Boston Symphony Research Articles

Using individually equalized playback of binaural recordings from an electronic orchestra to determine the effects of early reflections on proximity, localization, and loudness

Reflections in the first 50 ms are often assumed to enhance sound quality, but data supporting the assumption are lacking. We need to know when reflections are beneficial, and when they are not. Work by Lokki et al. may help to answer this question, but we have developed a binaural recording and playback technique that yields as good or better results. The key is individual equalization from the microphone to the eardrum of a listener. We have developed a quick and non-invasive method of headphone equalization that produces accurate timbre and frontal localization without head-tracking. This enables binaural impulse responses from a number of instrument positions in real halls to be manipulated by adding or deleting individual reflections and then evaluated with blind listening tests. Data from Boston Symphony show that early lateral reflections in the front of the hall are typically inaudible, but early medial and lateral reflections in the rear of the hall can reduce or eliminate proximity, clarity, impact, envelopment, and the ability to localize individual instruments. Deleting one or two of the earliest and strongest reflections improves all of those perceptions with no effect on loudness.

Reverberation theory obscures real physics in concert halls

Wallace Sabine posited sound in a room to be a uniform field, in equilibrium, varying but slowly with respect to time required to traverse the space: the “reverberant” field. It easy to demonstrate that such is not so, especially in rooms like occupied concert halls. But then, Sabine designed the Boston Symphony Hall, a paradigm of acoustic excellence. If that hall be regarded as a physics experiment, never has it been replicated by Sabine’s followers, even with extensive emendations to his concept of reverberation. The real physics of concert halls involves non-equilibrium manifestation of physical acoustics with respect to bounding surfaces, particularly proximity effects on stage and resonant scattering about the audience.

Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives (review)

IntroductionThe Boston Symphony Orchestra Ar - chives website currently contains digital scans of concert programs from 1881 to 2011, and over 2,000 photographic images. This online presentation, which uses OCLC's CONTENTdm platform,1 documents the activities of the Boston Sym phony Orchestra (BSO) as well as the Boston Sym - phony Chamber Players, the Boston Pops and Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestras, the Tanglewood Festival, and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. Although the orchestra's physical archival collection also includes correspondence, press clippings, posters, musical instruments, and recordings, these formats are not represented online on this site at this time. However, the website does state that expansion of its digital collection is in process,2 and some of those materials are represented on the orchestra's main web site.3Embedded within this site is a separate performance history search interface called HENRY (named after the orchestra's founder, Henry Lee Higginson), which allows users to search information on performances from 21 October 1881, through the current season. Its database is updated on a monthly basis. The development of HENRY was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.NavigationIt is worth noting that the BSO Archives site's URL is http://collections.bso.org, but HENRY has a separate URL, http://archives .bso.org. These address names have the potential to confuse users.On the main page of the BSO Archives section (http://collections.bso.org), there are links to the two collections-Images and Program Books-with a brief description and a scrollable thumbnail image gallery for both. Above these are a search box with an option for Advanced Search, links to the About page, HENRY, and Browse All.Clicking on the respective collection link brings up a landing page that, like the main page, features a rotating gallery of thumbnails and a description of the collection's contents, and in addition presents a section of suggested topics to browse. On the right side of the page is a static grid of recently digitized items, and a handy RSS link so that users can be notified when new items are added to the collection.The Browse All link brings the user to a table of thumbnails, but its main function is as a search page for the collections, which will be discussed below. It is easier to browse and get a better sense of what is available through the suggested topics list.One suggested link on the Program Books page is the program for the first BSO concert, held on 22 October 1881.4 The item can be viewed as multiple PDF files with an Adobe Acrobat plug-in. There is also a tab to view as text, which is an unedited Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text file. Next to this tab is a text search box. As OCR text files often have some scanning errors, executing a word search within the program page can be hit or miss. The document scans, however, are of excellent quality, and can be zoomed in or out using Adobe's tools.Each page of the program is its own PDF file, and thumbnails of each file is in a vertical tray on the right side of the Web page. A Content tab is also located at the top of the tray, which simply supplies links to each PDF file as text, rather than as thumbnail images. The link names are not descriptive, however; each file is only known as seq. 1, seq. 2, and so forth.Options are available to view the program book in page-flip mode and with the PDF and text files presented side by side for comparison. There are also buttons for downloading the entire program book (as a multi-page PDF), and printing either the current page or the entire book. A page or book can be saved to a Favorites folder by clicking on Save Page or Save to Favorites, respectively. The Reference URL link generates permalinks and HTML to copy and paste, and clicking on Share pulls up functionality from the Add This tool, allowing the user to share the item through an array of social media. …

Concert hall design: Some considerations.

