on concert halls

Yale University, School of Architecture

On Concert Halls: Conversations with Ralph KirkpatrickAuthor(s): Ralph KirkpatrickSource: Perspecta, Vol. 17 (1980), pp. 92-99Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567008 .

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On Concert Halls: Conversations with Ralph Kirkpatrick

Editors: You have used the term "anthropomorphic" on a number of occasions to describe music. Could you explain its use? R. K.: By anthropomorphic music I mean music which is related to the human organism. I happen to believe that no music which does not relate itself beyond the ear to the functions of the physical organism can be called music. Music speaks to us in three main ways. First, in arousing our sensations of singing, of verbal declamation; in other words, all that concerns the melodic as- pect of music and melodic phrasing is meaningful to us only as it arouses in us some sort of response derived from a sympathetic reaction or derived from accumulated experience of singing and speaking. Second, the rhythmic dimen- sion of music speaks to us in terms of our own problems of bodily locomotion against the forces of gravity. It speaks to us in terms of dancing; it speaks to us even in terms of imaginary movements, those which we ourselves cannot execute but of which we can grasp the sensation of their execution. Third, certainly in Western music, the ebb and flow of harmonic tensions is responded to in the physical organism by consequent fluctua- tions of visceral tensions. The so-called solar plexus is in many ways a more important center of musical feeling than even the ear. It governs not only all aspects of bodily sensation but also bodily movement. No genuine music is purely cerebral. One might say that no architectural plan which is purely cerebral is worth much to the human being. The examples of architecture that I most admire are those which are constructed in relation to a human scale, in relation to the physical experiences of human beings; to a certain extent in relation to their size, and above all to their experiences as mobile personages around and within that architecture. I always took the greatest pleasure, for example, in a Gothic cathedral, in walking through the side aisles. I very seldom approached it by the nave. I walked through the side aisles and the ambulatory in order to get the rhythm of the arches and the piers. As a matter of fact, I do that with classical buildings too. There is something that one gets from walking around a building that one will never get from looking at photographs or studying it through plans. That is perhaps a truism in architectural theory but surprisingly often it is disregarded in architectural practice, as Flaubert said in his Dictionary of Plati- tudes, "Architects have a tendency even to forget the stairways."

Editors: Therefore, you seem to be implying a return to a more humanist tradition ... R. K.: Which is exceedingly difficult in our time. It's the only one which person- ally I believe in. I think anything else is aberration and abandonment of all that we have inherited in terms of accumulated experience and capacity for feeling. One understands the origins of the reactions that produced Bauhaus architecture, for example, which has many, many virtues; but one of its most sinister features is the academicism of its reaction against overblown romanticism and bombastic sentimentality. In cleaning the deck, it swept everything away, very much in the same manner as did the drastic restorations that had earlier been inflicted on Romanesque churches. Every- thing has been cleared down to the bare bricks. And there isn't much comfort in that. It's been disinfected, swept clean. The best examples of Bauhaus and post- Bauhaus architecture achieve, on the other hand, a wholly admirable purity, cleanness, refinement, organization, free- dom from the confusion of the subsidiary and the coincidental. They certainly are enemies of those features of the picturesque which are commonly mistaken for features of the beautiful. Of course, I shouldn't make as many pejorative re- marks about the Bauhaus as I seem to have done because there were artists like Albers, Feininger, and Klee who were profoundly humanistic, particularly Klee. Their pedagogy is centered around what is human.

It would be interesting to speculate how successful man has been in the effort to get away from himself; the neue sachlichkeit of the Germans in the i9zos was, in large part, an effort to escape the immediate past. And it was a deliberate dehumanization, one which, I think, robbed many of its products of lasting value.

"Ralph Kirkpatrick", Photo- The current revival of interest in baroque graph by Eugene Cook, School music can partly be attributed to Ralph of Music, Yale University. Kirkpatrick, who is generally acknowl-

edged to be the world's greatest harpsichordist and an eminent scholar in seventeeth and eighteenth century keyboard music. Kirkpatrick began playing baroque music in recitals in America and Europe in the I93os and has since played in most of the major music capitals of both continents. Although he has mas- tered an extensive repertoire that includes keyboard works of Mozart, Purcell, Handel, Couperin, and Rameau, Kirkpatrick is best known for his perfor- mances of Scarlatti and Bach and in I967 completed the prodigious task of record- ing the entire clavier works of Bach for the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft. He regards himself as an amateur scholar, but Kirkpatrick is highly re- spected for his scholarship, especially for his definitive critical biography of Domenico Scarlatti, published in 1953. Mr. Kirkpatrick, who has a B.A. degree from Harvard in the History of Art, is Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale University.

