Word: stereos
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Four-channel stereo at first suggests mainly gimmicky possibilities-tap dancers banging their way across the living room and out into the kitchen; Valkyries swooping about the house like big-bosomed mosquitoes. Yet it has serious potential in recording. Certain kinds of music can be adequately heard no other way: the Berlioz Requiem, for instance, with its four brass bands in opposite corners, or the antiphonal music of Gabrieli...
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...
...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...
...common. County Circuit Judge Volie Williams, who has handled 3,000 divorces in the past two years, finds that plaintiff wives of engineers present a strikingly similar recital of marital discord. By their accounts, says the judge, "the husband never wants any family life. He likes to build a stereo set from component parts and then dare anyone in the family to touch it. Every weekend he goes out in his boat by himself and doesn't want his wife or kids to go with him. He never physically abuses his wife and he's a good provider...
Some engineers eventually find that they have more in common with jargon-speaking secretaries than with their wives. Electrical Engineer Kenneth Ongemach, for example, met his second wife Grace when she was a secretary at the company where he worked two jobs ago. Now 32, Ongemach owns a stereo set so complicated that he objects when other people try to operate it. His garage shelters a 1966 Cadillac and 1968 Pontiac Firebird with a 400-h.p. engine that he souped up himself. When his cars or his job preoccupy him so much that Grace complains, he told TIME Miami Bureau...