Concert Hall Acoustics and the Sounding Heritage of the Interwar Period in AmericaThe Coolidge Auditorium (Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 1925)
Starting in 1895 with the work of Wallace Clement Sabine (1868–1919), the science of architectural acoustics was born. Sabine's work on the materialization of sound influenced countless architects and physicists alike, including the famous New York City–based architect Charles A. Platt (1861–1933) and MIT physics instructor Clifford Melville Swan (1877–1951), a former student of Sabine. Both Platt and Swan collaborated on the design of the Coolidge Auditorium, housed in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Built in 1925, the five-hundred-plus seat chamber hall highlights the idealized listening environment of the interwar period in America, which was still reeling from the noise-filled horrors of World War I as it embarked on a progressive agenda to build the modern urban metropolis. In spite of the increased popularity at the time for large purpose-built halls to house films, big band jazz performances, and grand spectacle entertainment, the Coolidge Auditorium presented a small, intimate space with an explicit desire to reform music in America. In this article I explore this early twentieth-century listening environment and conclude by comparing the Coolidge Auditorium to the concert hall of today, which I argue is directly connected to the built environment of the early twentieth century, with its growing fascination with radio transmission and electronically reproduced music.
Boston Symphony Hall, interior, 1900. (Photograph courtesy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives)
[End Page 214]
In 1895, when the young physicist Wallace Clement Sabine examined the reverberation time of a lecture hall on Harvard's campus, the science of architectural acoustics was born. Sabine's work influenced countless architects and physicists alike, including the famous New York City–based architect Charles A. Platt and MIT physics instructor Clifford Melville Swan, a former student of Sabine's. Both Platt and Swan collaborated in the construction of the Coolidge Auditorium, which is housed in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Built in 1925 and dedicated "to promoting the study and appreciation of music in America," the five-hundred-plus seat chamber hall exemplifies the idealized music listening environment of the interwar period in America.1 This was an era that rose from the horrors of World War I, when many Americans found themselves besieged by the sounds now shaping modernity, be they the hustle and bustle of the automobile, office machines of endless motion and activity, the riveting of steel, or even the latest jazz tune thumping from a local bar.
By the 1930s, several cities throughout North America and Europe established antinoise commissions, which encouraged local governments to pass noise-abatement laws to counteract the increase in nervous anxiety and mental illness then occurring in urban communities.2 Architectural acoustics thus became a necessary science owing to the increasing levels of sound that defined the spread of urbanism in America. The concert hall acoustics of the Coolidge Auditorium is a result of this societal view of the destructive impact of noise in American cities. It is ironic, however, that with the increase of noise [End Page 215] abatement within concert hall construction, early twentieth-century music became louder and more discordant. It was as if the composers and musicians of the day, in opposition to local governments, sought to mirror in music the noise of the modern world rather than to avoid it altogether.3
Beyond the repertoire of the musical vanguard and its ability to disrupt sound-control measures in the concert hall, the introduction of live radio broadcasts forced acousticians to adapt to a new listening paradigm that embraced the engineered sound of aerial transmission and reception, a factor that still influences the design of modern concert halls today. This article therefore attempts to reconstruct the listening soundscape that informed the construction and patronage of the Coolidge Auditorium in the mid-1920s, a time bombarded with the noise of "progress" and the proliferation of sound recordings and electronic distribution systems. By so doing, my hope is to highlight the changing attitudes toward music, broadcast sound, and noise in the early twentieth century that shape the current listening environment in the concert hall. The 1925-built Coolidge Auditorium thus represents a "sonic oasis," a separate space in the nation's capital that underscores for us today the conflict in society between preserving the live music of the past and embracing the electroacoustic sounds of the future.4
Listening in Early Twentieth-Century America
Following his acoustical work at Harvard, Sabine was asked to construct acoustic environments for other spaces around the country, most notably Symphony Hall in Boston, modeled after the famous 1884 Leipzig Gewandhaus theater designed by Martin Gropius. The long-awaited opening of the Boston hall took place on October 15, 1900. After a number of initial mixed reviews, the hall was soon trumpeted as one of the best spaces to hear music in America (fig. 1). In fact, the Boston Sunday Herald declared the sound in the hall a veritable "feat in acoustics," further noting that "everything is heard with the most perfect distinctness, the contrasting timbres of the different instruments stand out clearly, and at no time, even in the heaviest fortissimos, is there any cloudiness of tone."5 To acknowledge the successful acoustics in the hall, a memorial plaque was installed by members of the governing board in October 1946, which highlighted the work of Sabine. It reads, "The first auditorium in the world to be built in known conformity with acoustical laws was designed in accordance with [Sabine's] specifications and mathematical formulae the fruit of long and arduous research through self-effacing devotion to science. … [H]ere stands his monument."6 With the building of this hall, science made its definitive mark on the sound of live music in America.