The editors are deeply indebted to Mr. Kirkpatrick who, having recently lost his sight, nevertheless worked diligently with them in developing this interview; Special thanks also go to Kent Bloomer who devoted many of these same hours and who led the critical portions of this interview to the results we publish here.

oo0079-958/8o/7P9z-99 $03.00o/o0 O I980 Perspecta: The Yale Architec- tural Journal, Inc., and The Massachu- setts Institute of Technology

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Editors: It seems, nevertheless, that by humanism you mean the closer study of specifically human sensations and experience. R. K.: Indeed. One must have a body of accumulated feelings, sensations, and, above all, a sense of the architecture of those sensations: how one coordinates small sensations into a larger frame of mind; what is subsidiary, what is important. Sentimentality comes in every art from overemphasis of the subsidiary, from losing sight of the main issues. Cry- ing over spilt milk is a perfect example of sentimentality in relation to the problems that face all of us. We have a tendency to become numb before things that are really important and to be ani- mated far too much by that which is not so important. Editors: Do you believe that all of these responses should be calculated rationally or is there room for irrationality in music? R. K.: Rationality is worth nothing in itself except as a means for cataloguing what has already been sensed. Rationality has never created anything. It can orga- nize; it can criticize; it can supervise arrangement of material that has already been conjured up through other often very mysterious processes. Good art is ultimately explainable only by itself. How- ever, there is far more than is commonly believed that can be organized, sorted out, freed from redundancies, from disorder, so that its own shape may be clarified. Form, after all, is nothing but comprehensible shape. And there is no limit to the amount of analytical criticism that one can bring to bear in the work- shop. But the value of this analytical criticism consists mainly in the clarifying of intentions and in the assessing of means of realizing those intentions. It is generally possible for most people to know far better what they are doing, without in any way being endangered by such knowledge. It is doctrine that is dan- gerous; but a thought never did any harm to anyone. Intelligence of the right kind can only help to illumine what otherwise might remain obscure. Editors: Do you feel that your three musical dimensions, melody, rhythm, harmony, provide an adequate accounting for human reactions to music?

R. K.: As I have said before, the basic responses to melody are derived from speech and vicarious song, but there are other associative aspects of melody, like space relationships, mathematical pro- portions of intervals. Our responses to rhythm have mainly to do with human mobility and those to harmony with our own inner response to the scale of inten- sities represented by various vertical combinations of tones. Now musical form is another thing, just as architectural form is another thing; that is something which is created out of these basic elements. I wouldn't attempt to draw a parallel between melody, rhythm, and harmony of music and corresponding functions in architecture because the vi- sual arts and architecture work dif- ferently from music. They have their own precisions, their own meaningful mathematics, which is not necessarily the same as the meaningful mathematics of music. There have been in the history of architecture serious attempts at correlation between musical and architectural pro- portions; I refer to the studies of the Renaissance from Alberti to Sarlino. Editors: Aren't your musical dimensions a bit schematic, a bit simplistic? Is there no room for the haphazard, the alietory, and even the absurd? R. K.: Don't you think Art is one of man's best answers to the absurdity of man's situation? Editors: In what sense? R. K.: Simply that it gives as far as is possible sense to that absurdity. It confers meaning on it. Editors: You mean "l'art pour l'art"? R. K.: No. I mean that anything which is subject to the disciplines that create ar- tistic form by its very nature cannot be absurd. You cannot have form without sense. You cannot have form without having communication. Editors: Yes, but who is to determine the order to the sense in the end? During the Middle Ages it was clearly God who was the determining order; in the Renaissance they threw that out and said that Man was the determinant. Now we don't know. That's the absurdity. R. K.: Well, I wrote a little piece on Style, in which I discussed various con- cepts of what constituted Style and Stylishness, Stylistic and Stylization, and I tossed the problems from one hand to another, and ended up with the con- clusion that those works of art which have true style and that have true com- municable shape are those which say in their way to the beholder or to the listener what was said to Moses from the Burning Bush: I am that I am. One ar- rives at a state, at an ultimate which can no longer be questioned. When something has that message-there are few works that do, and there are certainly few works of architecture that give us that message, but when they do they are there-one deals with them like climbers of Mount Everest, because they are there.

