THE BEETHOVEN YEAR
Wilhelm Backhaus--Beethoven Sonatas Nos. 13, 24, 3. (Op. 27, No. 1; Op. 78; Op. 2, No. 3) London CS 6638 stereo ($5.98).
Wilhelm Backhaus is surely the grandest old man of the recorded Beethoven piano sonata. His recordings for London would seem to beat all records (in both senses)--for longevity, quantity and quality-though I haven't totted up the others to be absolutely sure. My oldest Backhaus LPs date from the early fifties, among the very first London long-play recordings. He still goes right on, and the current Schwann catalogue is full of his Beethoven sonatas, though not in the sweeping "complete" format of such as Angel's young Barenboim, old Artur Schnabel ( who did the first such set before the war) and that other Wilhelm, W. Kempff, whose complete set is available on imported Deutsche Grammophon.
(He used to appear on U.S. Decca Gold Label LPs.) Kempff, who mustn't be confused with Rudolph Kempe, is a precision performer on his records, impeccable in phrasing and sharp detail, powerful, passionate but, even so, a bit chilly. One admires, but at a distance. Backhaus is a very different sort. Elderly now, he is sometimes clumsy, blurring up the details in old -man fashion; but to my memory he has always been this way, a pianist interested in the grand lines and impact, inclined to be uneven in detail, using both a bouncy, staccato technique and a good deal of blurring pedal. But this man has such an unerring ( and continuing) feel for the sense of Beethoven that these matters are of no account at all. His wholly natural, persuasive way with the composer is utterly musical.
Best of all, perhaps, is the lack of pose, the naturalness. So many pianists approach Beethoven with furrowed brow and determined mein, advertising loudly that now they are performing THE MASTER. (Orchestras likewise!) Yet for all their determinedness, many of them do not really understand nor feel the music.
With Backhaus, Beethoven is so comprehensible, so familiar, that there is no thought of anything but straightforwardness. For which, the thanks of us all.
Only the OP. 27, No. 1, "Quasi una Fantasia", runs into noticeable technical trouble here. The fugal segment with the running fast notes is just too much for the elderly fingers, though the sense is all there. The rest, and notably the early Op. 2, No. 3, is just fine. Backhaus is particularly good in the early works, so often treated as semi-youthful immaturities. He gives them their full due, without a trace of exaggeration. Try Backhaus first-then measure all the others.
Performance: A, Sound: B+
Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 "Pastoral." Phila. Orch., Ormandy. Columbia MS 7444 stereo ($5.98).
Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 "Pastoral"; Overture to Egmont. New Philharmonia Orch., Giulini. Angel S-36684 stereo ($5.98).
The Sixth Symphony with its pastoral picturesqueness, its peasants, birds, thunderstorms, all part of a straightforward love of nature and the countryside by Beethoven, was of all the symphonies the easiest to "put over" back in the 19th century when these things were taken for granted in the arts. Now, the Sixth is surely the toughest of all to play, and it seldom comes off. The hair line between dullness and overdoneness, between the routine playing of all the notes and the unctuous playing -up of the nature pictures, is always with us.
The Ormandy-Philadelphia Sixth--another of the flood of Columbia recordings of the orchestra issued since RCA took over-is exactly what we could expect.
All the notes are there and one cannot fault a single one. Everything is done according to instructions. It should be perfect. It is ineffably dull. Polished, suave, velvety playing, to be sure. But where is the soul, the will to make the music re-live itself? Carlo Maria Giulini's recording with the equally accomplished New Philharmonia is of another sort altogether. In spite of his Italian background, Giulini starts off somewhat heavily and slowly and, it might seem, the piece sets out to be heavy-footed throughout. But listen on! The Philharmonia probably didn't have more than a very few run-throughs with the conductor, hence a considerable amount of hesitant, out-of-time playing at moments of change. But this orchestra can read and play skillfully, and more important, it can take fire. The first and second movements go by with no more than an equably pleasant approach, OK but nothing wildly exciting.
Then, beginning with the peasant dance, the players take hold and the music begins to glow. The storm is wonderfully vivid, yet not a bit corny or overdone. It lives again! The calm after the storm has all of that delightful peacefulness that we know should be in the music, and the variations on the theme take on more and more warmth-I ended up enthusiastic. A splendid half performance: the second half.