Beyond the concert hall, the war effort in the United States further imposed a heightened acoustic reality upon the everyday lives of its citizens. During the war, the use of acoustical theories on the battlefield helped to mitigate the loss of line of sight due to trench warfare, submarine conflict, and aerial bombardment. Unlike any other time in the history of war, soldiers as well as civilians were faced with hearing their enemies rather than seeing them, a phenomenon that Axel Volmar describes as an "auscultation of the acoustic warscape."7 Additionally, the extreme levels of volume emanating from land and [End Page 216] naval artillery created an "acoustic landscape [that] constituted a violent, inhospitable environment" that dramatically defined a desire to control unwanted sounds like no other.8 Although the fight against noise in American cities began before the war, the physical and neurological effects of the "acoustic warscape" of World War I on American soldiers (e.g., PTSD, or "shell-shock" syndrome) increased the need for better sound-control measures to be defined in the built environment back at home.9
Owing much to the effects of the "acoustic warscape" on returning American soldiers, the study of acoustics in America became less about controlling the flow of sound and more about isolating individuals from it or, in the case of auditorium construction, quieting the hall entirely to create a "dead" space for sound to live again. In 1919, prior to his work on the Coolidge Auditorium, American acoustician Clifford M. Swan wrote an article titled "Architectural Acoustics" for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects that summarized the situation:
A few decades ago such problems commanded but little attention, but modern office machinery and the hard and non-absorptive materials used in fireproof construction have conspired to make the ordinary business office almost as noisy as the proverbial boiler-shop. The increases in errors and the loss of efficiency on the part of the clerical force due to this nerve-shattering racket are facts now being considered by the welfare department of many of the most progressive business houses.10
The desire for noise abatement in America's sprawling cities thus took on a "medicalized critique of modernity," one that grew with intellectual fervor among writers and cultural critics of American music.11 Big band jazz and "talkie" films of the so-called roaring twenties were, at the time, characterized by academics and conservative music lovers alike as a noise-filled blight upon the sensibilities of all art-loving Americans.12 For example, after listening to the jazz-influenced music of George Gershwin at Aeolian Hall (November 1, 1923), a critic published the following remark in Musical America, an established journal of American musical conservatism and pedagogy: "Jazz expresses merely the easy joy, insouciance, vulgarity and love of motion characteristic of America's big cities."13 To many conservative music listeners, the sound of jazz and its "dogmatism of the commonplace" presented a threat to those who championed an artistic legacy for America that rivaled Europe's.14 Like the everyday noises of the modern world, jazz was viewed by many social critics as a danger to the health and well-being of the American listener. As Isaac Goldberg, the first biographer of Gershwin's music and life, wrote in 1930:
To the theological dogmatist [jazz] is a new guise of the ancient devil, to be fought as a satanic agency. To the pagan, if he is minded to interpret novelties in the language of social ethics, it is the symptom of a glorious release from the bonds of moral restraint. The musician, if he is one of the old school, looks upon it with mingled amusement and disgust; if he is of the modernist persuasion, he beholds in it rich possibilities of a new style.15
[End Page 217]
Conversely, it was the sound of American jazz that, following the devastation of World War I, revitalized the European modernist spirit. For Europeans, American jazz was a celebrated by-product of the modernist aesthetic of noise, movement, hybridity, and spectacle.16
The Coolidge Auditorium was built in the context of these early twentieth-century debates surrounding the harmful implications of urban noise and jazz. The hall was designed to host classical chamber music and to serve as a counterpoint to the sounds of populist entertainment, thus "removed from the sphere of social rivalry and commercial intrigue."17 In the program booklet for an inaugural set of chamber music concerts in Washington, DC, the chief of the music division of the Library of Congress, Carl Engel, characterized the importance of chamber music to the American public:
No class of composition affords so great a variety as does chamber music. … If, during the second half of the eighteenth century, chamber music rapidly spread in favor and fashion, this was due not only to the genius of men like Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but also to the encouragement these men received from enthusiastic amateurs of birth and culture. … Fashion, for once, meant advance. … It is unfortunately no longer so; and if it is to retain its natural and well-qualified place "at the head" of musical composition and performance, it must rely more than ever on the support of munificent patrons.18
The creative directors of the Coolidge Auditorium were not alone in their desire to reform American cultural tastes with a return to artistic genres of the past. The size and intimacy of the Coolidge Auditorium expressed the values of the so-called Little Theater Movement in America, which began in 1912 and ended in the mid-1920s with the rise of sound in film.19 Advocates of the movement, who were drawn primarily from the uppermiddle class, desired intimate theatrical spaces as opposed to the visual and sonic effects of cinema houses in order to create "an image of reform, struggling against a conservative corporate society."20 Hollywood films and formulaic stage spectacles were perceived as enemies of high art and were described by members of the movement as "mindless, bloated, and detrimental to psychic well-being."21 The Little Theater Movement's architectural response was to construct and promote small playhouses and unconventional theatrical spaces for the performance of experimental and classic revivals of European artists ranging from Shakespeare and Molière to the latest epic-theatrical works of Max Reinhardt.22 The promotion of such works was grounded in moralistic terms and in the spirit of reform and the revitalization of the fine arts in America.
