Musicking. Christopher Small G.
and pass through into the auditorium itself.
If the entry to the foyer was impressive, that into the great inner space is dramatic. Now we have really crossed the threshold into another world, and that world opens up around and above us and envelops us. The very air feels different. Beneath the lofty ceiling sparkling with lights, row after curved row of seats separated by aisles extends across the raked floor, while above are galleries with more rows of seats. All face in the same direction, down the rake of the floor toward a raised platform at the end. This platform is itself tiered, and on it are seats facing the audience or, rather, facing concentrically toward a small dais at the front center of the platform. Behind the dais is a waist-high desk, and on it lies the score of the first piece to be played tonight, waiting for the conductor and the musicians who will between them bring the piece into existence. It is this dais and desk that together form the focus, the center of attention, of this whole vast space.
Auditoriums vary greatly in shape and size, from symmetrical boxes with galleries along the sides and at the end, through fans, horseshoes, ellipses, and parabolas to free-form spaces with cascades of seats spilling down on all sides toward the musicians’ platform. They range from the plain, austere and colorless to the riotously ornate and many-colored. They might incorporate, on the one hand, features of classical, baroque, or rococo architecture: columns and pilasters, swags, cornices and pediments and even caryatids, lunette windows high up, coved and vaulted ceilings, big ornate chandeliers and maybe allegorical fresco paintings or mosaics on the walls or ceiling, or on the other hand, the common stock of modern or postmodern architecture: daringly cantilevered balconies and boxes, tentlike ceiling, asymmetrical seating, curved or strangely angled walls, cunningly concealed or brutally visible lighting, sound reflectors hanging apparently unsupported above the platform, even perhaps jokey postmodernist references to the motifs of classical or vernacular architecture, like the square-mullioned windows, resembling those in a child’s drawing of a house, that confront one in the auditorium of Dallas’s postmodernist Meyerson Center. (It is not only the horseshoe shape of that auditorium that reminds one of a traditional opera house; the foyer, the place for seeing and being seen, is larger and grander than the auditorium itself, while the architecture of aristocratic privilege reappears unexpectedly in the row of boxes, each with its minute retiring room barely big enough to hang a mink coat, that forms the first tier of the balconies.)
Auditoriums may be lined with wood, with plaster, with colored hangings and sculpted panels, even perhaps, as a relic of the once-fashionable “new brutalism” of the 1960s, with raw concrete still bearing the imprint of the wooden shuttering into which it was poured, or any of these in combination. In general, discreet colors are favored: pastel, ocher or white for the plasterwork; the rich tones of natural wood; hangings in the colors of natural dyes; seats upholstered in deep red, slate blue or soft sea green, with aisle carpets in matching or tastefully contrasting colors.
What they all have in common is, first, that they convey an impression of opulence, even sumptuousness. There is wealth here, and the power that wealth brings. But on the other hand, there is a careful avoidance of any suggestion of vulgarity. What is to happen here is serious and important and will not appeal to the vulgar. Second, they allow no communication with the outside world. Performers and listeners alike are isolated here from the world of their everyday lives. Commonly, there are not even windows through which light from outside may enter. Nor does any sound enter from that world, and none of the sounds that are made here will be allowed to escape out into it.
We take our allotted seats, which for tonight’s concert are in the middle of a row between two aisles. When the other seats in the row are taken, we shall have to stay here for the duration of the performance; there will be no moving around. Since all the seats face in the same direction, we can talk only to our neighbors in the same row and, with more difficulty, to the person immediately behind or in front of us. If the foyer was a place for socializing, this is strictly a place for looking, listening and paying attention. It is indeed an auditorium, a place for hearing. The word itself tells us that hearing is the primary activity that takes place in it, and here indeed it is assumed that performing takes place only in order to make hearing possible.
The modern concert hall is built on the assumption that a musical performance is a system of one-way communication, from composer to listener through the medium of the performers. That being so, it is natural that the auditorium should be designed in such a way as to project to the listeners as strongly and as clearly as possible the sounds that the performers are making.
No large space, of course, can be without some sonic resonance, and over centuries musicians and listeners alike have come to accept, and eventually to feel the need for, a certain amount of resonance in the sound as an element in the communication. Those who composed for performance in the great and very resonant Gothic cathedrals wrote into their masses and motets an allowance for the enormously long time, sometimes several seconds, that it takes for each sound to die.
But concert music from the seventeenth century onward has been written with less resonant spaces in mind; the resonance must not be so strong or so prolonged as to blur the logic of the progression from one note or one chord to the next. Great care, even today as much intuitive as it is scientific, goes into the acoustic design of concert halls to give them enough resonance but not too much. Halls such as London’s Royal Festival Hall that are found to be to insufficiently resonant may resort to discreet boosting of their resonance by using electronic delay circuits, but this last-resort use of modern technology is felt to be somehow out of place in the performance of symphonic music. It is felt somehow to be cheating, and it does not advertise its presence.
All other considerations are subordinated to the projection and reception of the sounds. In particular, care is taken so that listeners will not be disturbed by the presence of others as they listen. For this purpose the auditorium floor is raked to give uninterrupted sightlines, the audience is fixed in the seats and knows it is to keep still and quiet; the program booklet politely asks us to suppress our coughing, and nobody enters or leaves during a performance. The very form of the auditorium tells us that the performance is aimed not at a community of interacting people but at a collection of individuals, strangers even, who happen to have come together to hear the musical works. We leave our sociability behind at the auditorium doors.
The auditorium’s design not only discourages communication among members of the audience but also tells them that they are there to listen and not talk back. The performance is a spectacle for them to contemplate, and they have nothing to contribute to its course. Such occasions as the famous riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, one of the last occasions in the history of the Western concert tradition when the audience talked back to the performers, are now well in the past. Today’s concert audiences pride themselves on their good manners, on knowing their place and keeping quiet.
Nor does the design of the building allow any social contact between performers and listeners. It seems, in fact, designed expressly to keep them apart. It is not only that the orchestra musicians enter and leave the building by a separate door from the audience and remain out of sight when not actually playing, but also that the edge of the platform forms a social barrier that is for all practical purposes as impassable as a brick wall. Not even the wraparound design of certain modern auditoriums, such as Berlin’s Philharmonie or Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall, can disguise the fact that a concert hall houses two separate groups of people who never meet. The technology of the concert hall has produced a gain in acoustic clarity, but that clarity is balanced by a loss of sociability. That, of course, is the way of technologies; none comes without its price. It seems that our contemporary classical music culture feels that the gain is worth the loss.
The great building, then, dramatizes and makes visible certain types of relationships. It isolates those within it from the world of their everyday lives, it brings some together and keeps others apart, it places some in a dominant position and others in a subordinate position, and it facilitates communication in one direction but not in the other. These relationships are not god-given but were brought into existence by human beings for reasons of which they may not even be conscious but which, I believe, model or enact ideal human relationships as those taking part imagine them to be. The relationships of the building are not, of course, the total meaning of the event, being only one strand of the