Paul's Posts — 26 August 2012
By Paul McGowan
After reading through our series on rooms and tuning, my son Scott suggested I watch a video by Talking Heads leader David Byrne on how architecture changed music.
This talk, available on the wonderful TED Series, is an extraordinary piece of information and I was pleasantly surprised at what I learned.
If you have a moment give it a look. I think you’ll enjoy his ideas about how music evolved into its present form from Bach, Mahler, Mozart, Wagner to modern Stadium rock, it turns out the architecture of the rooms and the environment plays a significant role in what composers write and musicians play. I certainly learned a lot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se8kcnU-uZw
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Soundminded
As I see it, there are four important factors in creating music. First is the composer who invents the idea. He dreams up melodies, harmonies, tones, and rhythms. Then there are the people who create musical instruments. They are of two kinds, those that rely exclusively on human energy. They’re blown through, struck, bowed, plucked. Everything you hear from them is the result of a human effort.When you hear an opera singer in the back row of the highest balcony, you are hearing the sound created by his or her own lungs. The other type use electronic amplification and IMO are far less interesting and pleasing but that’s just my personal opinion. Then there are the musicians who master playing their instruments, interpret the composers ideas, and bring life to them. Finally there’s the room where the music is played. It has an enormous effect on what we hear in the audience because as scientists tell us its effect is most of what we hear and its reflections are not the same as the sounds that came directly from the instruments themselves. Small wonder a room’s acoustics can make or break a musical performance by enhancing it or detractiing from it. No two musical experiences are exactly alike. At the same performance two people sitting next to each other will hear different things. On two successive nights the same person hearing the same music will hear two different things. What does this say about the notion of accuracy in reproducing it? However I think if we can remember what we hear live well enough we can judge the degree of similarity or difference between it and recordings we hear.
A concert hall like an opera house and a cathedral or church is from a musical performance standpoint much more than a place of assembly for the musicians and audience. The construction of a new concert hall whether by a college, a municipal government or through private donations is an eagerly awaited event by a community. A lot of hope is invested in high expectations for it. It’s no small thing. In today’s dollars a new concert hall for a symphony orchestra and the building to house it could typically cost one hundred million dollars and take several years to design and construct. The science of acoustics is only slightly over 100 years old and so it is still new and in some ways uncharted territory. There’s still a lot to be learned. A surprising number of concert halls have been bitter disappointments, even outright failures acoustically. What’s now called Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City is among the most famous of them but there are many other examples as well. Improving them when they are failures has been a difficult challenge which often fails too. Many expensive efforts over the last nearly 50 years have yet to turn Avery Fisher Hall into a good concert hall by most accounts.