Diskman's Dilemma

A record executive named Goddard Lieberson was resting up after a tough round of business meetings one day last year, his feet on his desk, his mind on a fascinating subject—the Civil War. It was, he decided, perhaps the best-documented war in history, with reams of personal memoirs and volumes of battle detail, campaign maps, bales of drawings and photographs. But suddenly he realized that something was missing: sound. With that thought, Columbia Records Executive Vice President Lieberson launched into a year's research that took him through libraries and across old battle grounds. When he was through, Columbia had a fine new album, The Confederacy.

Adventurous Programming. The album's ten sections, arranged and conducted by Richard Bales, of the Washington, D.C. National Gallery Orchestra, underscores different facets of the war. First is General Lee's Grand March, a frothy two-step that might have come from Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment. Next come wistful and militant soldiers' songs, e.g., Bonnie Blue Flag and Somebody's Darling. Others are drenched with sentiment; still others suggest the progressive bitterness of the occupation.

Sample lyrics :

"All quiet along the Potomac tonight,"

Except here and there a stray picket

Is shot, as he walks on his beat to and fro,

By a rifleman hid in the thicket;

'Tis nothing, a private or two now and then

Will not count in the news of the battle:

Not an officer lost, only one of the men,

Moaning out all alone the death rattle.

Later on, comes General Lee's farewell order to the Army of Northern Virginia (read by Lee's 77-year-old cousin once-removed, the Rev. Edmund Jennings Lee of Shepherdstown, W. Va.), and finally a rousing performance of Dixie that ends in a high-pitched, blood-chilling rebel yell. Bound into the album are 32 pages of pictures and texts by Civil War Experts Bruce Catton and Clifford Dowdey.

For Staffordshire-born Recordmaker Lieberson, The Confederacy represents a new-found obsession with the Civil War ("It's a disease"). It is also the latest experiment "creative" in his approach to the continuing search recording for business. Over the last 15 years, Lieberson has won a reputation for adventurous programming. Soon after his arrival, Columbia released such radical items as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Bartok's Contrasts, and continued to rack up first recordings of modern masterpieces, e.g., Berg's Violin Concerto, Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky cantata. Gradually, Columbia built a stable of its own name artists (Pianist Rudolf Serkin, Violinist Joseph Szigeti), and created a new source of fine music as a major underwriter of the first Casals Festival. By the time Columbia introduced LP (1948), most of its classical catalogue was Lieberson-produced.