The Little Theater Movement (and its ally, the Coolidge Auditorium) was one of many national reform projects in the early twentieth century that sought political and social change in the so-called Progressive Era. Be it the prohibition of alcohol, voting rights for women, labor unions, or education reform, the era presented a call to arms for the elimination of waste and corruption in all areas of society. At the heart of all these reforms was the hope for a prosperous society for all, a collective vision for the country to be greater [End Page 218]
Charles A. Platt, architectural sketch of the north exterior elevation, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1915. (Photograph courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, image #AI-29413)
than it was in the past.23 Even the wealthiest in society took up the call, increasing philanthropic activity by creating public spaces to educate and enrich the masses.
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was one such individual who dedicated much of her fortune (made by her father in the wholesale grocery business in Chicago) to reform music in America.24 When her father died, Elizabeth's first philanthropic act was to establish a pension fund in his honor for musicians of the Chicago Symphony. This interest in supporting music for the enjoyment of others led to the building of Sprague Memorial Hall at Yale University (her father's alma mater), the establishment of music ensembles, and the creation of a chamber music festival in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, complete with residences for the musicians and a festival hall.25 The year 1925 marked the eighth anniversary of the Berkshire Chamber Music Festival, held annually since 1918, and the opening of the Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, DC. The auditorium was the capstone of Coolidge's philanthropic support of chamber music in America.26
The Coolidge Auditorium
Frustrated by the lack of a suitable space to hear chamber music in the nation's capital, Coolidge approached Carl Engel, the chief of the music division at the Library of Congress, and explained her desire to build a music auditorium in the library. Engel later introduced Coolidge to Herbert Putnam, the librarian of Congress. In November 1924, Coolidge presented Putnam with a personal check for $60,000, which allowed Putnam to begin work on the auditorium.27 By January, Putnam met with the architect of the Capitol, David Lynn, who suggested that Charles A. Platt serve as an architectural consultant to the design. [End Page 219]
Charles A. Platt, architectural sketch of the Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, February 4, 1925. Instead of acquiring a new piece of land, the single-story auditorium was placed in the large inner courtyard of the Jefferson Building, which houses the Music Division of the Library of Congress. (Photograph courtesy of Charles A. Platt Architectural Records and Papers, 1879–1981, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University)
Platt was the architect of record for the Smithsonian Institution's Freer Gallery of Art, where Putnam, Engel, and Coolidge all attended a chamber music concert the year before (see fig. 2). Trained in both New York and Paris, Platt was a favored landscape architect and garden designer for Rockefeller, Astor, Roosevelt, and even the gardens of the Sprague estate in Brookline, Massachusetts, Coolidge's paternal home.28 Given his fluency with European artistic traditions and American idealism, Platt seemed well suited to fulfill Coolidge's vision for the auditorium.
