Sound, Preserved & Pirated

The house lights dim. In the balcony, a man warily eyes the ushers, then slips his hand beneath his folded over coat and flips a tiny switch protruding from a briefcase balanced on his knees.

Inside the briefcase, cradled in foam rubber, the reels of a tape recorder silently begin to turn. Then, reaching up his sleeve, he pulls out the tip of a 16-in. long microphone gun, shelters it with his palm and points it at the stage. In the orchestra seats, a woman wraps her program around a slender microphone, switches on a tape recorder hidden in her bulky handbag, and settles back.

These are the sound stealers at work, a new breed that has cropped up with the advent of high-powered portable tape recorders. For decades, private collectors have made tapes of live performances by recording them off radio broadcasts in their homes. But the best broadcast is never as good as being there in person. Now, like undercover agents, collectors are sneaking their machines into concert halls, theaters, opera houses and nightclubs and taking home more than a memory of an evening's performance. The most popular battery-powered recorder being used is the $375 German-made Uher 4000, which is not much bigger than a cigar box. It can record up to three hours of music on one reel of tape with surprisingly good quality. The 16-in. "dynamic telemicrophone" costs another $395, but is guaranteed to provide "near-professional sound" from the most distant balcony.

"That's Me!" What makes these pirated tapes valuable is that they capture one-time-only performances, many of them memorable, that are never recorded commercially. What makes them illegal is that many are reproduced and peddled under the counter. For "recommended customers," one Manhattan record shop provides a catalogue of some 2,000 black-market recordings. They are packaged in plain black cartons and, though stamped "private recording not for sale," sell for $9.50 for a single copy, up to $25 for an album. For the Callas fan, for example, the catalogue lists her excellent 1958 performance of Medea with the Dallas Opera, taped by a college student who hid his microphone in the footlights, and a 1952 Covent Garden production of Norma, prized by collectors because the cast also featured a then unknown singer named Joan Sutherland.

Record companies are understandably annoyed. This spring, for example, after Spanish Soprano Monserrat Caballe made her widely acclaimed U.S. debut in Lucrezia Borgia, RCA Victor quickly signed her to make a recording of the opera. But not quickly enough. A black-market version of her debut was already selling briskly for $25. Artists, who naturally get no royalties from the piratings, are equally irritated. Mezzo-Soprano Regina Resnik, rummaging through a record bin a few years ago, was startled to hear a recording of Wagner's Ring cycle, whose label listed a cast of singers and an opera company she had never heard of. "You know who that is singing?," she cried at the proprietor. "That's me!", and she got a court order to ban its further sale.

Prophetic Voice. Yet, for all the shady practices, black-market records have served what is a worthwhile but otherwise sadly neglected cause: the preservation of sound. As Resnik observes, "A live performance is of tremendous historical, educational and artistic importance" and should be taped and preserved, subject to the approval of the artist, by a responsible organization. This is the ideal of the Institute of Sound, founded four years ago by a group of Manhattan music lovers as "a central repository for the music, sounds and voices of our times." The Institute's 300,000 tapes and disks, half of them recordings never issued commercially, were donated by private collector, artists, radio stations, the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony. Headquarters for the nonprofit organization are in Carnegie Hall. There Institute President Richard Striker, a 31-year-old exactor, works with six volunteers, surrounded by towering mounds of tapes and recordings.

The Institute's collection begins with an 1888 recording of Poet Robert Browning shouting "Hip, hip, hooray!" for Edison's new machine, and encompasses every form of music right up to the rock 'n' rollers. "Today's trivia," explains Striker, "may interest tomorrow's historian." Singers such as Resnik, Sutherland and Gianna d'Angelo visit the Institute to hear how their predecessors interpreted a role, conductors and musicologists to hear little-known works.

Striker, who works without salary and has poured $50,000 of his own money into the Institute, has the full backing of many artists in his bid to gain the rights to make authorized one-copy-only tapes of live performances. "What wouldn't we give," says Striker, "to hear Paganini play his Caprices, or Malibran sing Bellini? The next generation may be as critical of us if we neglect to fully preserve the great music of our age."

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