Could have been Giulini but, I suspect, it was as much the members of the New Philharmonia, simply working themselves into a very professional enthusiasm, almost of their own accord. It can happen among good musicians. A good conductor, on such an occasion, is wise enough to go right along and do all he can to help, giving only the necessary minimal leadership.
Performances: B-, B+ Sound: B, B
Artur Schnabel--Beethoven: Concerto No. 4. Chicago Symphony, Stock (1942). RCA Victrola VIC 1505 mono ($2.98).
A memorable reissue, this one, though Schnabel is better known on records for his European recordings of the concerti, done previous to this American recording. The sound is unhelpful though in no way unpleasant-just dull, typically lacking in reverberation and the high end, the orchestra somewhat subdued in the background and the climaxes apparently limited in volume; they seem curiously to fall short of the proper impact and the fault is surely not the orchestra's nor the conductor's.
But the piano comes through silky smooth, in the best of the excellent RCA Victor manner, and Schnabel's dedicated playing of this, the gentlest of the five concerti, is plenty to carry us with him, technical faults or no. It is a splendid version, gentler than Serkin's Beethoven yet rugged all the same, less flamboyant than Gilels yet equally big in bravura concept. Schnabel was not a great piano finger technician but sheer musical faith, expressed so profoundly, made his music the finest Beethoven of his day. Brains and musical understanding, operating through a workable virtuoso technique--that did it.
Performance: A, Sound: C+
Historic Organs of France. E. Power Biggs. Columbia MS 7438 stereo ($5.98)
The Historic Organ: Bach Organ at Schlosskirche, Lahm. (Music by the Bach family). Wilhelm Krumbach. Telefunken SAWT 9551 stereo ($5.95)
As more and more of the great classic organs are restored to playing condition, the recording crews keep us up-to-date on them-to the delight of many a home body whose previous experience of the organ may have been the sound of Sunday hymns in church. A great hi-fi sound and splendid for stereo reproduction.
And the music is as sturdy as the organs themselves, remarkable products of an enlightened age.
Mr. Biggs' playing, characteristically, seems always to improve when he finds himself an inspiring historical instrument.
At home, he is often uneven, the phrasing bad, the fingering nervous. Here, once again, he is mainly very good, at two celebrated French -style Alsacian organs, both built by Andreas Silbermann, French-oriented brother of the great organ builder Gottfried Silbermann. Andreas lived for years in Paris and his organs have that brilliantly nasal sound characteristic of the classic French instrument. The instruments at Marmoutier and Ebersmunster alternate in this recording; Ebersmunster is gentler and more distant (in the recording), Marmoutier is big, round, and full. The Biggs program, appropriately, is all French of the period, from Couperin le grand and an earlier Louis Couperin through a brace of lesser men-an oddity is a very familiar theme of Bizet, in a piece by Clerambault a hundred and fifty -odd years earlier. You'll spot it in an instant.
Did Bizet "borrow"? More likely it's a well known pop tune out of history.
In contrast, Telefunken's Bach Organ is a splendid German instrument built 1728-32 for a minor nobleman to ornament his local church; his organist was Johann Lorenz Bach, a nephew of J. S. Bach. The single Prelude and Fugue by T Lorenz in this recording is a brilliant piece of writing as played on his own organ. The entire recording is devoted to music by members of the far-flung (in Germany) Bach family-Johann Michael, J. Christopher, J. Bernard, J. Ernst, in addition to J. S. Bach himself. All these various Johanns were cousins or brothers or uncles and the program is a good practical illustration of the industrious talent for music that was spread through this family.
The Herbst organ, the only one of this German builder still surviving, is unusual in that it has been preserved absolutely unchanged since the day its first sounded out in 1732. It has merely been restored to perfect working condition in the recent 1960s. An all-mechanical organ, including the hand -pumped wind supply, very much in the Bach tradition, with an altogether lovely sound, big and full yet never strident. Suits its church perfectly; we quickly sense the classic open Baroque interior of the building in the sound, so different from the reverberation of the long, high Gothic cathedral. Wilhelm Krumbach is an excellent performer, accurate, lively, and colorful.