Briefly discussed is the change in architectural design of concert halls from early in the 20th century to the present time. The growth of sound in a concert hall is reviewed with emphasis on hearing the direct sound clearly. Next comes the desirability of hearing early lateral reflections, that is, those from side walls. The strength (loudness) of the orchestral sound follows with emphasis on the degree of seat upholstering and the cubic volume of the hall. It is shown that in a large number of successful concert halls, the midfrequency, fully occupied, reverberation time (RT) and the ratios of the volume to the total surface areas are nearly the same even though the volume per seat varies over a wide range. The bass index for a number of halls is discussed in relation to the weight of side walls and added sound absorbing materials. The need for surface irregularities is emphasized. Finally, maximum and minimum seating capacities for shoebox-shaped, surround-shaped, and fan-shaped concert halls are suggested.Brief History (Beranek, 2004)The highest-rated halls acoustically were built before 1901. They are Grosser Musikvereinssaal in Vienna, Austria; Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts; and Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. All three are shoebox in shape and have lightly upholstered seats. To listeners, the sound in them is beautiful, almost luxurious, because of the rich reverberation, the quantity and quality of early reflections that give breadth to the music, the balance of tone among the orchestral sections, and the loudness (sound strength) that brings listeners to their feet following a fortissimo conclusion. Also, the sound is nearly uniform in about 90% of the seating areas and the players clearly hear each other, certainly in Boston and Vienna.Since the advent of the Berlin Philharmonie Hall in 1963, architects and owners have often placed beauty and novelty of architecture above acoustics. In Berlin, Germany, nearly half of the audience is seated behind and to the sides of the stage. That hall has been a success even though the orchestral balance differs considerably from one seat location to another because the sounds of the various instruments are radiated in different directions and because the listener is much closer to one part of the orchestra than to others. Nevertheless, many listeners enjoy being to the rear or sides of the orchestra so they can see the gestures and facial expressions of the conductor. Some say that at these locations they feel as though they were part of the performing group. A negative factor is that with the piano lid up, listeners seated at the stage rear hear only the low string notes. This is also true for soprano voices, where the high tones are only projected forward.Clarity of the Direct SoundWhen a musical note is suddenly sounded on the stage, say by a violin, the sound radiates outward from the instrument and then strikes walls, ceiling, and audience. Each surface then reflects a sound wave that subsequently bounces around the room from one surface to another. At a listening position in Boston Symphony Hall located just off the center line and two thirds the distance from the stage to the main-floor rear wall, that is, 26 m (85 ft) from the stage, the rise in the energy density following the arrival of the first seven strongest reflections at a central seat is shown by the heavy line in Figure 1. The zero point on the bottom scale is the time at which the direct sound arrives. The direct sound of a played note will usually continue throughout the 70-ms span that follows. The dashed curve D(t) shows the rise in energy density that would occur if the equivalent energy were to be fed gradually into the hall instead of arriving in separated reflections.The first reflection is from the lowest sidewalls and the undersurfaces of the first balconies. The second is from the undersurfaces of the second balconies and their fronts. The third is from the back of the stage. …

The Search for Excellence in Auditorium Acoustics

The scientific approach to room acoustics is now well over a hundred years old. Yet two concert halls from the nineteenth century (the Musikvereinssaal, Vienna of 1870 and the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam of 1888) are still viewed as among the best in the world, as is the first product of a scientific approach (Boston Symphony Hall, Massachusetts of 1900). Has a century of research and building new auditoria failed to make any progress? One is reminded of the situation with violins, modern violin makers fight to compete with the reputation of Stradivarius’ violins built 300 years ago. With auditorium acoustics, the search has been long, with bursts of activity at certain times often in response to new experimental techniques. Considerable progress has been made but the search is not over. This article hopes to elaborate on the challenges involved.