Editors: What you seem to be leading to is the notion of a superior consciousness which has confounded man for ages. And in a sense God was a translation of that sense of superior consciousness. And so one just has to accept it oftentimes and it becomes the greatest impetus for creation. R. K.: Indeed. And I think that it is finding access to that impetus that is the ultimate problem. Editors: That's what I was asking about before: Do you find any place for irrationality within modern music or modern architecture, in the sense that science has proven, especially by Heisenberg and Einstein, that certain truths are unap- proachable rationally; therefore that the only real way of capturing the essence of this consciousness is to bypass rationality and go into irrationality, or non- rationality. R. K.: Rationality won't get anybody to that consciousness. That they recognize, and in that sense great scientists have always seemed to me much fuller of true humility than many of the artists I have known and certainly than most of the commentators or critics.

If you look at the irrationality, the absurdity of most of the world's architecture, the frivolity . . ! I once compared the history of architecture with the history of the hat, of headgear. It's almost as capricious and irresponsible as the work of milliners in the days when people wore more hats than they do now. One is always fed all this stuff about the sublime mission of architects to elevate and edu- cate mankind, but how much architecture has ever done it? The proportion is very small. So much of what we admire in architecture of the past belongs more to the domain of the picturesque, of the haphazard, the fortuitous, than to the domain of the sublimely beautiful. It gives us titillations of quaintness, of an- tiquity, of associative values. They are all perfectly legitimate, but one sees again and again and again that a really bad piece of work, when it ages, gets for- given. Moss grows over it, associations accumulate around it, and it is forgotten what a mess it really is. It would be interesting to go through the architecture of the past and nominate those works which seem to represent in every way supreme achievements, that rise above the mere picturesque, that are coordinated, those monuments of which every part is related to every other part, and consequently to the whole, whether they be functional or not. Editors: Can you cite any of the Roman- tic era, which obviously dealt with the picturesque and the poetic, perhaps with manifestations arising from the classical era? R. K.: Well it's awkward, I think, to make distinctions between romantic and classic. One of the architects I was going to cite from the nineteenth century as having achieved a high degree of purity was Schinkel. Editors: A true masterpiece would tran- scend merely poetics and also have a high degree of order and rationality? R. K.: Yes. One of the plainest examples is the Parthenon.

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Editors: In what sense is that poetic to

you? R. K.: Anything which is completely or-

dered, in which everything has meaning in relation to itself, is poetic. But there is also the poetry of the picturesque just as there is the poetry of the sublime. Editors: Let me read a statement to you:

"Cezanne rehabilitated the art of painting as an art of construction and design and not merely as an art of description." R. K.: Well, that statement is not ac-

cepted by certain writers on Cezanne. I remember particularly one evening with an art critic, Novotny, who has written

extensively on Cezanne. I was struck by his argument that Cezanne was extraor-

dinarily inept at organizing his material and his composition and that, if I under- stood Novotny correctly, he was implying that much of what impresses us today and moves us in C&zanne is that very struggle for order. If you compare the

fumblings of a Cezanne with the com- mand over order of a master like Poussin, you might lead me to think, as much as I love Cezanne, that Cezanne is a mere child beside a Poussin, to keep the com-

parison within the domain of French

painting. The art of Cezanne is much more attractive to many of us than that of Poussin. We like the suggestiveness of Cezanne's imcompleteness, of his im-

precisions. On the other hand, the art of Poussin seems to us hermetic, in a way independent of the beholder's attention, since it is so perfectly organized within itself. A great deal of music of Bach has that same quality of self-sufficient interior

organization. Editors: One way or another, however, you are advocating an architecture, a music and an art, creative expression, that must have a human viewer in order to be worthwhile? R. K.: Absolutely! Editors: As opposed to those which are

merely ideas, which may be independent of... R. K.: Now this could be stretched very far, because part of humanity is playing with ideas. It is the vital connection with that mysterious thing which is the center of humanity that counts. There is no reason to think that the geometry of Mondrian, or Albers, is not human. It

may be limited in some ways in its range; but I don't think practiced with the in-

tensity or the devotion and the commit- ment that those two painters brought to their work, that it can be called inhuman. Editors: Therefore it seems that any creative work of art which has a sense of order, be it cerebral or physiological, is in that realm. Or is disorder also a part of the human experience?