Performances: B, B+ Sound: B, B+
MANDOLIN
It's all very well to speak of the "now" generation but what, after all, is time itself but a series of now’s which become then’s before you can think? Take, for perspective, that very unstylish instrument, the mandolin, currently at a lowish ebb if used here and there in a bit of rock or for a sentimental journey into the past. A batch of recorded mandolin music has given me a new look at this pear-shaped, pick -plucked relative of the lute from the vast viewpoint of several centuries. Remarkable-I wouldn't have believed it! Nothing earthshaking, of course.
The mandolin isn't quite up to the violin or the piano or the string quartet. But I found its older music surprisingly interesting in terms of new musical horizons.
Beethoven. Hummel. Mozart. More recent worthies such as Hans Gal and one Norbert Sprongl. (Anybody with a name like that deserves a hearing.) I had no idea the mandolin had gone so far.
My first contact with the instrument was in the nature of a family reverence--quite soundless. I had three old uncles, all of them obstreperous souls, brilliant minds, each in his own way fettered by small-town pettiness. The oldest, a bluff, hearty soul with the voice of a bull, terrified me as a youngster by insisting on three helpings of roast beef when I could swallow but one. The next, an irascibly humorous devil, has made life raffish for half a century on his local small town back street-you may still hear him today halfway down the block on an otherwise quiet summer evening. The youngest and most loveable was so long outshouted by these elders that for fifty years he has fought to make his vocal cords work at all. A brilliant talker, once he gets started.
Ah, but the fourth brother! I never met him. I only knew his mandolin. Uncle C. is the family saint. He was the eldest but he remains eternally youthful, a smooth faced college man with hair parted neatly in the middle, a tall stiff collar around his aristocratic face. He died of appendicitis before his father could make up his mind whether to operate or not. Uncle C. was at the top of his class in college, where he had at last broken the family tethers--or had he? He was, they said, clearly 4 designed for greatness. He played the mandolin.
In those distant days it was the instrument for an up-and-coming college man, setting off the heavy turtleneck sweater, the beer steins, the rakish derby hat. Alas, the family never told me what music he played but I can guess. Bereaved, his mandolin was passed silently on down the family line, a black bow figuratively tied about its neck. One looked at it, so to speak, in hushed tones. Symbol of youth cut off in flower.
My brother was named after Uncle C. and inherited this special instrument as a matter of sacred family duty. But it would not speak for him. It sat around for years, with its mother-of-pearl fretwork and its dark, brooding, ship -like curved body; not even I, the musical member of the family, could get more than a dismal jangle from its broken strings. So much for the mandolin. Or so I thought.
Well, there was a big mandolin, the mandola, used by jongleurs and the like in the 12th and 13th centuries. Around the end of the 18th century the mandolin became a musical craze, modestly, following hard upon the transverse flute, its more cultured neighbor. A very respectable instrument. Beethoven wrote for the mandolin, and that neglected first-rank musician, Johann Nepomuch Hummel.
Also Mozart. The mandolin had even then a clearly marked character of its own--it was definitely a serenade-type instrument, graceful and pleasant, rather than impassioned like the guitar. You will have heard Mozart's mandolin (or imitation of same) in Don Giovanni. The Don's serenade--what else? A peculiar sound, dry and sweet, midway between the liquid guitar, the elegant lute, and the plunking banjo, and Mozart knew exactly how to use it.
Jump a century and there it is again, but now in the 1890s used for the first "popular music," that gentle sentimentality that was heard in college rooms and a few front parlors where "classical" music would forever remain unknown.
That was my Uncle C.'s time-put a rakish, flat-topped visor cap on him above the tall turtleneck, and add the mandolin. Early Gibson-boy. Around the same time, the mandolin's most striking feature became mechanized and rolled on metropolitan streets, that walking mechanical piano, mis-known as hurdygurdy ( actually a much earlier hand-held mechanical player), which rattled out "The Sidewalks of New York" and "East Side, West Side, All Around the Town" while the monkey held out his cap for coins. Remember? The mandolin has pairs of strings tuned together in unison.
You play it with a pear-shaped pick and for the longer notes you vibrate that pick back and forth across the two strings for that characteristic slow brrrrrrrr that makes a mandolin sound like a mandolin--and a street piano sound like a street piano. Curiously, though all later mandolin composers use that effect, it is missing from Mozart. Could his mandolin have had single strings? It was, of course, a Bohemian mandolin in Prague. That's where Don Giovanni was composed and produced, and where practically every citizen was soon humming its tunes. Or playing them on the mandolin? Imagine, then, my gratification when I recently discovered not one, but two different new recordings of what is now perforce called the "classical" mandolin, encompassing between them almost 200 years of mandolinic time spread. Both mandolinists are excellent, revealing a surprisingly lively and fluent technique.
