Music: Victory for Moderns

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In music, as in politics, yesterday's revolutionary is today's conservative. Listeners' ears have become accustomed to hearing once scandalous sounds in the backgrounds of film, radio and TV productions, and the mellowing years caused many of the composers themselves to compose less aggressively. Today the record industry—perhaps the most conservative part of the generally conservative music business—seems to have decided that 20th century music is here to stay.

Last week the weekly trade magazine The Billboard front-paged some corroborating statistics. Three major labels, Columbia, Mercury and MGM, devoted the largest part of their summer releases to modern works, e.g., Aaron Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Elliott Carter's The Minotaur. With several other companies contributing, 50 contemporary compositions were released this summer. This brings the impressive total of 20th century compositions on records to some 1,500, with about 240 composers represented. By comparison, there are only 776 works represented by 48 composers of the first half of the 19th century.

This does not yet mean that contemporary composers are necessarily eating better than they were before the boom. Record royalties seldom come to more than 3¢ a composition. In the modern-music field, 10,000 copies mean a rare bestseller, bring only $300. But the mere fact that a work is put on permanent vinyl plastic makes its composer seem more substantial. One of today's most popular contemporary LPs, Colin Mc-Phee's Tabuh-Tabuhan, had a grand total of three performances between its creation, 20 years ago, and the time it came out on records (Mercury) this summer. Since then, at least half a dozen groups have made plans to perform it. Most popular modern composers on disks: Bartok, Prokofiev, Stravinsky.

Record companies are today practically forced into the arms of the modernists. They have exhausted the "standard" repertory of late 18th century and 19th century music and even the cool counterpoint of the preclassical masters. Some of the moderns prove to be profitable indeed. The reason: contemporary composers favor brilliant or unusual orchestral effects, and such effects are just dandy for showing off hi-fi phonograph equipment. Thus the battle of modern music appears to have reached its turning point, and the composers who pioneered during the '20s and '30s and their followers are about to enjoy victory.