The Lp: 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.