My Uncle C. would be astonished, if taken aback by their uncollegiate names--Scivittaro and Bauer-Sleis. Even more unsettling to him ( and his now) would be the old fact that both are women. A lady mandolinist?? As unthinkable then as a lady Yale man or a male Vassar co-ecl.
Nevertheless, both these ladies, Maria Scivittaro and Edith Bauer-Sleis, are superb players. Maria is backed by no less than the harpsichordist-pianist Robert Veyron-Lacroix on Nonesuch. Edith is aided by members of the Vienna Chamber ensemble and a tenor to sing a Mozart serenade or two on Everest.
Nonesuch's Robert and Maria perform the Beethoven and Hummel, from just a century before my Uncle C.'s day. Four pieces by Beethoven, all out of that sudden 200th anniversary wealth of unknown music with the curious designation "WoO"--music without opus number--dating from the composer's first maturity.
Oddly, Beethoven wrote for mandolin and harpsichord, not piano, perhaps because both are plucked by plectra. Curiously, too, the WoO 44 music, a sonatina and an andante with variations, is superficial though pleasant, whereas the earlier WoO 43 pair, another sonatina and an adagio, are full of interesting harmonies and daring modulations of key. Matter of circumstance. WoO 44 was written in Prague (1796) for a mandolin-playing countess. Beethoven could always write convincing potboilers when so moved.
WoO 43, on the other hand, was done far a professional mandolinist who obviously aroused Beethoven's musical interest.
Edith BaueE-Sleis adds directly to this musical picture via two Mozart serenades with mandolin (zither in the parlance of the time), K. 349 and K. 351, which by their sound could be no less than studies for Don Giovanni, if Mozart had needed to do any studying. From Mozart this disk skips lightly over and beyond Beethoven et al to a much later period that is another ear -opener, our immediate past-which in mandolin terms (as in guitar music) means mostly a reminiscence of the last days of Romanticism. Hans Gal, a name I had heard of in a vague way. Raffaele Calace. Norbert Sprongl.
Among other accomplishments these gentry composed music for mandolin in a variably grand manner and it comes off well. The least of them, I thought is Calace, who with his brother was for the instrument what Czerny and Hanon were for the piano. Teaching methods. Exercises. And music on the side. Sprongl and Gal, born in the early 1890s, both from lower Austria, were wider -ranging musicians and their music sounds it. The Hans Gal Divertimento for mandolin and piano is a really lovely, sunny piece, full of a gentle, rather Nordic nostalgia for the old days in Vienna. Norbert Sprongl, who moved to Scotland, writes a peculiar and more incisive style that seems, such is internationalism these days, to come from a later period, France of the nose thumbing generation, poking vulgar and noisy fun at all that was Viennese elegance at the time of WWI. But Sprongl is still a Viennese and, so to speak, takes refuge in the nearest French equivalent, the manner of Cesar Franck though without the mysticism. A curious style! Both these composers write incredibly well for mandolin, Sprongl's music blending it expertly with a guitar. All in all, I'd say, the mandolin will never be the same again once you have tried these disks.
Mandolin Music. Beethoven, Hummel. Maria Scivittaro; R. Veyron-Lacroix, hps. and pf. Nonesuch H-71227 stereo ($2.98).
The Virtuoso Classical Mandolin. Edith Bauer-Sleis; Vienna Chamber Ens., Kurt Equiluz, tenor. Everest 3244 stereo ($4.98).
Heinrich Schutz: Psalmen David, 1619. Soloists, instrumentalists, Westphalian Choral Ensemble, Ehmann. Nonesuch H-71235 stereo ($2.98).
Schutz Schein Scheidt. Voices and Brass. Purcell Chorus of Voices, Philip )ones Brass Ensemble, Leppard. Argo ZRG 576 stereo ($5.95).
