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 now used from time to time for symphony concerts, like London’s six-thousand-seat Royal Albert Hall, were intended, and are still used, as multipurpose places of assembly, symphony concerts taking place among balls, political rallies, boxing matches, and the like. These are the halls that, even though they may have served very well for symphonic performances for more than a hundred years, are now being replaced by more specialized buildings. This means that virtually all musical works composed before the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and many later ones as well, are out of their original setting when they are played in a concert hall.
The architectural style of older concert halls, even those which have been built outside Europe, first in the Americas and later in more remote colonies such as my own country (Wellington built itself a fine one in Italian baroque style in 1904, barely sixty years after the first British settlers arrived in New Zealand), generally emphasizes a continuity with the past of European culture. It may be plain classic, exuberant baroque, Renaissance, or a mixture of these, so the building may remind us of a Greek or Roman temple, of an Italian Renaissance palace, a French château, or even, in the case of Barcelona’s dazzling Palau de la Mùsica Catalana, an art nouveau fantasy world straight out of the pages of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (an appropriate evocation perhaps for a building that was built for their own performances by a workers’ choir in the early twentieth century, before socialism became a dirty word).
I cannot remember seeing a concert hall built in Gothic style, possibly because its association with a mystical, theocentric culture is felt to be out of place in the rational, humanistic world of classical music. Despite the widespread use of Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century for anything from railway stations to London’s Houses of Parliament, neither of the two great Gothic Revival architects, Gilbert Scott in England and Viollet-le-Duc in France, ever got to build a Gothic concert hall.
The entrance facade is impressive (in older buildings a tall classical colonnade surmounted with a pediment like a Greek temple is a favorite device) and is intended to make entry into the building an event of importance. We pass through the doorway into a lobby with a row of ticket windows, the only visible sign in this big building of a link with the everyday world of commerce and money. We have had the foresight to pay in advance the money that entitles us to take part in the event, so, armed with the tickets that are the symbol of that entitlement, we walk past the windows, where a line of people is waiting to pay and be admitted.
At an inner door we show our tickets to an attendant who stands guard to ensure that only those entitled to do so will enter. He takes the tickets, returns the stubs that bear the numbers of the seats we have been allotted, and politely motions us on. Passing through the door, we find ourselves in a grand ceremonial space. Now we have entered another world, apart from that of our everyday life.
The space extends around us, lofty and sumptuous. If it is in an older building, it will most probably be formal and rectangular, matching in style the building’s exterior, lit perhaps by big chandeliers and decorated with statuary and mirrors. In more recent halls, it may well be asymmetrical, with staircases rising in unexpected ways, ceiling sloping this way and that and even curved, with angled walls that trick the sense of perspective, all carried out with up-to-date skill and technological daring that is clearly intended to place the building and what goes on within it squarely within today’s up-to-date technological culture.
There are bars for coffee, snacks and alcoholic drinks. On the walls and display stands there are posters, some advertising future concerts and others giving the entire schedule of performances for the season. There are glossy program booklets on sale or free distribution telling us about tonight’s conductor and soloist, listing the pieces to be played, and giving such background information as is thought to be necessary for full appreciation of them. We buy a booklet and thumb through it, more interested at this moment perhaps in the crowd of people who, like ourselves, are waiting for the concert to begin. There is a quiet buzz of conversation. Although there are chairs and tables, most people seem to prefer to stand and keep their ability to move around.
This, we know, is not the space where the performance is to take place but a transitional space through which we pass in the progression from the outer everyday world to the inner world of the performance. It is at first hard to understand why a mere transitional space should be so big and grand; it must have added considerably to the construction cost. Nevertheless, its spaciousness and grandeur tell us that it is an important part of the building, where an important part of the event takes place. It is a criticism I have heard made of the otherwise excellent church-turned-concert-hall, St. John’s, Smith Square in London, that it has no transitional space between the outside world and the auditorium, even though it does have a place for socializing in the crypt. Traditionally, churches do not, of course, have foyers; those modern churches that do may speak of a change in the nature of the ceremonies that take place there.
The foyer is a place to eat and drink and socialize, to see and be seen. There is nothing wrong, of course, in wanting to socialize or to see and be seen; where we are seen to be, like where we are not seen to be, or seen not to be, is an important element in who we are. Musical performances of all kinds have always been events to which people