Before submitting his plans for the auditorium, Platt consulted with the acoustician Clifford M. Swan.29 Initially, Platt designed a thrust stage with seats on three of the four sides. According to Engel's letter to Coolidge, Swan advised against such a design for the auditorium, reasoning that "such a stage would tend to create one limited area … where the acoustics would be excellent, and all the rest of the hall would have to suffer."30 Swan thus recommended that Platt design a rectangular theater, similar to his mentor's own architectural design for the Boston Symphony Hall. The rectangular hall was placed on the ground floor of the northwest courtyard of the Jefferson Building, with a seating capacity of 512 (fig. 3). [End Page 220]
The design of the Coolidge Auditorium was based on the acoustic work of Swan's mentor, Wallace Clement Sabine, who referred to Swan as "the only student I have had, and, as matters now stand, my sole hope of making the subject of Architectural Acoustics an engineering science."31 Swan used a pitch above middle C, or 512 vibrations per second, to measure the sound-absorbent ability per unit area of material, including painted cloth panels, cork tile, and wool seat covers.32 After measuring the area volume of the auditorium, Swan was then able to determine the reverberant nature of the empty auditorium before construction even began. To mitigate sound leakage into the library, the space was equipped with heavy double doors encased in one inch of wool felt. The felt created a tight closure around each door that was enhanced with a lever door handle that, when depressed, would push a felt stop down in between the doors so as to seal the space between them.33 In addition, the reinforced concrete floor was covered with cork tiles, which have a natural soundabsorbing capacity and reduce the amount of airborne noise that travels through lateral walls and floors.34 In a further attempt to control echoes and reverberation time, the ceiling was coffered and ventilation grills were installed near the front of the stage. The walls were lined with one-inch-thick wool felt and covered with painted cloth panels to absorb the sound even further and to reduce reverberation in the room. And finally, to bring about a neoclassical aesthetic to the hall, oak-paneled wainscoting was put in place throughout.35
All of the sound-absorbing materials proposed by Swan were implemented by Platt to create an ideal listening environment for chamber music. According to the second edition of Acoustics of Buildings, published in 1930 by Floyd Watson, founder of the Acoustics Society of America, the outdoor Greek theater was the model for "ideal" acoustics for both speech and music in an auditorium:
It has been known since the time of the Greek theater that outdoor auditoriums have good acoustical properties. … Consideration of the outdoor theater shows that it is quite dead acoustically. It has almost no reflected sound as in the indoor theater, and is thus at once from the various defects of echoes, blurring of sounds and excessive reverberation. It suggests the desirability of deadening the indoor theater to make it comparable with outdoors.36
The Coolidge Auditorium was thus designed to be a classically inspired listening environment, equipped with enough sound-control measures to create a "dead" acoustic space (i.e., having a short reverberation time) to allow the intimacy of classical chamber music to resound and to restore America's artistic future.37
The Coolidge Auditorium opened in October 1925 with a three-day festival of chamber music. The festival featured music from the Renaissance, baroque, and neoclassical periods, as well as contemporary works based on traditional compositional forms. The festival repertoire exemplified a desire to return to the past and to do it in a space that literally shut itself off from the noise of the modern world. In contrast to the large theaters and movie houses that were populating cities across America, the Coolidge Auditorium presented an intimate, unamplified sonic experience for both listener and musician. Thus, [End Page 221]
Charles A. Platt, architectural sketch of cross section of auditorium looking toward the stage, Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, March 10, 1925. Note the use of Doric columns in the inlay as well as the classically inspired broken pediment over the doorframe. (Photograph courtesy of Charles A. Platt Architectural Records and Papers)
Charles A. Platt, architectural sketch of stage setting, Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, March 10, 1925. Note the classic-inspired panels and the floral molding above the stage door. (Photograph courtesy of Charles A. Platt Architectural Records and Papers)
[End Page 222] the highly controlled acoustics, the neoclassical architectural design of a federal building in the nation's capital, and the select repertoire all represented a cohesive effort to institutionalize chamber music in America.