Most of the Schutz we hear was composed parsimoniously for small ensembles during the Thirty Years War. But young Schutz, before the wars began, had studied with G. Gabrieli in Venice and had enthusiastically imported the multiple-choir magnificence of the Venetian style into Germany, where the Elector of Saxony gave him full resources for the same kind of gloriously big music in German terms. Out of that early period came the settings of the Psalms of David, as sampled on the above Nonesuch record. The Venetian magnificence held over into later adversity, where it was achieved necessarily with simpler means--contrasting groups of solo voices, as in Argo's "Ich beschwore." The earlier Schutz is hardly distinguishable from Gabrieli, if even more sonically magnificent. Later, the characteristic Schutz melody takes over, for a more personal and intense effect. The others of the "3 SCH" composers, Schein and Scheidt, borrow some of the same Southern magnificence, though more indirectly.
Nonesuch's German recording is made in a huge and resonant space, with a typically precise choir sound--no wobbles--a passel of soloists and a considerable band of "authentic" instruments (mostly). As recorded, the acoustics interfere somewhat; rather close miking was necessary to defeat the echo overlap.
But the magnificence comes through--solos, chorus, organ, band, in multiple choirs. An interesting idea was to do two versions of the hymn -based "Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren" (using two verses of the text) according to two optional instrumentations suggested by Schutz himself. One is circumspect, with only a simple accompaniment; the other tosses in the instrumental works. The two are note -for -note the same music and we are thus given an excellent idea of the range of option allowed in productions of that time.
"Voices and Brass," from England, is a stirring recording even if technically somewhat of a throwback. Here we have a similar magnificence, in the music of Schutz, Schein, and Scheidt, and an absolutely gorgeous spread of recorded stereo sound. But the instruments are strictly modern--including those powerhouse modern brasses that so many people love in Gabrieli, however unauthentic the sound-and the solo voices are modern concert type (as though this were to be taken for granted, as it still often is). The chorus is even more so, a collection of professionally trained vocalists quite suitable for Wagner and Verdi and Puccini! Nevertheless--as so often happens--sheer musicianship wins out, not to mention splendid acoustics and superb recording. I found the record excellent and easier to listen to than Nonesuch's more documented recording. (We must merely keep in mind that it is possible to have the best of both worlds: documented, authentic production and musical awareness.)
Performances: B+, B+ Sound: B+, A
Copland Conducts Copland. (Our Town, Outdoor Overture, Quiet City, Two Pieces) London Symphony Orch. Columbia MS 7375 stereo ($5.98).
Bernstein conducts Copland. (Inscape, Connotations) N.Y. Philharmonic. Columbia MS 7431 stereo ($5.98).
An interesting pair of Columbia disks (added to an already impressive Copland discology in the Columbia catalogue), summing up neatly two eras of Aaron Copland's musical life, and ours.
One of them surveys the Copland output of the thirties and forties, the span of his great success as a popular classics man. The other offers two recent works, altogether different and changed, yet still unmistakably Copland for those who know his music. It will be a while, if ever, before these newer works become widely popular--if ever. Does it matter? A question.
Copland's own disk, with the London Symphony, is of a remarkable consistency. These are some of those short works, derived from folk-like American legend and melody or from American life scenes, that made him a leading exponent before WW II of the theory that American music could be popular and classical too. The square, jazzy tunes, the simple, rugged major chords, often tossed against each other in what once seemed like intriguing dissonance (don't even notice it now), the wide open spaces in the music, so to speak, took much of the "highbrow" labeling off of this symphonic output. Almost anybody could listen to Copland-and recognize America. Even the British ( who aren't good at this sort of playing) manage very well here, with Copland's own infallible direction to keep things in an American style.
"Inscape" (a species of landscape, figuratively speaking) and "Connotations" (1967, 1962) were among, the works in which Copland finally took up the Schoenbergian serial system, now that it had emancipated itself from its earlier Germanic connotations. Like his works of the 1920s, these two are not in the least "popular" nor in any way derived from folkish or nationalistic themes.
The extreme opposite, indeed! They are musician's music, for musicians, and perhaps stem naturally from the fact that over the last quarter century Copland has become a sort of dean of American composers and the leader wherever music schools, symposia, summer institutes, convocations and the like have brought professional musicians and teachers together.
He lives in that world, and writes for it.
One work, by the way, celebrated the opening of New York's Lincoln Center, the other the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. So you see where it's at.
