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by WILLIAM M ANDERSON HALL OF FAME UNLESS one has an awful lot of it to waste, one should not spend too much time in idle speculation. It is, however, an attitude the mind falls into easily enough, and it does have its points. Busy a couple of weeks ago gathering together and tabulating the results of our annual poll of staff and reviewers for the 1975 Record of the Year Awards (they'll be announced next month), I paused momentarily to wonder just how lasting these elections would be, how firm were the foundations under these new busts in the Hall of Fame. It can be argued that the root purpose behind all such festivals of prize-giving is self-congratulatory: they satisfy our desire to prove we are both clever enough to recognize excellence and generous enough to acknowledge it. But there is also, I think, a certain measure of self-consciousness in the presence of History, an active, if unacknowledged, intention to leave behind a few signs, hints, and directional markers that say to posterity, "Don't miss this." They won't, of course. They'll look at it, or listen to it, and marvel at how quaint we were, how strangely innocent, how stubbornly wrong, how oddly insensitive to what really mattered. They will, in short, patronize us, treat us posthumously to a little of that same condescension we so generously bestow on our forebears. The wheels of retributory justice move, moreover, with unsettling speed. Casting my speculative eye back over Record of the Year Awards of the recent past, I find that in February of 1971 we settled a prize on Harry Nilsson's "Nilsson Sings New man" (RCA LSP 4289, still in the Schwann supplementary catalog). Other award winners in the popular category that year were Simon & Garfunkel ("Bridge," of course), Jethro Tull, Jefferson Airplane, and John Denver. All very well, but is there anybody besides me who remembers-nay, who is still regularly playing-one of the finest popular albums ever made? The Nilsson album is, in truth, more an art-song recital than what we would ordinarily expect of an album of popular songs. It is a kind of cinematographic, sentimental-romantic inventory of the bursting attic of American experience, touching lightly, colloquially, and lovingly on a paradoxical and am bivalent litany of common-denominator cliches of expression and feeling, rather as if life itself were a script for a bad, but still lovable, B movie. I exaggerate, you say. Maybe. But I challenge those of you who are already of a mind to disparage the taste of yesteryear 1970 to listen to the way Harry Nilsson sings one line of one song-"I miss my good ol' Dad" in So Long Dad-and tell me that its economy and its rich ness, the tone of wistful regret, the echo of experience, the ring of truth, the mixture of emotion real and feigned crammed into those few notes, those six words caught between a sob and a Hallmark sentiment don't matter. What it is, in both the writing and in the performance, is high musical art, and that is something that matters a very great deal. Still speculating, it occurs to me to wonder what else in my own musical experience will, having exhausted its usefulness, find itself rousted out of the pantheon of greatness a generation or two hence. I am asked from time to time, perhaps by people with much this same question in mind, to name the greatest music, greatest performance, or greatest recording I have ever heard. As the paragraph above will testify, I tend to shy away from superlatives, but I am never at a loss to supply the names of two records I consider to be of signal influence on my own musical development and perhaps even on the development of American musical culture. Both are 78's, one of Jussi Bjoerling singing "Che gelida manina" (Puccini's La Boheme) and "Celeste Aida" (Verdi's Aida), the other of Aksel Schiotz singing "Comfort ye, my people" and "Every valley shall be exalted" (Handel's Messiah). The 78's are long gone, but I have both performances on LP, incomparably brilliant, incalculably important, and tops in my pantheon. What is tops in yours? Also see: LETTERS to THE EDITOR Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine) |
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