There will be times when, in order to make a question clear, I have to propose an answer—and I do have answers of my own, many of them strongly felt, that I do not intend even to try to keep under wraps. But as I used to say to my students, I don’t care whether or not you agree with my answers, so long as you see that there are questions to be asked.
The majority of this book, then, will be taken up with a description, as fine-grained as I can make it, of the ceremony in Symphony Hall and of the human and sonic relationships (and the relationships between those relationships) that are being generated there. I wish it were possible to run at the same time, in counterpoint as it were, a parallel text that explains why I believe it is important to understand the nature of these relationships. But (and it is one of the themes of this book) while the gestures of musicking can articulate many kinds of relationship at once, words, on the other hand, can deal with things only one at a time, and there is no way they can be made to bear the cargo of multiple simultaneous meanings that the gestures of musicking can do. I shall therefore be obliged to pause from time to time in my description and to interpolate three interludes, which I hope will gave a more theoretical understanding of my search for the meaning of a musical performance. They are only loosely attached to the description that precedes them, and readers who wish to continue following the description uninterrupted could leave them to one side and come back to them later.
So let us begin by looking and listening carefully around us at this symphony concert. It does not matter too much where it is taking place, for it is an international ceremony; that is part of its nature. It might be taking place in New York, London, Tokyo, Wellington, Taipei, Minsk, Reykjavik, or Denton, Texas. Wherever the Western scientific-industrial culture has gone and wherever a middle class has grown prosperous from its activities, there we shall find symphony concerts taking place and concert halls built to house them.
CHAPTER 1
A Place for Hearing
The chances are that it is a modern building, built since the Second World War. The last fifty years or so have seen a doubling of the number of professional symphony orchestras in the world, as the Western classical music tradition has moved into regions where it was previously unheard, and an explosion of concert hall building has taken place to house those orchestras and their performances. Countries and cities that wish to signal their entry into the “developed” world often do so through the construction of a “center for the performing arts,” of which the centerpiece is a big concert hall, and through the establishment of a symphony orchestra to play there. In addition, many cities in the older industrial countries have decided that their existing nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century hall is too small, or insufficiently specialized, or that it projects an image that is not up to date and have commissioned replacements. So today modern concert halls greatly outnumber older ones.
As we approach the building, our first impression is likely to be of its great size. It is a landmark in the cityscape, and even its external appearance tells us that it was built with no expense spared, probably in the forefront of the design and building technology of its day. It stands most likely on a prominent site, on a rise perhaps, in a park, beside a river or harbor, or as the focal point of a complex of civic buildings. It is probably located slightly apart from the commercial center of the city, possibly surrounded by gardens and fountains, and at night it will almost certainly be floodlit. In the winter darkness it blazes with light inside and out, a beacon of culture in the philistine world of commerce that surrounds it, welcoming the initiated with dignity and discreet opulence but making no attempt to attract the vulgar with those flashing neon signs and brightly colored posters which one sees outside cinemas and other places of popular entertainment.
Every building, from the tiniest hut to the biggest airport terminal, is designed and built to house some aspect of human behavior and relationships, and its design reflects its builders’ assumptions about that behavior and those relationships. Once built, it then has the power to impose those assumptions on what goes on within it. A conventional school building, for example, with its rows of boxlike classrooms joined by corridors, its assembly hall, its gymnasium and its staff room, is built in accordance with certain assumptions about what young people in our society ought to learn and how they ought to learn it. But it also enforces those assumptions, making difficulties for those who might have different ideas. Even so everyday a structure as a family house or apartment makes, and enforces, certain assumptions about family life and its relationships, about childhood, privacy, cleanliness and sex.
The scale of any building, and the attention that is paid to its design and appearance, tell us much about the social importance and status that is accorded to what goes on within it. The decline in the importance of rail transport is clearly mirrored in the modest appearance of most twentieth-century railroad stations in comparison with the splendor of those built in the great era of nineteenth-century railroad building, when the railroad signified a quantum leap in human mobility and speed of travel. Today their splendor has passed to airport terminals.
Some buildings lend themselves to uses, to the housing of sets of relationships, that were not foreseen by their builders. The great Victorian railway engineer Robert Stephenson could never have dreamed that the magnificent roundhouse he built for one of his new London terminals would in the 1960s begin a new life as a versatile performance space. Such new careers for buildings depend on their not having been designed too rigidly for their original function. For while some buildings leave room for a variety of activities and relationships, others impose their structure very firmly on what goes on within them.
Modern concert halls fall mainly into the latter category. They are highly specialized buildings, designed down to the last detail to house not just musical performances but performances of a very specific kind. The architects who design them, and the committees of civic authorities who commission and approve the designs, are for the most part members of the social group that tends to take part in such events. They know how people are supposed to behave there and will shape the building in ways that will encourage that behavior, at the same time closing off the possibility of behaviors of different kinds.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this building may be that it is here at all. For musicking, even large-scale musicking, does not need a building such as this. Human beings have been musicking for as long as there have been humans and have done so mainly without feeling the need for a specialized building to house their activities, certainly not for anything on so grand a scale as this, anything so opulent or so impressive. If the cathedrals and palaces that in Europe in earlier times were the scenes of many such performances were grand and opulent, if was not for the sake of the performances themselves but for the religious or aristocratic ceremonies of which the performances were no more than a part.
The grandeur of this building is something else, and it tells us loudly and clearly that the performances that take place here are an important social activity in their own right, not just as part of another ceremony or event. It tells us also that those who consider them important have the confidence and possess, or at least control, the wealth and the power to actualize that belief in architectural form.
If the idea of an event that consists entirely of a musical performance, with no other social function than playing and listening to music, is a modern one, so is the building that is built expressly to house such an event. The large purpose-built concert hall is essentially a nineteenth-century invention. Only a handful were built before the turn of the nineteenth century, and almost all were tiny by present-day standards. Even many of the big nineteenth-century halls that are