Nonesuch H-71291 has been a highly regarded album since the 1970s. Consider this rave:
This LP has been on the TAS (The Absolute Sound, a magazine for audiophiles) list for years. It consists of very modern percussion compositions by a variety of composers. The "most famous" being Ionisation (1931) by Edgard Varese. There are actually two sirens and a "lion's roar" in it. The sound quality is stupendous at times. It has a huge and focused soundstage. The dynamics are outstanding and so is the quality of the bass reproduction. The only weaknesses that keep this record from the top classes are a noticeable dryness of the timbres and shortening of the natural decay of the notes.
And this one:
Highly touted in the pages of TAS, PERCUSSION MUSIC from Nonesuch is one of those albums you can play for a person who doesn’t know high fidelity and have them gawking with disbelief. Trust me when I say, this album is a wrecking ball of percussion, that can easily re-arrange your listening room furniture at the right volume.
I could dig up more, but you get the general drift. This is a great recording when you're raging hot to whip out your big throbbing hi-fi and ram it to your dinner guest.
And that's just fine and dandy. But there's something else you should know about Nonesuch H-71291. It's dreary. It's tedious. It's banal. It's dated.
Really, really dated. Apart from one (downright silly) work each by Varèse and Cowell, the remaining pieces are the brainchildren of 1970s academic modernists, fellows bristling with DMAs from Princeton and Columbia and Manhattan. As of the album date (1974) they had been represented on contemporary music festivals hither and yon. A bit of casual research revealed that most of them have continued to stay within the contemporary music festivals orbit. God forbid any of them should be held accountable by a real, ticket-buying audience.
The musical equivalent of those horrid beige office towers that languish nowadays in downtowns throughout America, 1970s modernism represented the last grunting dry humps of a squeezed-out idiom. Its seminal vesicles constricted from the get-go, post-WWII modernism emerged from the Puritanical conviction that spurts of creative energy were incontinent failings requiring suppression, denial, and unyielding self-control. Bragging rights included secure seats on prestigious American or English university faculties, coverage in the music theory and academic press, regular presence in grim and gritty music 'festivals', a steady supply of grants, and the wholesale alienation of mainstream audiences. To be played by the students of the Brandeis University Contemporary Music Ensemble was good. To receive an enthusiastic ovation from Chicago Symphony subscribers was selling out.
As I explored the undeniable audio splendor of Nonesuch H-71291 Percussion Music, performed to an audio T by Raymond DesRoches and the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, a murky sense of dejà vu settled over me. Been there, done that. Heard all that. Played a lot of that. During the decade in which Minimalism began administering a much-needed enema to modern music, constipated academics continued to hold most of the career cards. Those erstwhile students of Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions and Arthur Berger chaired the composition departments and continued to crank out confusing, boring pieces festooned with program notes that were little more than proactive intimidation. The group of the determined pitch instruments is represented as the sky, and that of the undetermined pitch instruments as the earth; the whole composition is symbolic of a drama between man and heaven and the earth. Oh, really? Would it have changed very much if the pitched percussion was the earth and the unpitched the sky? Or if the pitched represented his mother-in-law? The piece itself is blippy-bloopy and dingy-dingy, punctuated by various moans and swoops from a soprano intoning syllables from Korean words. Such bleakness was the norm for college concert halls back then. You were supposed to appreciate it. Nobody liked it. The thing got played—once—and went on your CV.
Most of Nonesuch H-71291 is the same ol' grayish academic bobble that I sat/slept through back when the SFCM New Music Ensemble was a dour, joyless, and ill-rehearsed group led by a grimly laid-back Harvard drudge with all the musical sparkle of an egg beater. At least Nonesuch H-71291 is well played and well recorded. But Jesus H. Christ, what a frigging BORE it is.
During the same listening session I played a recently acquired LP, Decca Headline HEAD 12 from 1978, a very young Simon Rattle leading the Philharmonia Orchestra in London's acoustically glorious Kingsway Hall. I bought the record mostly on the strength of its audiophile credentials: those 1970s Decca recordings and their utterly stellar Dutch pressings are a wonder to behold. The record did not fail to deliver on its acoustic promises; a beautiful specimen of the audio engineering and record pressing art, it plays as though brand new and produces luminous sound from its silky-smooth surface.
It probably is brand new for all intents and purposes. I'll bet the original owner made it about halfway through the first track—that's as far as I got—then shelved it. The Philharmonia sounds great. Even in this, his third-ever recording, well before Birmingham and long before Berlin, Rattle shines as a conductor of taste, energy, and exceptional control. The problem is the piece itself, Symphony by Peter Maxwell Davies, eventually to be re-catalogued as his Symphony No. 1 once eight more such came rolling off his compositional desk.
More 1970s modernism. Tedious and bleak, dreary and offputting, instantly forgettable and uninvolving. Amidst the usual atonal huffs and heaves, Davies tosses in bells and chimes. They're interesting for a minute or so, mostly for the rich transients captured by Decca's crackerjack engineers. Then ennui sets in to stay. It's quite sad, really: Peter Maxwell Davies has displayed a marvelous gift for writing accessible music for kids. He was never an innately infertile cerebral type. But modernism died hard, even when it was acquiring moss and verdigris. So even Davies had his monuments to dourness.
An Amazon customer reviewed a recording of Davies' Third Symphony as follows:
Modification of historical music gestalts is achieved through lean counterpoint, rich rhythmic development, and a well balanced range of sonic presents. Stepwise conjunct melodic fragments and quotes are reassembled in a matrice which presents disjunct aspects at the surface, with a note data set spread of Shepherd Tone proportions and mapping distinctions.
This elicited a brief comment thread from folks who wondered if the reviewer was waxing serious or satirical. The issue remained moot.