R. K.: It is certainly part of the human drama and certainly much art concerns itself with disorder, with ultimately sur- mounting it, not necessarily resolving it. After all, most of us spend most of our lives floundering in disorder which we never totally succeed in organizing. A successful work of art will give us that vi- sion of organization of which we dream. In that sense one can understand certain aestheticians or aesthetes who felt that

they received more eloquent sermons from works of art than from what was said in the pulpit. Editors: There is all of this polarity within the realm of human experience which is extremely large, then what doesn't qualify as architecture or music? R. K.: Certain forms of rationality, of so-called objectivity, which exclude rather than invite human participation. Editors: That is the basis of modernist art and architecture, in that objects reflect objects; in other words, they deal with self-reflexive signs. R. K.: Well, there is machine-made sculpture, for example: sculpture made in accordance with a set of formulas which are then put onto a machine without human intervention. The idea of doing such a thing, it can be argued, is human. But the result, as far as I know, is always inhuman. Editors: Would you call an automobile inhuman? R. K.: It is very inhuman in the sense that it kills people, it asphixiates them, it deafens them. Editors: It also rushes them to the hospi- tal, enables me to visit my distant relatives and friends ... R. K.: That is the problem of our time which is that humanity has extended itself through so many forms of automa- tism, and machines, and things that are far out of the reach of the actual physical human body, that we are in danger of

forgetting who we are. I think this is where one is in some ways talking in vain when one speaks of a humanistic architecture, because we are not living in a time of humanism, and it is only natural that the architecture reflects our doubts and our confusions. The inhumanity of an ordinary supermarket, for example, textures which are not natural to the human body, noise which is not what we associate with what is natural, vicarious music with which we have nothing to do, mass-produced, assembly-line stuff. Editors: But man created these, so therefore they are human. R. K.: There are two ways of being human: simply of being good or of being bad. And humans are capable of creating just as much that is bad, of fabricating their own destruction, as they are of ele- vating themselves in a more positive sense. Editors: Now we are back to the question of ethics, which one can see in all the morality of the Victorian era and how much damage it did to society and to people's psychology. R. K.: Well, it was a false and limited morality. Editors: So who is to come up with the new morality? Architects? R. K.: Never!

Editors: How about the indigenous builder, who often has an audience of

great architects? R. K.: And he often has a great achieve- ment. This has a lot to do with this business of getting in touch with the cen- tral source. Some people do it the hard

way. As products of highly educated civi- lizations who sign their names to

everything they do, they have to recon- quer an innocence that has been lost long since. The simple, uncomplicated person is often far wiser than the educated person who has to regain any natural

approach to his endeavors. There is no such thing as ethics in art.

You cannot be moralistic. You can only try what you yourself believe. Editors: Can you write prescriptions? For example, one for architects might be that the building should work. It should

keep the rain out; insulate itself in the winter; cool itself in the summer. R. K.: Well, you can write the prescrip- tion but it is an open question whether the patient will ever take the pill or whether the pill will effect any kind of cure. The number of buildings that work are few indeed. That, of course, in its

way, is a very human quality. That is a

very accurate reflection of the human condition. Alas! Editors: On concert halls, in your memoirs, you say that "the worst halls are generally the most recent, victims of those acousticians who believe that music is made of sound waves, frequencies, res- onators, and echoes, and who totally overlook the fact that music was never made to be judged by scientific instruments, and that it cannot even be judged by the human ear alone, since it is di- rected toward those immeasurably com- plex and unpredictable psychological and

physical reactions of the entire human

organism and toward its qualities of

imagination and remembered experience." R. K.: Yes, I'll stand by that quotation. K. B.: What basic, very fundamental architectural features seem to recur in these bad concert halls? R. K.: That is a little hard to say, because there are bad concert halls that externally correspond to what I might describe as a good concert hall. But I think the essential feature of the bad concert halls is their failure to present, intact, the music that is being performed in them. K. B.: Then you are not addressing any subject other than the music itself in your judgment of concert halls? R. K.: I don't see how one can possibly judge a concert hall except in the way in which it transmits music from a performance to the listener. That is, after all, its sole function, presumably. K. B.: Is there such a thing as a concert hall which is too big? R. K.: Not necessarily. K. B.: Or too small? R. K.: Not necessarily.

