All critics make mistakes and I proved a sorry prognosticator when I wrote a “defense” of the LP record for The New York Times in 1985.
“The great Heifetz, Rubinstein, Gould and Furtwangler performances will make it to CD; some of them are already available. But hold on to your Johanna Martzy disks, your Irma Kolassis and Isobel Baillies, your Michael Rabins and Webster Aitkens, your rare operas and oratorios by Ferruccio Busoni, Franz Schmidt and Horatio Parker. You’ll find them only on LP, and on LP they will continue to nourish and fulfill.”
This is, of course, not at all the way it worked out! Instead, the CD brought huge amounts of the repertory to attention and we now have complete sets – hundreds of them – devoted to the complete recordings of many great musicians, including some of the ones I mentioned. So I got it wrong but, looking back, I can take some comfort in re-reading a similar “can-this-possibly-be-happening-and-who-might-we-complain to?” article in the London-based Music Review No. 12, in 1951:
”I regard LP as a complement to 78 – a sort of ‘missing link’ in the gramophone world. What is sauce for the goose is seldom sauce for the LP gander. For instance, what happens on LP with works that go comfortably on one side of a 12-inch 78? Does one arrange a series of separated ‘bands’ of 4 1/2 minutes each? And, if so, who is clever enough to collate these items so that everyone will be pleased? Are we going to desert our old faithful 78, a friend of 50 years standing?”
Well, yes, of course we were. I have only a few 78s left and gave most of my LPs away at the turn of the century, saving only the ones that I remembered opening back when they were lifechanging events, like “The Best of Caruso.” I found that one “under the tree” on Christmas morning in 1964 and it will be with me forever, although I now have not one but two complete Caruso collections on CD.
And, while acknowledging that original Fritz Reiner Chicago Symphony Living Stereo recordings playing on a $50,000 unit still sound extraordinary, I long ago gave up regular visits to the LP sections of second-hand record stores. I became a happy convert to CDs. But there were two qualities that we find on LPs that were never quite replaced in the newer mediums.
First, the most beautifully designed albums were often genuine works of art. I think not only of the fanciest ones – the deluxe Angel records that introduced many Americans to the best EMI recordings that had been sold for a long time in Europe, for example – but also standard classical LPs. I remember particularly an album of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 with Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting the BBC Symphony. The performance is unremarkable but I found the cover itself so beautiful – a great solitary bird spreading wings and soaring through deep grey skies – that it helped me translate the music to myself, a synesthetic process that helped me enormously when I was a child.
EVEN more important were the liner notes, which were primary sources of music education for many of us. These still exist, of course, and the recent Eloquence collections devoted to the contralto Aafje Heynis and the violinist Alfredo Campoli are likely the best source of biographical information about those artists anywhere. But most CD liner notes are deucedly hard to read, at least for older eyes, and I have to dig out a magnifying glass to follow them.
50 years ago, it was all different. When I was still learning to read, I ran across one of RCA’s “Treasury of Immortal Performances” in my mother’s record collection. The album was called “Golden Age Ensembles” and it was filled with performances by artists such as Caruso, Frances Alda, Antonio Scotti, Amelita Galli-Curci, Geraldine Farrar and Rosa Ponselle, all of them singing in languages I didn’t understand.
Leading me through this noisy new fascination were the liner notes, by a Philadelphia music critic, Max de Schaunsee, who would have been on any top-ten list of people I wanted most to meet as a nine-year-old. Later in life, whenever I wrote liner notes – and I probably did about 200 of them over the years – I thought of that nine-year-old and wanted to make sure I never made any mistakes to disappoint.
Thomas Pynchon wrote a wonderful introduction to “Slow Learner” (1984) a collection of his first short stories, in which he brings up an error of understanding he made in an early effort called “Entropy.”
“In the character of Callisto I was trying for a sort of world-weary Middle-European effect, and put in the phrase “Grippe Espagnole” which I had seen on some liner notes to a recording of Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat.” I must have thought this was some kind of of post-World War I spiritual malaise or something. Come to find out it means what it says – Spanish influenza — and the reference I lifted was really to the worldwide flu epidemic that followed the war.”
“The lesson here,” Pynchon continued, “obvious but now and then overlooked, is just to corroborate one’s data, in particular those acquired casually, such as through hearsay or off the backs of record albums.”
In that same essay, Pynchon included approvingly a quote from Spike Jones, Jr: “One of the things that people don’t realize about dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.” A decade later, that inspired me to contact Pynchon’s agent to ask whether he might consider writing liner notes to a Spike Jones reissue we were bringing out on the Catalyst label. To my delight, he agreed – but that is a story for another time.
