Conductors: Herr Doktor

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Through his 92 Westminster recordings, most notably Bach's B Minor Mass and Handel's Messiah, Scherchen has long been known and respected in the U.S. as a master of the baroque and classical repertory. But in Europe he is famed as the indefatigable champion of modern music, who played Schoenberg, Von

Webern, Berg, Milhaud, Bartok and Hindemith when they were still rank unknowns. Scherchen's mission, as he sees it, is "to conduct all those works which cannot be performed without me." The result is that he has probably premiered more significant modern compositions than any other conductor in this century.

Ear Capacity. His ear, as always, is tuned to the sounds of the future. At his 17th century farmhouse in Gravesano, Switzerland, where he lives with his wife Pia, 42, and their five children (he has a total of nine children, ranging in age from four to 46, by three wives), he has constructed three "electroacoustical laboratories" crammed with exotic space-age sound equipment. There he pursues his "burning interest": investigating the possibilities of "electronic sound forces." One sound force he will not tolerate is the telephone: a grocery down the road handles all his calls.

"The art of music has been dying since the beginning of the 20th century," says Scherchen. "The ear has developed new capacities; Beethoven no longer excites an audience as he did 15 years ago." The reason: "Beethoven has no high frequencies." Scherchen concedes that the electronic music being produced today is "primitive and monotonous," but foresees the day when it "will perhaps create the most fantastic reactions man has ever experienced." Whatever the sounds of the future, Hermann Scherchen means to have a hand in it. "My whole life has been doing new things," he says, "and I'm not going to stop now."