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K. B.: Are there shapes which are particularly unsuited to concert halls? R. K.: Yes. Those shapes which fail to

recognize the directional quality of most musical instruments and ensembles; those shapes which fail to permit performers on stage to hear each other; those

shapes which produce too great a discrep- ancy between one side of the hall and another, between nearness to the stage and distance away from it. But any good concert hall will always have certain vari- ability in all of its parts. There is no such

thing as uniformity through all sections of concert halls. Music is not like that. Music is made for people who move around and who seize different aspects of it according to whether they are near or far away from it; or on the side of the first violins or on the side of the cellos and violas. This is all perfectly natural. It needs a certain judicious balance. Experi- mental shapes, complicated shapes, shapes that rely on acousticians for cor-

recting are usually failures. Shapes that

pay more attention to sight-lines than to lines of sound are usually failures. This involves in certain kinds of halls putting the stage too high so that the sound goes up over the heads of the first seats in the orchestra. In general, sound rises. Some of the worst concert halls are too broad and too shallow. They are made broad to increase visibility with the result that the variation between one side and the other is too great. The construction of bal- conies can often destroy the sound of what is beneath them, especially at the rear of the hall. The presence of multi- purpose installations such as velvet cur- tains, theater sets, flies, the absence of a proper concert shell can all be prejudicial to the reflection of sound from the stage. In fact, the very existence of any kind of procenium is problematical; sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Even the time- honored custom of placing an organ and its pipes in the back of the stage is not always favorable, either to the music made in front of that organ case or to the organ itself. The problem of avoiding these discordant qualities in a hall is the same as that of avoiding unresolved features in the construction of an instrument or of an efficient tool. There is no overall blanket solution. There is only the har- monizing and coordination of all compo- nent elements.

K. B.: Could you say a little more about the property of directionality in music in relation to a concert hall? R. K.: Yes. Certain instruments are

strongly directional. Keyboard instruments, for example, always sound better on the side away from the keyboard because the sound goes out diagonally, or rather perpendicularly to the curve of the bent side. Those who want to hear keyboard instruments best are well advised in most halls not to sit on the keyboard player's side where they can see his hands. Fiddles are strongly directional and need to be seated so that they are facing outwards. Certain wind instruments are also directional. There is much to be criticized in the customary seating of orchestras, since it favors the directionality of some instruments above others. Even the human voice is directional, and certainly you are less likely to understand any words of a singer if her back is turned to you. It is almost ax- iomatic that any attempt at building a concert hall in the round, so to speak, is doomed to failure from the very start. It's absurd. One is at a loss to understand how common sense can be so totally lacking. K. B.: You have referred to the problems attending the interior shape of a concert hall. Do you have any memories of poor entrances to concert halls, poor transi- tions between the interior and the exterior that would affect the experience of going to a concert hall and hearing music?

R. K.: I am not terribly concerned about that. The worst features of the transition from the outside to the inside are simply those which allow outside noise to pene- trate into the concert hall and disturb it. It makes eminent sense, for example, to build a concert hall with walls that pro- tect it from the outside and not build it like the ex-Philharmonic Hall in New York with glass walls, which is an aes- thetic absurdity as well as a practical one. One could pay for dozens of orchestra rehearsals with the money it costs

just to keep that glass clean. Many urban concert halls, especially the older halls in New York, have very little space in either the front of the auditorium or behind the

stage; this is conditioned by the dimensions of the city block. Carnegie Hall, for

example, is ridiculously cramped, both in front and behind. The old Metro- politan Opera House was also fairly cramped. It is nice for a performer to have a decent, comfortable dressing room, but no performer, who is a trouper in any way, has been led necessarily to

expect it. He is accustomed to changing his clothes in a locker room and having not even so much as a glass to drink out of, to using his bare hands while trying to avoid splashing his starched shirt. But the essential thing which makes a concert hall memorable is the way in which it transmits sound. K. B.: Is the transmission of sound favorably aided by the electronic devices that have been designed for modern halls? R. K.: In my view, no. They are, at best, if they work at all, simply patchwork jobs to counteract the deficiencies of the hall, to correct the errors of the architect and the acousticians. K. B.: Does this mean that electronic boosting is unnecessary in virtually all cases, including the very large concert hall?

