track recording and tape superimposition. "In this way," says Poland's Krzysztof Penderecki, "the process of recording itself has become a means of composition as well as communication." Of course, none of this technical expertise would be possible without tape, on which all LPs are originally recorded. And there are those who see tape--especially video tape, with which the home listener may some day be able to see as well as hear an opera--as the LP of the future.

Different Esthetic. There was a time when the thrill of a composer's life was a concert performance of one of his works. Now most composers see the concert hall and the LP as separate, but equally rewarding, mediums. Penderecki prefers to hear romantic music in the concert hall, but listens to Bach and Handel in the quiet and privacy of his home. As for his own music, he thinks the dramatically extroverted St. Luke Passion belongs in the auditorium because it should involve people as a group. When it comes to such works as Polymorphia and Dies Irae, Penderecki believes that they sound better on LP because they explore instrumental and vocal techniques in a new way; he does not want listeners to be diverted from the music by extraneous theatrical matters.

The ultimate creation of the recording process are composers who create only for the electronic idiom. To them, composition means either recording real-life sounds on tape and then transforming them electronically (musique concrete), or starting from scratch with an electronic sound synthesizer like the Moog (TIME, March 7). Electronic composers "write" on tape; their music was never intended for the traditional concert hall. "The trouble with the concert hall," says California's electronic composer Morton Subotnick, "is that it requires a social and theatrical esthetic that really has nothing to do with our music." Germany's Karlheinz Stockhausen, who today works primarily in the electronic idiom, agrees: "I make everything for stereo records. The record is the document of how I want my music to sound."

What pleases all composers is the way the LP has broadened the taste and intelligence of the listener. "Once only kings made love to music," says Berio. "Now everybody does." Adds Germany's Hans Werner Henze: "Audiences have learned to hear pieces of music more than once and thus have acquired a training in hearing musical structures." That kind of knowing audience has made possible a new mode of composition in which snippets from, say, the Baroque, French Impressionism and Viennese post-Romanticism are pasted into surrealistic aural collages that would lose much of their point for anyone who had not heard LPs of the originals. Perhaps the outstanding example of that style is Berio's four-movement Sinfonia, a great critical success last fall when premiered by the New York Philharmonic (TIME, Oct. 18). This week Sinfonia comes out on a superbly engineered Columbia LP. Even though Berio conducted the premiere, he believes that the LP release will probably be a more satisfying event. From a purely esthetic point of view, the work will be clearer and more forceful than any concert-hall performance so far. A concert, moreover, is heard today and gone tomorrow. But the LP Sinfonia will be sold, perhaps for years, all over the world.

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