Performances: B, B Sound: B, B
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Canby Looks at "Les Illuminations" opera today
WHERE ARE WE GOING, in this new age of quadraphonics? Since my first mention of it a long year ago I've said nary a word--but, as the phrase goes, I've had one ear to the ground. The other has been flapping wildly in sheer excitement. It is a new age, even if we are far from defining its shape and parameters.
Quad sound does add a fundamentally new aspect to reproduced sound, never heard before. And it is strictly a logical development out of what has already happened in the past. It will surely prevail, in spite of the present confusion.
That confusion, alas, is the price for advancement. The greater the potential of a new system, the more dismal the chaos at its introduction! Never fails. We have immense problems, this time, what with so many possible quad media, competing and not necessarily compatible, with pure quad sound-four separate "tracks"-versus various sorts of quad information coded into more economical transmissions.
And there are those two big jokers, quad broadcast and quad on disks, both requiring some form of compromise, (technically .speaking, not aesthetically) and/ or a radical change of the rules. No wonder there's confusion. Nor do today's strident demo -promo blasts do much to help. Remember "ping-pong stereo"? We're in the same rudimentary stage with quad sound.
It's awful.
Yet there is good quad sound. And there's even better quad logic. First, take my word on the sound. It has a new, unique impact when it is done right.
There has been nothing like it before.
I had long noticed that ordinary good stereo sound can make its impact even around a corner and through a doorway--without any apparent spread at all. Stereo, you see, is much more than merely two speakers to right and left. It gives the ear fundamentally new things to work on, as compared to any mono transmission, and that impact is surprisingly persistent, even around corners and into other rooms. Now I am discovering that quad sound, similarly, goes much further than the much advertised "surround," which supposedly plops you down right in the middle of a concert hall. ( The old "best seat" all over again.) Quad brings-or can bring-a quality of definition that to my knowledge has existed only in live music. And so it should, logically.
I've heard quad sound in extreme conditions. I have heard superb quad in a closet, the tiny work room of engineer Dave Jones in New York, so filled with equipment and boxes there wasn't room to sit down. Yet, via his recording, there we were listening to a splendid big brass ensemble in a large space, without the slightest impediment! The tiny listening room simply was not there. We were sonically taken straight out of it.
Then there was a recent multimedia extravaganza, at the opposite pole, "Spatial Variations on Benjamin Britten's 'Les Illuminations'," a presentation of Opera Today, New York, which is given inside an airy hemisphere of linked metal circles filled in with stretch cloth, and includes not only music recorded in quad but live music too, plus a troupe of live dancers, six film and eight slide projections (of the same dancers), all this going on at once. In New York the show occurred improbably on the floor of a huge enclosed armory, the quad "surround" dwarfed by the vast surrounding arena; and the music was for chamber string orchestra and solo tenor! For once, here was small music in a vast space, instead of the more normal opposite.
Yet even as I climbed the stairs of that enormous building, late, I heard it unmistakably. The sound of quad stereo, the sound of live strings, though I was completely outside the stereo surround of the four channels. It hit me in seconds. No earlier type of recording could have done it.
This beautifully produced show did more than that for my ears. It combined recorded music with live-the solo tenor sang in the flesh, against the quad sound of strings. But he also took part in the dance pantomime, and at those moments his voice was unobtrusively taken over into the quad sound. He stopped singing, but the voice went right on. Excellent! I was not aware of any changeover. The moral of this is that with quad we have more closely approached live sound and thus we can mix live and recorded music with a wholly new effectiveness. That mixture, as we know, is a big thing in the arts now, all the way from the corniest pop to the classiest classic. More quad versatility.
Even at the noisy Consumer Electronics Show last spring, with a thousand demos going on in two huge New York hotels, I heard the unmistakable quad sound.
Telex, for instance, bravely set up a quad demo right on the ballroom floor, out in the open in the midst of a raucous babble of other demonstrations. No more than a few partial reflectors, plastic room dividers, with walk space between, the four minimal speakers mounted overhead-yet as I walked through, there was that sound again! Against incredible odds. Just because most of the other quad demos at the show chalked up a zero for my ears doesn't lessen my respect. They'll learn.
What is the logic of quad sound? There is only one logic, and it applies to all of the variations and the systems we have been hearing, without exception. Quad sound aims to take us further in the direction where we have always been going, towards greater information density for the listening ears. Not more sound, but more kinds of sound, for the ears to work on.