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R. K.: I think it is, in general, highly un- desirable. It is true that many auditoriums that are used as large concert halls are multi-purpose auditoriums. Either they are sport palaces or congress halls, and suffer as much by the adjustments to this multi-purpose use as by their size. There is, however, a factor of presence; there is no question that being near an orchestra, or being near an ensemble, lends a quality of immediacy, a quality of participation. Berlioz once wrote that hearing chamber music in too large a hall is like seeing a fire without being warmed by it. I feel this acutely, for example, in operas of Mozart. The psychological subtleties of an opera like Figaro get totally lost even in an opera house as small as the Metropolitan. Anyone who has had the experience of hearing Mozart in an opera house that holds zoo to 300 people knows the difference. And this, to a certain extent, holds true of the subtleties of chamber music, not to mention those of my own instrument. It is much more exciting to be immersed in the middle of a big orchestra than having the feeling of looking at it through the wrong end of an opera glass. There is no electronic device that will compensate that properly. K. B.: Would an air conditioner be help- ful? Does heat, oppression, and humidity make the hearing of music more difficult? R. K.: For those who don't care about music, yes. For those who care about it, I think, it makes very little difference. But air conditioning is the number one enemy of the modern concert hall. Most air conditioning systems are noisy and get noisier as they get older. In the ex-Phil- harmonic Hall in New York, there have been many occasions when the air conditioning simply had to be turned off because of the noise it was making on the stage. The air conditioning in the auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum is not obvious, but it fills up all those mo- ments of silence on which music so much depends. It also raises havoc with tuning, because it usually is not turned on during the day and turned on just before the concert, so that the humidity is changing all the time during the concert. But that constant hum makes it impossible; it throws a kind of greyness over a performance. I always notice the difference in an audience reaction when I am playing in the presence of air conditioning and when air conditioning is absent. The actual performance is not that much different, and the audience, I think, isn't aware of what is happening, but the in- tensity of the communication is dimin- ished. It is like a drawing that has been allowed to get dirty, so that the dif- ferences between the white paper and the lines have become obscured, and half the effect is thereby removed. K. B.: In the language of architecture what would you regard as basic to a good concert hall, since we have been speaking mainly up to now about bad concert halls? R. K.: You are speaking about the shape of the building? K. B.: Yes.

R. K.: Well, I have developed the superstition that there are two basic shapes which seem to be common to most of the halls that I have come to admire: the shoe box or rectangle, and the amphitheatre. Both of them have their advan- tages and their disadvantages. The shoe box has the disadvantage, at its rear, of distance from the stage and of poor visibility. It needs compensating, and often the most successful shoe boxes are those which have the stage on a level lower than the public; otherwise there is a tendency for the stage to be too high. The amphitheatre is full of pitfalls for the infirm, because it has so many steps; it is awkward to get in and out of. On the other hand, it has good sightlines and good sound-lines and one is brought into a certain intimacy with the performers on stage. And this can work, sometimes, in very large amphitheatres. The finest example of an amphitheatre I have ever seen is the Greek theatre at Epidarus, in which you can hear a whisper from any part of the stage, in any part of the theatre. And furthermore, you have a sense of spatial relationships with the different parts of the stage. When the chorus moves from one side of the stage to the other you hear it; that is, there is an asso- ciation between sound and movement. There isn't this deadly uniformity which has become the ideal of so many acousticians, in imitation, I suppose, of the loudspeaker. K. B.: Recognizing the basic shapes that you just mentioned and recognizing the extraordinary complexities of other aspects of a concert hall, how would you proceed to design one, and by this question I don't mean design one with the kind of knowledge that a practicing architect would have, but to design one with the knowledge that you have right now. How would you proceed if you were commissioned as a prime consultant? R. K.: I would beg for the maximum flexibility in the construction, for a construction that would have the minimum of factors that could not be changed and regulated. I would start with the basic shell which would allow for the possibilities of regulating sound absorption and sound reflection on a purely prag- matic basis, on an experimental basis. I would advise either shoe box or amphitheatre. I would be tempted to advise a stage which is below the level of the audience rather than above it, although this is not essential. I would be tempted to advise giving up any attempt at creating a multi-purpose hall, of any attempt at combining a concert hall with a theatre or a lecture platform, although in some cases, this has been perfectly successfully achieved.

