The wonders of space
Space: it actually isn’t the final frontier. One way of telling the story of how music developed over the aeons is how musical cultures evolved in a symbiotic dance with the spaces in which musicians performed and sang and congregated, everywhere from churches to opera houses, outdoor arenas to recording studios. From plainchant to vocal polyphony to pop albums, music never exists in a vacuum – literally, since in an absolute vacuum, or in the near vacuum of outer space, sound waves simply aren’t perceptible.
And particular species of sound waves are designed to function best in particular species of space – so much so that it’s hard to know which inspired which; the musical repertoires or the buildings made for their performance. There’s a reason that the sumptuous overlapping lyricism of Renaissance polyphony emerged in concert with the architecture of the time. Music by Palestrina, Tallis or Josquin reverberates in sympathy with the acoustics of churches from London to Rome, from Paris to Milan, so that you have the illusion the choristers are sounding out the whole space with their voices. They sing in an echo of the long reverberation time of the building, which means how long it takes for a sound to decay in a space: much longer in a cathedral than a drawing room.
That illusion is even stronger in the basilica of St Mark’s in Venice, where composers in the 16th and 17th centuries, from Willaert to the Gabrielis, wrote vocal and instrumental music designed to call across its cornucopia of domes and turn their pieces into spiritual-spatial consecrations of the building. And contemporary concert halls are increasingly designed with absolute clarity in mind, so that the ever-finer details of music of the 20th
From plainchant to vocal polyphony to pop, music never exists in a vacuum
and 21st centuries can be perceived as forensically as possible.
Churches and concert halls are man-made caves for listening. They are architectural echoes of ancient acoustic phenomena that archaeologists and acousticians have found in the geologically created caves that were the cradles of modern civilisation.
The places with the greatest density of cave paintings are also often the most resonant areas of the cave system: were these quasi-sacred places for celebration, in which our ancestors made their voices echo in the depths, creating uncanny auditory projections that must have seemed like sonic visions of the beyond?
And in today’s recording studios, musicians and producers can create spatial illusions with the wizardry of microphones and software. They can shrink the Royal Albert Hall down to the size of our kitchen speakers and they can expand a recording booth into a stadium, controlling dimensions of acoustic surreality that composers and musicians in the pre-recording era could only dream about. Maybe space is a final frontier, after all...
Stefan Soltész
Born 1949 Conductor
Stefan Soltész, who tragically died after collapsing on the podium during a performance of Richard Strauss’s The Silent Woman in Munich, could trace his professional lineage back to the composer himself. Soltész studied under fellow Hungarian Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Music Academy, and Swarowsky had learned with both Strauss and Felix Weingartner. Born in Nyíregyháza, Hungary, Soltész moved to the Austrian capital as a child and was surrounded by music – he learned piano and sang with the Vienna Boys Choir.
His early career saw him work at the city’s top venues, including as Kapellmeister at the Theater an der Wien and as repetiteur/conductor at the Vienna State Opera. He assisted both Böhm and Karajan at the Salzburg Festival and would go on to serve in major creative roles at opera houses in Belgium and Germany – he was artistic and music director at Essen’s Aalto-theatre from 1997-2013. Soltész made his US debut in a 1992 production of Verdi’s Otello in Washington DC.
Alice Harnoncourt
Born 1930 Violinist
Harnoncourt was the principal violinist of the period ensemble Concentus Musicus Wien for over 30 years. She had co-founded the trailblazing group with her husband, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, in the 1950s. They both studied Early Music with Josef Mertin in Vienna and had previously founded the Vienna Gamba Quartet. Born in Vienna, as Alice Hoffelner, she studied there, and in Paris and London, and is considered one of the pioneers of Historically Informed Performance practice.
Marie Leonhardt
Born 1928 Violinist
Marie Leonhardt encountered the Harnoncourts (see above) in Vienna and would go on to do her own pioneering Early Music work with her husband, the keyboard player and conductor Gustav Leonhardt, in Amsterdam. She was principal violin of The Leonhardt Consort, founded by Gustav in 1955. Born Marie Amsler in Lausanne, Switzerland, tshe studied in Geneva, Basel and London.
Also remembered…
British organist and composer Martin How (born 1931) will be perhaps most fondly remembered as the long-serving choirmaster at the Royal School of Church Music in London, where he inspired generations of young singers.
Jean-jacques Sempé (born 1932) was a French cartoonist who – besides illustrating more covers for the New Yorker that any other artist – often drew composers and many pieces inspired by music.