The Tapesichordists

Every age has had its characteristic instruments: in the 17th century it was the voice, in the 18th the clavier and pipe organ, in the igth the piano and the symphony orchestra. The 20th century instrument is the record machine--a phonograph or a tape recorder.

Until recently, the instrument has been little more than a musical morgue where performances could be preserved and exhumed at will. Last summer the U.S. got a taste of creative recording in France's musique concrete, a compilation of natural sounds (trains, bells, crowd noises, etc.), recorded on tape, cut and spliced at patterns to make a composition.

Last week, in Manhattan's fashionable

Museum of Modern Art, still another kind of composition for tape recorder was unwound: Low Speed, Invention and Fantasy in Space by Otto Luening and Sonic Contours by Vladimir Ussachevsky. Out of the loudspeaker came the sound of a flute--but a flute that could growl like a bassoon, or thunder like the trump of doom, as well as chirp like a bird--and the sound of a piano that seemed to accompany itself with organ tones. Haunting both instruments was a maze of echoes and pulsing overtones.

Critics thought the sounds were striking or amusing, reserved judgment on musical values. But they saw the point of Conductor Leopold Stokowski's introductory remarks: the conventional composer usually has to wait for somebody else to play his music, and it might be to his advantage to work, like the painter, directly on the materials of sound--the tape recorder, for instance.

Composer Luening agrees. For a quarter century he has tried without success to find other performers who could improvise with him when he plays on the flute. When he got together with Ussachevsky last summer, he was delighted to find that he could improvise with himself via tape. Very soon, the men were using devices that automatically distorted, attenuated and reverberated the notes they played. They decided that the resulting tones were not just sounds, but the stuff of music.

They have spent most of their spare time since trying to organize the random echoes and overtones into understandable patterns--and, if they turned up barnyard squawks and eerie moans along the way, maybe those could be used too. They know their "tapesichord" will never displace the orchestra ("After all, Beethoven's Ninth is still Beethoven's Ninth"), but they believe it will give composers a brand-new range of effects.

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