How Music Works Read Free

heard in symphony halls, which is where they’re often performed today, but rather in these smaller, more intimate venues. Rooms like these would be filled with people whose bodies and elaborate dress would deaden the sound, and that, combined with the frilly décor and their modest
    size (when compared to cathedrals and even ordinary churches) meant that his similarly frilly music could be heard clearly in all its intricate detail.
    People could dance to it too. My guess is that in order to be heard above
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    the dancing, clomping feet, and gossiping, one might have had to figure out
    how to make the music louder, and the only way to do this was to increase the size of the orchestra, which is what happened.
    Meanwhile, some folks around that same time were going to hear operas.
    La Scala was built in 1776; the original orchestra section comprised a series of booths or stalls, rather than the rows of seats that exist now.J People would eat, drink, talk, and socialize during the performances—audience behavior, a big part of music’s context, was very different back then. Back in the day, people would socialize and holler out to one another during the performances.
    They’d holler at the stage, too, for encores of the popular arias. If they liked a tune, they wanted to hear it again—now! The vibe was more like CBGB than
    your typical contemporary opera house.
    La Scala and other opera venues of the time were also fairly compact—
    more so than the big opera houses that now dominate much of Europe and
    the United States. The depth of La Scala and many other opera houses of that period is maybe like the Highline Ballroom or Irving Plaza in New York, but
    La Scala is taller, with a larger stage. The sound in these opera houses is pretty tight, too (unlike today’s larger halls). I’ve performed in some of these old opera venues, and if you don’t crank the volume too high, it works surprisingly well for certain kinds of contemporary pop music.
    Take a look at Bayreuth, the opera house Wagner had built for his own
    music in the 1870s.K You can see it’s not that huge. Not very much bigger
    than La Scala. Wagner had the gumption to demand that this venue be built
    to better accommodate the music he imagined—which didn’t mean there
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    was much more seating, as a practical-minded entrepeneur might insist on
    today. It was the orchestral accommodations themselves that were enlarged.
    He needed larger orchestras to conjure the requisite bombast. He had new and larger brass instruments created too, and he also called for a larger bass section, to create big orchestral effects.
    Wagner in some ways doesn’t fit my model—his imagination and ego
    seemed to be larger than the existing venues, so he was the exception who
    didn’t accommodate. Granted, he was mainly pushing the boundaries of pre-
    existing opera architecture, not inventing something from scratch. Once he
    built this place, he more or less wrote for it and its particular acoustic qualities.
    As time passed, symphonic music came to be performed in larger and
    larger halls. That musical format, originally conceived for rooms in palaces and the more modest-sized opera halls, was now somewhat unfairly being
    asked to accommodate more reverberant spaces. Subsequent classical com-
    posers therefore wrote music for those new halls, with their new sound,
    and it was music that emphasized texture, and sometimes employed audio
    shock and awe in order to reach the back row that was now farther away. They needed to adapt, and adapt they did.
    The music of Mahler and other later symphonic composers works well in
    spaces like Carnegie Hall.L Groove music, percussive music featuring drums—
    like what I do, for example—has a very hard time here. I’ve played at Carnegie Hall a couple of times, and it can work, but it is far from ideal. I wouldn’t play that music there again. I realized that sometimes the most prestigious place doesn’t always work out best