Word: lp
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Without announcing the titles of his songs, acknowledging applause only with a quick smile or a murmured "thank you," he sang with the new voice and manner first heard on his most recent LP, Nashville Skyline (TIME, April 11). It is far less nasal and rasping than before, far less a mixture of drone and downward slur. The tone is softer, rounder; one note leads gracefully to the next, and the result is just as satisfying in its own way. Unexpectedly bending and holding notes like a crooner, Dylan gave a lyric, wistful quality to the traditional Irish ballad, Wild...
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...
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...
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...
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...