BULLETIN, Edited by William Livingstone
IMPROVED AM AND FM BROADCAST QUALITY is the goal of the NRSC (National Radio Systems Committee) just formed by the National Association of Broadcasters and the Electronic Industries Association.
First considering AM stereo and FM technical standards, the committee will examine equipment design and operating practices to assure the best possible service quality. Since today's home receiving equipment is generally capable of better performance than broadcast equipment delivers, this is welcome news.
JVC'S "VIDEO HIGH DENSITY" VIDEODISC system has been adopted by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (marketed in the U.S. as Panasonic and Technics) and Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC) "for development and production." VHD discs are read by styli but contain no grooves. Audio and video information is carried in pits on the discs' surfaces, and tracking signals guide the styli servo mechanisms. The system permits random access, slow motion, still frame, fast forward, and reverse. VHD discs can be manufactured using basically the same facilities as used for conventional vinyl audio discs. The VHD system is compatible with neither the Magnavox system nor RCA's SelectaVision.
"SWITCHED -ON BACH," performed on an electronic synthesizer by Walter Carlos, is the largest -selling classical album ever released in the United States, according to CBS Records. The company claims sales of 1.25 million copies of the album in the U.S. alone in the twelve years since it was released.
CBS has just released a two -disc album, "Switched -On Brandenburgs," a version of Bach's Brandenburg concertos played by the same synthesist, who, following surgical reassignment, is now known as Wendy Carlos.
RELEASE OF AUDIOPHILE RECORDS WAS UP 100 per cent in 1979 over the preceding year, according to the Schwann Record & Tape Guide, which lists direct -to -disc, digital, and other specialty recordings released by forty-two labels. Overall, however, industry statistics reflected the general state of the economy. New Schwann listings for 1979 totaled 8,690, down from 10,557 in 1978.
ACTRESS BO DEREK AND THE MOVIE 10 have made Ravel's Bolero a current hit.
Composed in 1927, Bolero (not named for Bo) is among the classical pieces most frequently recorded, and there are more than forty versions currently available.
The first to hit the charts was not the soundtrack from 10 on Warner Bros., but the performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa (Deutsche Grammophon 2530 475). On its Privilege label, DG is now releasing "Great Film Classics" (2535 436), an album of classical music used in such movies as Sunday Bloody Sunday, Elvira Madigan, 2001, Clockwork Orange, and 10.
On this disc Bolero is conducted by Herbert von Karajan.
COUNTERFEIT LP'S, PIRATED TAPES, and illegal duplicating equipment valued at more than $50 million were confiscated in 1979 as a result of anti -piracy efforts of the FBI, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and local law -enforcement agencies. An additional $5 million worth of raw materials, machinery, and counterfeit software was destroyed by court order in connection with prior confiscations.
Further progress reported by the RIAA at the end of the Seventies included strong anti -piracy statutes in New York and California, both key states in the recording (and piracy) industry.
THE ASPEN AUDIO -RECORDING INSTITUTE, a three-week basic workshop, will be held three times this summer at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. The faculty this year will include Thomas Frost, director of Masterworks at CBS Records, and James Progris, former director of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Institute, and there will be guest lecturers from Ampex, J. B. Lansing Sound, and other manufacturers. Sessions begin June 23, July 14, and August 4. Enrollment is limited to ten students per session; tuition is $400. Write Aspen Music Festival, Suite 401, 1860 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10023. For similar courses at the Eastman School of Music, write Jon Engberg, Associate Director for Academic Affairs, Eastman School of Music, 26 Gibbs Street, Rochester, N.Y. 14604.
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SPEAKING OF MUSIC
CULTURE MANAGEMENT
WHEN the giant Warner Communications combine set out late last year to do some premature spring housecleaning at its Nonesuch Records subsidiary, it probably thought it would be a private affair en tailing no more fuss than deep-sixing the family pussycat. Instead, it ended up facing a damp, enraged, and very public tiger. The firing of director Teresa Sterne and her staff elicited a storm of indignant protest from the critical press (see, for example, "Going on Record" for March), music -
business professionals, and at least a few uncomfortably articulate members of the laity. Though the continuing brouhaha may look from the West Coast like only one more instance of the workings of the inscrutable mind of the East, the reasons for it seem quite clear from this vantage point.
First, Nonesuch had become, through Sterne's repertoire policies, a pet of the musical community. It had in fact behaved as any responsible cultural instrument should, impartially and catholically documenting American musical history (ragtime, Foster, shape -note hymns), preserving a dizzying variety of exotic musics in its Explorer Series, giving a hearing to early (Schoenberg), middle (Babbitt), and late (Maxwell Davies) modern music as well as re-hearings to everyone from Rameau and Clerambault to Haydn and Schubert-all in sterling performances and on what appeared to be a spartan budget. In the process, it even made some money. Nonesuch, in short, was doing what all classical critics and a- &-r men worth their salt know should be done, and they took comfort in knowing that someone was doing it even if they couldn't. The upheaval at Nonesuch rudely unsettled this complacency, raising the specter of a similar massacre of the innocents at RCA or Columbia (rumors have circulated for years that one or the other was about to "get out of the classics").
There is a good deal of understandable hypocrisy attending the subject of classical music at the "majors." Though lip service is dutifully paid to classical "product," particularly when it comes to rubbing up against the kind of social cachet that attaches to such eminences as a Rubinstein or a Bern stein, when it comes to the bottom line man agers must still explain to wondering stock holders why classical music never pays the dividends pop music does. Unfortunately, we seem to be fresh out of musical states men persuasive or tough-minded enough to make it clear that the popular -music business is but cultural strip-mining, that a record company lucky enough to find itself in the classical business as well has an enviable public trust: the happy privilege and serious responsibility of putting something back, of making a capital investment in our cultural future. Sadly, though American corporations are very good at ordinary ac counting, they are (largely) very bad at this social accounting, seemingly impervious to the idea that they might have other duties besides making money.
Though we can't do much more than deplore this collective Philistinism, we can be tigers when we encounter benighted individuals who score low on cultural account ability. We must refuse to remain silent when some pipsqueak pop-star too ignorant to imagine any time frame other than the narrow one he lives in declares Beethoven, all of opera, Shakespeare, and the whole of history "irrelevant." We must be just as outspoken with classical exclusivists who express contempt for popular music while doing all they can to keep the classical club a small one. No culture is safe whose members believe any of its parts to be expendable; all are interdependent pieces of a precious mosaic, and the more hands-and minds-they rest in the better.
Also see:
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)