Recordings: The Twelve Tones of Christmas

Most record companies fill their preholiday releases with seasonal sounds: Christmas carols, a Handel oratorio or two. This fall the sounds from Columbia seem to be designed for Christmas 2067. In one batch last month, on its three constituent labels, the company issued as its entire "classical" release no fewer than 17 recordings of contemporary music, most of it on the farthest fringes of the far-out.

The list is admirable in its division of attention between the gurus of the contemporary styles and their still-emerging disciples. It includes such cornerstone composers as the French mystic Olivier Messiaen and American Serialist Statesman Milton Babbitt, plus a smattering of tiny, wispy recent Stravinsky pieces, as well as chamber works by Aaron Copland, some recently discovered early pieces by Anton Webern, performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.*

Squawking Steinway. Columbia's package concentrates chiefly on the broad spectrum of experimentation, most of it stemming from Webern's later pointillistic serialism and further shaped by the development of electronic sound producing and reproducing equipment. John Cage's Variations II required Pianist David Tudor to clip microphones at various points on his Steinway and to overtune them so that the amplifier-produced squawl and squawk become part of the composition; in Mikrophonie I. Karlheinz Stockhausen attached two microphones to an oversized gong, which was then hit with a variety of materials to produce a 26-minute submersion in audible chaos.

New York Composer Steve Reich taped a short phrase from a Harlem boy's account of a riot, played it back stereophonically so that the words ("Come out to show them") gradually expand spatially from one to eight channels, creating a 13-minute study in mounting obsession. On other disks, Composer Henri Pousseur blends voices and taped sounds to make an airy sound-picture of the Belgian city of Liège, while Pauline Oliveros and Toshi Ichyanagi create broad, abstruse patterns by tinkering electronically with the sounds of chorus, organ and strings.

Inside Bach. If any message surfaces from Columbia's far-out stockpile, it is simply that today's musical world spins through healthy confusion. While some composers have chosen to cut themselves off from the familiar sounds of instruments in favor of microphones and amplifiers, others—Lukas Foss, Gunther Schuller and the Russian Edison Denisov—find within orchestral resources the means for flying just as high. Denisov, the first composer from the recently surfaced Russian avant-garde to find his way to records, builds his six-minute Crescendo e Diminuendo by offering the conductor a series of short, disconnected blocks of string tones that he can put together in whatever order he wishes. In his ten-minute Phorion, Foss produces an authentic and horrifying piece of camp by turning a Bach prelude inside out and scattering its bones around the orchestra. Schuller's 17-minute Triplum is a brilliant synthesis between the fractionated twelve-tone language and jazz.