Do not be misled by the "surround" hoopla. We have had "surround" sound with us ever since the earliest days of electrical mono recording, via the walls and ceilings of our listening rooms. We are always surrounded by sound, whether it's mono, stereo, or what have you. Even in our automobiles. (Only pop music at the beach is a real exception!) Our recordings have reasonably assumed that room reflection would help to create that sense of a larger, other space which is the aim of virtually all modern recordings of any sort. ( One in a thousand actually brings an instrument into your living room.) In mono, we could create a surprisingly real space outside our living rooms, even a Carnegie Hall, by recording the hall liveness with the music and spraying the mixture into our listening space for all-around reflection. And this even though that space was non-dimensional-you could not point and say, there are the violins; for they were everywhere, equally. No differentiation. No matter-it worked. The room itself did it and, as we know, the room and the speaker placement were crucial for good listening. At best, we did not hear the mono speaker as such; we heard the music and its space, spread out before us. Quite a trick, all things considered.
Stereo sound took over the important end of the listening room, up front where the ears are most sensitive, to project newly differentiated sounds towards the ears, left and right. A deeper, more immediate space, a certain degree of actual spatial direction-the violins were, at last, on the left. (In concert your eyes do most of the direction finding, remember.) Stereo at best is an immense improvement in conveyed useful information-but note well that the room is still there. Three sides of it still operate as before, bouncing now a double echo but still surrounding you with sound, as always. Our stereo recordings take this into account, and count on it. In good stereo, we are still inside our rooms (or our autos) but we have moved almost into that other created space brought to us by the recording-we have a foot over the threshold, and the other space extends around us to each side, whenever the recording people want it to. (Stereo signals definitely create images out beyond each speaker, at the sides.) That is the increased versatility of the stereo recording process.
Yet look--the back of the room and the sides are still no more than passive reflectors, just as before. They work hard for you, but they merely follow along after the up -front power -signals. Like railroad cars following an engine. They contribute no new information; they merely help to process and distribute the old, for best effect.
It was inevitable, given the technology, that we should move on to a still further display of new information for the ears.
Let's power up those rear spaces, take them over much as we have taken over the front end. Then we will no longer have an active front and a passive surround--we can control and manipulate sound projection not only in front but from all around. The basic result? Less listening room, more re-created space, to taste. We have, in theory at least, very nearly eliminated the listening room itself ( though it still reflects, and must be taken into account). We are, indeed, "in" the recorded space, in whatever fashion the recording engineer desires and the music requires. There is a potentially much greater control over the effect of the recorded sound. And, because it gives more clues to the ear that are of the sort we hear in live sound, quad sound (again--when done right!). is closer than ever to a parallel with the live situation.
Not, mind you, a literal reproduction of the concert hall, though to a new degree that is possible in quad sound.
Unimportant! What matters is a new versatility and a new control, over all kinds and degrees of recording and reproduction. This is the aim, in the last analysis, of every one of the new systems that has been offered for our consideration-even to those which merely process a two -channel stereo recording into a synthetic four-channel sound. There are, after all, four different sounds coming from four different directions, even if synthesized. With good taste, with experience, the synthetic quad sound can be a useful improvement over straight two channel reproduction. So, too, with all the variants, from purely synthetic quad all the way to purely four -channel with total separation. Every one of them aims at least, to add new kinds of information to the sound we already have. And that is good.
Do I hear the soft sound of money? Of course. Nobody denies that a big reason for the appearance of quad is the need of the market place for new gimmickry. I merely point out to you that even though most of the promoters don't even know it, there is fire behind all that smoke, and behind the billowing clouds of present quadra-hot-air. Give us time! All in due course.
*Spatial Variations on Britten's "Les Illuminations," French text by Rimbaud, for tenor and string orchestra. St. Paul Chamber Orch., Herbert Kaplan; Michael Best, tenor. Quad sound by Sound 80, Minneapolis. Norman Walker Dance group, New York. Elaine Summers, color photography. Hemisphere by Omniversal, Roxbury, Mass. Artistic Director: Pat Collins. Gen. Manager: Al Berr. Presented in New York, June 1970 and at the Lake George Festival, N.Y., week of August 10.
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(Audio magazine, Sept. 1970; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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