Diskman's Dilemma

A record executive named Goddard Lieberson was resting up after a tough round of business meetings one day last year, his feet on his desk, his mind on a fascinating subject--the Civil War. It was, he decided, perhaps the best-documented war in history, with reams of personal memoirs and volumes of battle detail, campaign maps, bales of drawings and photographs. But suddenly he realized that something was missing: sound. With that thought, Columbia Records Executive Vice President Lieberson launched into a year's research that took him through libraries and across old battle grounds. When he was through, Columbia had a fine new album, The Confederacy.

Adventurous Programming. The album's ten sections, arranged and conducted by Richard Bales, of the Washington, D.C. National Gallery Orchestra, underscores different facets of the war. First is General Lee's Grand March, a frothy two-step that might have come from Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment. Next come wistful and militant soldiers' songs, e.g., Bonnie Blue Flag and Somebody's Darling. Others are drenched with sentiment; still others suggest the progressive bitterness of the occupation.

Sample lyrics :

"All quiet along the Potomac tonight,"

Except here and there a stray picket

Is shot, as he walks on his beat to and fro,

By a rifleman hid in the thicket;

'Tis nothing, a private or two now and then

Will not count in the news of the battle:

Not an officer lost, only one of the men,

Moaning out all alone the death rattle.

Later on, comes General Lee's farewell order to the Army of Northern Virginia (read by Lee's 77-year-old cousin once-removed, the Rev. Edmund Jennings Lee of Shepherdstown, W. Va.), and finally a rousing performance of Dixie that ends in a high-pitched, blood-chilling rebel yell. Bound into the album are 32 pages of pictures and texts by Civil War Experts Bruce Catton and Clifford Dowdey.

For Staffordshire-born Recordmaker Lieberson, The Confederacy represents a new-found obsession with the Civil War ("It's a disease"). It is also the latest experiment "creative" in his approach to the continuing search recording for business. Over the last 15 years, Lieberson has won a reputation for adventurous programming. Soon after his arrival, Columbia released such radical items as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Bartok's Contrasts, and continued to rack up first recordings of modern masterpieces, e.g., Berg's Violin Concerto, Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky cantata. Gradually, Columbia built a stable of its own name artists (Pianist Rudolf Serkin, Violinist Joseph Szigeti), and created a new source of fine music as a major underwriter of the first Casals Festival. By the time Columbia introduced LP (1948), most of its classical catalogue was Lieberson-produced.

Choking Classics. Diskman Lieberson, 43, has found time to write a novel (3 for Bedroom C), start a play and marry famed Dancer Vera Zorina. Lately, he spends less and less time in the glass-fronted control booth supervising recording sessions, more and more behind his desk thinking up new ideas. Although he recorded Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, and all the quartets of Schoenberg and Bartok, Lieberson discovered gradually that "it is becoming almost bourgeois to do contemporary music-everybody's doing it now." It is also too expensive for a major company to take a chance on unknown modern composers. At the same time, recordings of well-known music are almost choking each other (there are no fewer than 21 recordings of Beethoven's Eroica on the market, 16 of Brahms's First Symphony).

Lieberson's answer: new gimmicks, such as The Confederacy album. Among Lieberson's other off-beat projects: Edward R. Murrow's I Can Hear It Now album of historic speeches, the prestigious Literary Series, with such authors as Somerset Maugham and William Saroyan reading from their "own works, and album revivals of old musicals (the Pal Joey and Porgy and Bess albums have, in turn, sparked Broadway revivals).

Despite the fact that the record business seems to have recorded everything of major interest, past and present, Lieberson sees a bright future. Next week, with The Confederacy under his arm, he is off on a tour of the South, the U.S.'s weakest classical-record market. Says he: "I don't think the potential for selling records has even been touched."

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