A DAY IN A GREAT TRADITION

1 2 4 Y A D A Y I N A G R E A T T R A D I T I O N A N N B E A T T I E We’re the people who are gossiped about. We live in the yellow house with the pink bougainvillea by the cemetery, and every day the Conch Train drives by with a recording telling the tourists that one of the tombstones says, ‘‘I told you I was sick.’’ We’re also gossiped about because we’re sick, though we’re going to live through it, both of us, and I’m optimistic that everybody isn’t going to remain as interested in the two of us as they are today. There’s a new mailman on the route, and he doesn’t even say hello, let alone try out a nervous joke. Also, there’s been a so-called Cemetery Burglar who’s captured the headlines repeatedly in the local paper. He/she/the transgendered robber, whatever this person is – let’s say he – has taken money out of people’s billfolds at night and replaced the billfolds in the pockets from which they were taken, nothing else disturbed. He’s taken computers (of course) and a famous photographer’s favorite camera, an old Leica. People still resist locking their doors, this being Key West. They install motion detectors, cameras, floodlights – but they’ll be damned if they’ll lock their doors. It’s not that kind of place, and giving up, giving in, might bring the whole island bad jujus. Yesterday a doctor’s prescription-drug pad was taken, though his 1 2 5 R money clip remained in his backpack, untouched. Maybe the guy didn’t know it was there, on the bottom. So the burglar has been a good distraction, and many months have passed since we first came to a lot of people’s attention, and right now the Olympics are on, and before that of course there was the Superbowl. That sort of thing also gives people something to talk about. When I used the word sick before, it was a word chosen for convenience. I did have surgery for a bleeding ulcer that wouldn’t heal and, almost simultaneously, while still recovering, a root canal , but that isn’t why people talk about me or my husband. Some think my husband is ‘‘sick’’ because he was approved for transgender surgery. That wouldn’t be unheard-of here, but my husband is quite famous. Before he got rheumatoid arthritis, he played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Seiji Ozawa is a frequent house guest, as YoYo Ma has been, and as Justin Bieber will never be, though Madonna once came to visit during the time she was having a relationship with her personal trainer Carlos Leon and they wanted to get out of New York for a long winter weekend. She was delightful, and he was simply stunning. We would not have met them if not for being invited to the home of a famous chef who had a beautiful house near the Casa Marina, but we were invited, and because Madonna was interested in some LPs my husband had, she and Carlos stopped by the next day. The day after that, they were gracious enough to invite us to their private rental condo for champagne at sunset. Carlos had found a way to make a digital copy of my husband’s jazz records that interested her, and he also gave us copies, in case anyone asked in the future. At that point, my husband had longer hair, with a little help from a rug that covered his small but still noticeable bald patch. He also dressed in what you might call a unisex way. I think he was wearing a sarong and a tank shirt. I was wearing a drainage bag under one of his white shirts and low-cut jeans that didn’t a√ect my surgical site. Nobody would have known I had the drainage bag attached around my middle, I don’t think. We both had on flip-flops, though my husband’s were a little fancier...

RECORDINGS IN REVIEW: COLIN DAVIS

1 6 9 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R Colin Davis, who died on 14 April 2013 at age eighty-five, was one of a generation of orchestra directors born between 1924 and 1936 whose glory years fell after the passing of the great ones: Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini, Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Bruno Walter, Thomas Beecham. The younger group’s early prominence overlapped that of their immediate predecessors, such as Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Georg Solti. And they are now beginning to pass. Lorin Maazel and Claudio Abbado, born in 1930 and 1933, respectively, both died in 2014. Charles Mackerras (b. 1925), Klaus Tennstedt (b. 1926), Gustav Leonhardt (b. 1929), and Carlos Kleiber (b. 1933) predeceased them. So the questions of their legacy and their work’s quality now come to the fore. All of our group left a body of recorded performances, both live and studio-created, in far better sound than was given their predecessors . Davis’s first recordings were in stereo in 1959, and eventually he recorded digitally on both LP and CD. He made surroundsound recordings in the ill-fated Quadrophonic LP format, several of which have been remastered on CD by Pentatone, and in the Super Audio CD format, mostly in five-channel surround sound. 1 7 0 F A U L K N E R Y There are also pirated and in-house recordings, primarily of his operatic work. So it is relatively easy to hear what Davis’s performances sounded like at all periods of his career. Much the same is true for the rest of the group, if not in quite this variety of formats. Davis’s career spanned work with orchestras and opera houses in England, the United States, and Germany. He came to prominence in October 1959 when he conducted a London public performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni with the cast of Carlo Maria Giulini’s famed EMI recording. Giulini had replaced Otto Klemperer on short notice but was unable to perform the concert, allowing Davis to become an overnight star. In 1959 he also first conducted the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). Then in 1960 he suddenly replaced Sir Thomas Beecham in Mozart’s Die Zauber flöte at Glyndebourne. His justified reputation as an important Mozartean was now established, and he was much in demand. As a young man, Davis was both ambitious and intolerant of those less dedicated to music than himself, especially orchestral musicians. From 1961 to 1965 he was director of the Sadler’s Wells opera company, but his goal was to lead the LSO. The LSO players were not impressed. In 1964 they passed over him and selected István Kertész as their principal conductor. As a rather nice consolation prize William Glock, controller of music for the BBC, soon o√ered Davis the BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBCSO) and the summer season of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts. This gave Davis resources unavailable to most of his peers to conduct large-scale works, such as Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 and Hector Berlioz’s Requiem and Te Deum. Meanwhile, Davis came to America, where in 1967 he conducted Tyrone Guthrie’s stunning new production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes as part of Rudolf Bing’s gala opening season at the new Metropolitan Opera House. In 1969 he would return to the house with Grimes and add Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; in 1972 he conducted Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande there. This and his London accomplishments brought him to the attention of both the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), both of which were seeking conductors. Consequently, in October 1968 Davis gave four series of concerts with the Philharmonic , opening with an all-Berlioz evening. As with the LSO, the New York players balked, delivering only average playing until R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W 1 7 1 R the last item...