The new hall and the three-day music festival were well received by the press, with one reviewer remarking, "Among its splendid features is a very fine pipe organ, and although the architecture and decoration of the hall is severely simple in design, the acoustics which are said to be perfect, compensate for the entire lack of ornament."38 After the successful opening of the hall, Coolidge took to the airwaves to broadcast chamber music directly into the homes of the American public. From the very start of the building project, Coolidge desired a space in the nation's capital that would arouse American listeners to the pleasures and educative sounds of chamber music, hence one of the reasons the Library of Congress was chosen.39 The relatively new practice of radio listening in the home allowed this to occur on a scale that was previously unimaginable, uniting "the nation physically, across geographic space, connecting remote regions with centers of civilization and culture, tying the country together over the invisible waves of ether much as the telegraph and telephone lines had stitched America together, pole by pole, in the preceding century."40 The success of these live radio broadcasts, hosted by Coolidge herself, prompted the Library of Congress to initiate the Chamber Music Hour, which was presented on major radio broadcasting companies across America. With the radio transmissions from the Coolidge Auditorium, which shared airspace with other music shows like The Standard Hour (music of the San Francisco Orchestra and Opera Company, sponsored by Standard Oil Company), The Majestic Hour (the Majestic Orchestra and songs of Eddie Cantor), and the Palmolive Hour (concert music sponsored by the Palmolive Soap Company), members of Coolidge's artistic circle could carve out a restorative sound culture in opposition to the chaotic "noise" of the day. In 1936, after ten years of radio broadcasts from the Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, DC, Coolidge presented the following self-congratulatory remark:
To NBC, I cordially say, "I told you so" … the splendid victory for chamber music over those doubts and misgivings … of broadcasting it to the largest audience possible … and by doing this freely and frequently until we cannot live without it, thus serving art through mankind by serving mankind through art.41
In the end, the acoustic reality that Swan and Platt set out to achieve by building the Coolidge Auditorium was undermined by the radio listening audience that was so sought by Coolidge to reform music in America. As Emily Thompson writes in her penetrating study, The Soundscape of Modernity, at the same time that the Coolidge Auditorium was being built to counteract the "noise" in American society, a new acoustic reality began to take shape, whereby acousticians sought to develop an ideal soundscape for a mass audience outside the built environment of the hall:
Acousticians began to promote a new "ideal" type of auditorium in the 1920s, and architects simultaneously made that ideal a reality. The new auditorium was low and [End Page 223] wide, "spatulate" or fan-shaped, with diverging side walls spreading out from a small stage area to form an increasingly wide seating area. … The acoustic result was the performers on stage effectively occupied the apex of a large horn. … There was little opportunity for reverberation to develop, as the shape and material constitution of the new auditorium were designed "to blend and unify the music at its source and then transmit this music efficiently and uniformly." … Efficient transmission—a primary goal in electroacoustical design—was equally in the realm of auditorium design.42
With the advent of radio broadcasting, the sound engineer superseded the acoustician, "creating spatial effects and acoustical illusions by using electroacoustic devices in conjunction with, or even independent of, architectural space."43 The soundscape of the concert hall was now defined by the outside radio listener. This new emphasis on radio transmission forced architects to build concert halls to broadcast music to an unseen external audience whose listening desires were to hear the music via the broadcast medium and not necessarily in the hall itself. The 1932 opening of Radio City Music Hall in New York can be viewed as a logical outcome of the profound shift in the sonic reality of the built environment.44 As Thompson writes, "Radio City Music Hall was not just a symbolic tribute to the tremendous industry of sound communication and control; it was also constructed of the very products of that industry."45 The main auditorium boasted more than six thousand seats with the latest hardware in electroacoustic reproduction, encased in the most advanced sound absorbing materials on the market. Here, in this "gigantic cathedral of sound," music stages were constructed that contained no seats for listeners, only areas for observation behind soundproof glass, thus further isolating the music from the acoustic reality of a live listening audience.46
The acoustic environment of the Coolidge Auditorium was eventually superseded by the efforts of sound engineers to meet the growing demand for radio listeners (and, it must be said, the increased revenue from advertising dollars). After serving the chamber music community for more than sixty years with its original acoustic construction, the Coolidge Auditorium was renovated in 1996–97 to accommodate electroacoustic reproduction. The Library of Congress contracted famed acoustician George C. Izenour to serve as consultant for the renovation project.47 Following Izenour's advice, the hall was equipped with movable acoustic panels in the stage shell, an acoustic curtain to simulate a full hall for recording sessions, a new audiovisual recording system, and a soundproof booth for the recording engineer.48 In the end, the increasing demand by the public that the Coolidge Auditorium be equipped to accommodate radio broadcasting and electronic recording meant that its original acoustical construction was reconfigured to meet modern listening devices. The impact of electroacoustic reproduction on the design of concert halls is still being felt today.
The Sonic Legacy of Early Twentieth-Century America
In the contemporary listening environment, the ultimate sonic ideal of what music should sound like is commonly understood to be represented by a music recording, whereby an audio engineer eliminates any extraneous sounds that get in the way of the music. As a result, digital music recordings present a disembodied sound, which isolates the sound [End Page 224] source from its environment to such a degree that we come to consume only the sound signal and not the actual space or person who produced the sound. The sound of music making, the sound of an individual interacting in a physical space, is thus eliminated in a digital sound recording.
