Music: Sound in the Round

There has not been anything quite like it since the stereopticon delighted the nation’s tasseled parlors with its “magic” ability to make the two-dimensional seem three-dimensional. After a sluggish start in 1958, stereophonic music has finally begun to catch the ear and the purse strings of the U.S. This year’s sales of stereo phonographs are nearly double last year’s (1,423,179 for 1960 to date; 757,710 for 1959) and stand at more than three times those of standard players (438,011 for the year of date). Fresh labels are flowing from the record mints to fill the stereo gap—by no means all of them living up to the promise of true “separation of sound.” While the vogue has produced some first-rate performances, (London’s Girl of the Golden West, RCA Victor’s brilliant new Turandot, Columbia’s Concerto for Orchestra by Bartok) too often the stereo disks appeal not to music lovers but to sound addicts, craving to be enveloped by that “wraparound” effect.

All kinds of sounds are being recast in the stereo mold, but the stereo fan has learned that he can best demonstrate the pingpong effects with the plink and thump of percussion instruments, and stereo records with “percussion” in the title have a Presley-like pull. Command Records, a stereo pioneer, seldom settles for less than two Ps in titles, such as Persuasive Percussion and Provocative Percussion which between them have sold hundreds of thousands of copies since last September. Companies both big and small are doubling in brass. Among the new releases:

Brass and Percussion (Morton Gould and his Symphonic Band; Victor). Marches by Sousa, Goldman, E. E. Bagley and Conductor Gould pit piccolo against bassoon, trumpet against drum, with the listener caught in between, as if trapped in a Fourth of July parade.

The Private Life of a Private Eye (Enoch Light and the Light Brigade; Command). Bandleader Light, Command’s artist-and-repertory chief, and Fellow-Composer Lewis A. Davies have written a ballet for the ear, suggesting that stereo may give rise to original compositions to exploit its spatial effects. The score runs the gamut of styles, incorporating some fine workable musical ideas, as well as some that are merely reminiscent of background music for crime melodramas.

String of Trumpets (Billy Mure, his Guitar and Orchestra; Everest). Player Mure has muted his guitar and assembled an impressive crowd of trumpeters—Doc Severinsen, Ernie Royal, Bernie Glow among others. They eloquently blare out big-band and specialty numbers.

Pertinent Percussion Cha Cha’s (Command). This time, Bandleader Light provides a strong, not to say overpowering beat for the stereo fan who likes to exercise while listening.

Fantastic Percussion (Felix Slatkin conducting; Liberty). Classical Conductor Slatkin enlists in the stereo wars, blending 35 kinds of percussion instruments from all over the world to lend new, cool and yet exotic color to standard tunes like Blues in the Night. One of the more civilized and sophisticated stereo demonstrations, with feathery Balinese bells leaping from speaker to speaker and mingling in midair.

Percussive Vaudeville (Harry Breuer and Orchestra; Audio Fidelity). A sentimental treatment of Gay Nineties songs is mixed with Spike Jonesian horn and whistle exclamations. The “separation of sound” here is greater than that between the far ends of a vaudeville pit. and the effect, while startling, ultimately cancels out the melody.

Beethoven: Wellington’s Victory (Morton Gould and his Orchestra; Victor). A rare lapse of genius, the so-called “Battle Symphony,” written in 1813 when the composer was at the height of his powers (he had just finished the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies), is a fascinating but vulgar and bombastic ode to Wellington’s victory over Napoleon. Frankly composed to make money and originally intended for the panharmonicon, a sort of early stereo machine built by a German inventor in which nine different types of instruments were operated mechanically, the piece includes a rumbling God Save the King, an absurdly tinkling For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, an immense eruption of drums and other battle effects, with only an occasional hint of the true Beethoven (most contemporary critics loved it). Altogether, it is a fine stereo demonstration piece and, as deafeningly played by Conductor Gould, guaranteed to agitate the surface of a martini at 20 ft.