K. B.: Flexibility is a word that is used a great deal in architecture and it often re- fers to folding walls, doors, and other machines of flexibility. What instruments and devices of flexibility might come to mind to you? R. K.: Well, I am thinking of such things that are, on an experimental basis, mov- able; even temporary sound absorption bodies or temporary sound reflecting bodies which can be replaced by perma- nent installations. The same would be true for seating, simulation of the difference between an empty and a full hall, in other words, retaining the possibility of modifying surfaces. There is a common superstition that if a concert hall is paneled in wood it is automatically good. I have found this not to be necessarily true. In fact, one of the unsuccessful ad- aptations of the ex-Philharmonic Hall was lined from floor to ceiling with plywood. I think it was plywood. Plywood, incidentally, is not the most resonant form of wood. Plain, ordinary pine, fir, or spruce is probably as resonant as anything you can get; oak is not. And yet I have played in many halls which had an absolute minimum of wood, in which the construction was basically in stone and plaster. K. B.: The property of resonance seems critically important? R. K.: Indeed. It is true that in a construction that is entirely made of wood, you can hardly go wrong, but this, of course, is not compatible with fire laws or building codes of a concert hall of any size. K. B.: Would it be fair to say that the compositional possibilities between the resonant and non-resonant materials de- liver the framework for flexibility? R. K.: Yes. It is like furnishing a house. Most empty houses sound dreadful until you get furniture in the house that breaks up the surfaces and there is a moment when you have enough things with re- spect to sound and there is a moment when you go too far. K. B.: Do you have any other materials that you might refer to as good resona- tors as compared with fir, pine, or spruce? Steel, aluminum, glass? R. K.: Usually not good. Any of them. K. B.: Very thin masonry walls? R. K.: Masonry has been used since time immemorial, with conspicuous success. K. B.: As a resonant material? R. K.: Yes. Think of all those limestone churches. Incidentally, one of the most successful examples in my experience of twentieth century acoustics is Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp. In 1958, together with its cure I conducted extensive acous- tical experiments in all parts of the building.

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K. B.: Have you any prejudices against very complicated and faceted surfaces, such as those that might be produced by sculptures and moldings? R. K.: They often are exceedingly favorable. Think of the stucco work of the

Baroque, or the paneling of the French

eighteenth century. But now I think certain problems have been brought out into the open by the current fashion for sim-

plicity, for unornamented surfaces. K. B.: Therefore, the choice of elements in designing a flexible background for

tuning up a concert hall should by no means be limited to a small palette or a small number of elements. The experimental possibilities are enormous. R. K.: Indeed, they are. K. B.: In fact, one could possibly, by this

process, make new discoveries? R. K.: How many really good discoveries have been made in the art of

cooking, for example? I think that things which mask as discoveries are more often than not specious and turn out to be clinical or pseudo-scientific, and these are elements which we don't want. We want

something that tastes good, we want something that sounds good. There have been a few thousand years in which ex-

periments have been conducted in this direction.

K. B.: In that case, it would be reason- able to come forward with a limited

palette of materials? R. K.: I think so, yes. I think that just as some of the best cooking is made with the simplest elements, and certainly the best art, so there can be an excessive pro- fusion of elements in a way that never did anyone any good. K. B.: Having created, let us say, the conditions for flexibility as you described

them, whom would you call on to cho-

reograph the elements? Who would judge the quality of the concert hall as the elements were adjusted in time? R. K.: There will never be complete agreement in many of these judgements but I would call upon a group composed of musicians and intelligent listeners. The

things that need to be judged are the sound on the stage as the musicians hear it, the communication between musicians on the stage, in the case of ensemble music, and the reactions of the hall to various combinations of instruments, from solo instruments through chamber music to all the kinds of sound generated by the large orchestra.

Incidentally, a great deal of walking about is desirable from one part of the hall to another. One can tell a great deal

by simply clapping one's hands through- out different parts of the hall before

proceeding with further refinements. Sometimes one can tell simply by speaking what a hall is like, but it is amazing what the handclap will reveal. K. B.: Then it seems to me that you are

describing a goal in the design of a concert hall which is to achieve a highly refined, highly sensitive instrument or tool. In fact, a hall which has the greatest and most impeccable sensitivity to sound? R. K.: But not a clinical sensitivity! A normal human sensitivity. There has been far too much fiddling with sensitivities that are merely clinical. That we don't want.

K. B.: Would you say more about a normal human sensitivity? R. K.: A sensitivity of a cultivated musi- cian or a cultivated listener. I mean the

sensitivity of someone who is literate

enough to know what to expect that a

given composer's score can yield. The concert hall is ideally nothing more than an extension of anthropomorphic music. It is music made by and for human

beings, and it ought to be possible to hear it as if one were a human being.

