Word: musication
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...know how we ever did with out the LP," says Composer Roy Harris. "It is to music what the printing press was to literature...
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...
...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...