The Lp: Shaping Things to Come

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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.