R. K.: You have asked me for a list of good, bad, and mediocre concert halls. This is a random sampling out of my own experience and quite open to dif- ferences of opinion. My judgement is not based on the peculiar exigencies of the instrument I happen to play; it is based on my feeling as a listener to music as well as a performer. At another time I

might shift the categories under which some of these halls are listed. There are

many other halls which I have forgotten or cannot indicate with any precision. Most of the good halls fall into the cate-

gory of the shoe box or the amphitheatre, but the Berlin Philharmonie combines both. A striking disproportion is to be noted in this list between the good halls built before World War II and those built afterwards, and in the bad halls built before World War II and those that followed it.

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Bad Good Prewar

Maryland, Baltimore Museum of Art

New York, New York Town Hall

France, Paris Salle Pleyel

Postwar Connecticut, Hartford

Trinity College Iowa, Iowa City

University of Iowa Maryland, Annapolis

St. John's College Massachusetts, Cambridge

M.I.T. Kresge Auditorium Massachusetts, Wellesley

Wellesley College Concert Hall New York, Buffalo

University of Buffalo New York, New York

Avery Fisher Hall Metropolitan Museum Metropolitan Opera Tully Hall

France, Marseilles Marseilles University

Germany, Bonn Beethovenhalle Liederhalle (both halls) Stuttgart

Italy, Milan Milan Angelicum

Fair Prewar New York, New York

Carnegie Hall Ohio, Cleveland

Severance Hall England, London

Wigmore Hall Sweden, Stockholm

Both concert halls Postwar California, Berkeley

Herz Hall Germany, Munich

Herkulessaal

Prewar Connecticut, New Haven

Sprague Hall Illinois, Chicago

Orchestra Hall Maryland, Baltimore

Peabody (both halls) Massachusetts, Boston

Jordan Hall Symphony Hall

Massachusetts, Cambridge Paine Hall Sanders Theater

New Hampshire, Durham University of New Hampshire

New York, New York Carnegie Recital Hall

New York, Utica Munson Williams Proctor Institute

Ohio, Cleveland Cleveland Museum of Art

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Academy of Music

Texas, Austin

Hogg Auditorium Virginia, Williamsburg

Governor's Palace Ballroom Washington, D.C.

Coolidge Auditorium Dumbarton Oaks

Austria, Bregenz Landestheatre

Austria, Salzburg Mozarteum (both halls)

Austria, Vienna Konzerthaus (both larger halls) Musik Verein (both halls)

Belgium, Antwerp Rubens House

England, London Victoria & Albert Museum Wilton House Double Cube Room

France, Caen France, Paris

Ecole Normale de Musique Salle Gaveau Theatre des Champs Elysees

France, Strasbourg Conservatoire

Germany, Augsburg Jesuitensaal

Germany, Bayreuth Markgrafentheater

Germany, Bielefeld Oetkerhalle

Germany, Hamburg Musikhalle (both halls)

Germany, Hanover Beethoven Saal

Germany, Ludwigshafen Badsf

Italy, Perugia Perugia Cathedral

Italy, Rome Sta. Cecilia (Via dei Greci)

Italy, Venice Palazzo Labia

Italy, Vicenza Theatro Olimpico

Switzerland, Zurich Tonhalle (both halls)

"Epidaurus Theatre", Photo- graph Collection, Art and Architecture Library, Yale University.

98

Concert Halls



"Berlin Philharmonie", plan, architect, Hans Scharoun, Pho-

tograph Collection, Art and Architecture Library, Yale

University.

Interior of Guthrie Theater's auditorium

Postwar Georgia, Atlanta

Concert Hall Iowa, Grinnell

Grinnell College Auditorium Minnesota, Minneapolis

Tyrone Guthrie Theater

Washington, D.C. Kennedy Concert Hall

Germany, Berlin Philharmonie

Germany, Frankfort Deutschebank

Germany, Leipzig Post Office Auditorium

Portugal, Lisbon Gulbenkian Foundation (both halls)

"Teatro Olimpico", Vicenza, Italy, plan, Photograph Collec- tion, Art and Architecture Li-

brary, Yale University.

"Teatro Olimpico", design by Palladio, Photograph Collec- tion, Art and Architecture Li-

brary, Yale University.

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on concert halls

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anthropomorphic music

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