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When Columbia introduced the LP record a decade ago (among the first disks were Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and "Emperor" Concerto, Ravel's Bolero), the U.S. was already primed for a revolution in sound. In 1947, the last year of the pre-LP era, the industry sold more 78-r.p.m. records than it ever had in its history. Within two years the entire industry had begun converting to microgroove—LPs (33⅓ r.p.m.) for classical music and the 45-r.p.m. disks pioneered by RCA Victor for pop music. Since then, record catalogues have become jammed with upwards of 30,000 LP recordings and untold thousands of 45s, put out by 1.467 separate labels. Record clubs are booming, and more than half of all supermarkets now carry disks.
In the fevered heat of record production, the phonograph industry opened like a swampland plant. The number of phonographs owned in U.S. homes has risen 37% in the last five years, to an estimated 30 million this year. There are roughly 2,000,000 hi-fi rigs scattered about the country today.
Exploring the Ocean. "Music is an ocean," wrote Aldous Huxley not long ago, "but the repertory, the stuff that is habitually performed ... is hardly even a lake; it is a pond." The record industry seems determined to explore the ocean. Today the record buyer can choose from 26 versions of Beethoven's Fifth, seven Aïdas, seven Bohèmes, 18 versions of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, 18 versions of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.
From the start of the LP era, some recordmakers tried to get away from this highly profitable piling up of consistent favorites. Among the most daring of the explorers were the dozens of small companies formed with vast amounts of imagination and practically no cash. To snatch a piece of the market away from the majors (RCA Victor, Columbia, Capitol, Decca, London, Angel, Mercury, M-G-M), the new companies went in for such esoterica as the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), the Concerti Grossi of Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713), The Wood So Wild, by William Byrd (1543-1623).
When the standard repertory ran thin, the larger companies joined the search for oddities. Columbia President Goddard
Lieberson has given the record buyer his first good look at the music of his own time by recording such radical items as Schoenberg's Erwartung, Berg's Lulu, the complete music of Anton von Webern, Elliott Carter's first String Quartet. Composers who had only limited popularity in the past—Vivaldi. Berlioz. Bartok—came into their own on LPs; some who had never even been heard before in the ordinary concert hall, notably Guillaume de Machaut (1300-77) and Guillaume Dufay (circa 1400-74). appeared in the record catalogues. For the first time the listener had just about all of Western musical literature at his fingertips.