In his essay "The Grain of the Voice," Roland Barthes reminds us that the grain, the actual physical body of the performer, or in our case, the performance space, is a text full of erotic meaning for the listener.49 By eliminating the spatiality and corporeality of the sound, we are disregarding fundamental aspects of the sound inherent in its production. In fact, the MP3 digital audio format, the most pervasive music file format played on digital devices, has eliminated the actual physical "presence" of the music to such a degree that select audio layers of the original sound signal, which imprint the uniqueness of the built environment on to the sound, no longer are heard. What remains is a curated sonic reality, a virtual "presence" that is native only to the digital medium itself.50
In the concert hall today we find a similar process at work. As we have seen throughout this article, the main goal in architectural acoustics is to create a sonic environment in which preferred sounds are enhanced, while others are absorbed, blocked, or otherwise eliminated from the space as soon as they are produced, so that an idealized listening experience remains. What has changed in modern concert hall acoustical construction is the use of compressed sound (i.e., the MP3 digital audio format) to shape the listening environment for the hall, so much so that the unique timbre of the live sounding body, be it the performer or the space itself, is eliminated so as to produce a sound in the hall that is akin to a music recording, the sonic ideal for the modern listener.51 This process of "scrubbing" the hall of its corporeality creates a sameness of sound that distances the uniqueness of the sounding space from the uniqueness of the music, a point echoed in a Los Angeles Times article from March 2017, where music critic Mark Swed laments "the sameness of sound" across the globe of halls designed by the famed acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota (b. 1952).52 Since his first project with the Suntory Hall in Tokyo in 1986, Toyota has come to define how we hear or, better yet, how we should hear classical music. As Jacques Attali argued in his 1977 classic text, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, when music listening is defined by uniform conditions, these conditions become "a powerful factor in centralization, cultural normalization, and the disappearance of distinctive cultures."53 Notably, what Attali cautioned in this midcentury essay was similar to the acoustic ambitions embraced by the Coolidge Auditorium and the Little Theater Movement, whereby populist entertainment (e.g., theatrical spectacles, "talkies," and big band jazz), mediated through large amplified audio reproduction systems, was seen as eroding the distinctive culture of high art, with moral implications for society.
Concert hall acoustic design today has little to do with foregrounding the site-specific characteristics of music production (e.g., complexity of timbre, resonance, pitch range, and dynamics) and more to do with the predictive modeling of sound. To this end, one of the most commonly used acoustic software programs for concert hall design is CATT-Acoustic, a 3D computer modeling program for acoustic prediction and sound-field simulation.54 The program can be used in the actual space, virtual space, or miniature models, built with the same materials used in the full-scale hall.55 Tools such as CATT-Acoustic contribute to [End Page 225] defining an "all-purpose soundscape," which highlights neither the uniqueness of particular pieces of music and their performers nor the distinctive sound of particular auditoriums. Like the recording studio, the acoustical reality of the modern concert hall flattens our perception of diverse bodies of sound.
The unique listening environment of live chamber music, with its intimacy of space and performer, was conserved in America with the building of the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress in 1925. The Coolidge Auditorium evolved from a heightened awareness of sound in society, the philanthropic will for collective reform, and the progressive mechanization of modern American life. The marriage of all these elements influenced the auditorium's construction and acoustical design. The focus of listeners and the wider public, however, soon shifted to the futuristic sound of radio transmission. This gave rise to the creation of new types of concert halls such as Radio City Music Hall, which privileged predictable electroacoustical recording over the spatial particularities of hall construction. The legacy of recorded music continues to influence concert hall design and listener expectations of how music should sound regardless of the unique particulars that define an acoustic space. And, as we have seen, aerial sound transmission soon outperformed the seemingly progressive agenda of music reform in America and the medical critique of noise in the early twentieth century.
Mark A. Pottinger is associate professor of musicology and chair of the Department of Music and Theater at Manhattan College, where he initiated a new major in sound studies, an area of research that is at the intersection of musicology, acoustics, audio technology, and performance studies. He is the author of a number of publications on the music and cultural life of nineteenth-century Europe and the contemporary listening environment. Winner of the prestigious Berlin Prize in 2017, he began his study of concert hall acoustics while a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where he became increasingly interested in the politics of live music listening in the United States and in Germany.