Synchronous Sympathy at the Symphony

This study compared the emotional intensities of a conductor and audience during a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The affective state of the conductor was estimated unobtrusively with a wearable electrocardiogram, and audience participants self-reported their affective states with manual slider boxes. Results indicated that: 1) the conductor’s heart rate variations were temporally aligned with structural patterns in the musical scores; and 2) these variations strongly correlated with the average emotional intensity measurement of the audience. Four consecutive musical selections yielded significant positive correlations (p < .001; r = .86, .84, .48, .61), demonstrating a temporally related emotional intensity shared between the conductor and audience during the performance. Although a causal relationship was not determined, some evidence supported induction as the mechanism of emotional communication. These results suggest possible methods for better understanding the affective experiences of conductors, the reactions of listeners to various stimuli, and the interactions between audiences and musicians during concerts.

Legendary Conductors of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (review)

Legendary Conductors of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 5 vols. DVD. Disc 1: Charles Munch. Maurice Ravel, Ma Mere l'Oye (Suite), (February, 1958); Claude Debussy, Iberia (October, 1961), La Mer (October, 1958). Disc 2: Erich Leinsdorf. Franz Schubert, Symphony No. 9 in C Major (March, 1963); Robert Schumann, Symphony No. 4 in D minor (November, 1962); Richard Wagner, Parsifal - Good Friday Music ( January, 1964). Disc 3: Erich Leinsdorf. Ludwig van Beethoven, Egmont Overture (April, 1969); Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5 in E minor (April, 1969); Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Serenade No. 9 in D major ( January, 1963). Disc 4: William Steinberg. Anton Bruckner, Symphony No. 8 in C minor ( January, 1962). Disc 5: William Steinberg. Franz Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 55 in E flat major (October, 1969); Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 7 in A major (October, 1970) and Symphony No. 8 in F major ( January, 1962). [London]: ICA Classics, 2013 ICAB 5115. $99.99.This five DVD set focuses on the three conductors of the Boston Symphony Or - che stras during the 1960's - Charles Munch (1949-1962), Erich Leinsdorf (1962-1969), and William Steinberg (1969-1972, although two selections from a concert he guest conducted in 1962 are included). These broadcasts are important not only in that they allow comparison of the styles of three very different conductors, but also because of the pioneering work of WGBH in the field of televised concerts.These groundbreaking tapes were a part of the semi-regular broadcasts of the BSO that began in 1955 and continued through the 1970's at the rate of about one every other month. ICA has begun a program of bringing out a significant number of these from the pre-Seiji Ozawa years (during which the shows were called Evening at Symphony) featuring the regular conductors as well as guests such as Pierre Mon - teux and Claus Tennstedt. To those who are historically inclined, the opportunity of seeing some of the legendary but somewhat forgotten players of that era is reason enough to own this set. Just among the winds, clarinetists Gino Cioffiand Manny Valerio, trumpeter Roger Voisin, horn player James Stagliano and English horn player Louis Speyer (whose career stretched back to the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913) were joined by the next generation including Ralph Gomberg on oboe, bassoonist Sherm Walt and flautist Doriot Anthony Dwyer. Dwyer's case is particularly interesting - as the first woman to occupy a first chair in a major American symphony, she represents a major change in the culture in the industry, although it is curious to see that there were other women performing on these broadcasts on cello and horn - one wonders who they were and how they came to be engaged as substitutes.The first of these concerts in 1955 was televised from the Kresge Auditorium at M.I.T., but by the time of these performances recording had moved to Harvard's Sanders Theatre where it remained until 1963 when Symphony Hall was finally equipped with permanent broadcast facilities. The technical evolution of these concerts from the earliest to the latest in this set is remarkable, although perhaps the biggest surprise is that the quality of the direction and camera work was so high to begin with. Tapes of sports events from this period, for example, are extremely primitive looking today with their inflexible and distant camera work not to mention the lack of continuity. These broadcasts were directed beautifully, with closeups, section features and panning shots that demonstrate true knowledge of the music on the part of the directors (David M. Davis in the earlier years and William Cosel later). Even the lack of color in all but the last selections does not detract from the highly polished appearance. Occasionally some extra musical moments intrude - the fire engine passing by between movements of Debussy's Iberia, the re-tuning between movements of the Schubert Symphony no. 9, etc.The three conductors profiled in this collection all came to the BSO with different agendas and personalities and each was fairly conservative in his programming. …

My Personal Tribute to Dr. Mary Ellen Avery

Because my husband was planning to pursue a fellowship in adolescent medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, I was set to interview there in July of 1974 for a third year of pediatric training. I was just starting my second year of pediatrics in Los Angeles and had been focusing more on the mechanics of completing pediatric training than on choosing a fellowship. Dr. Mary Ellen Avery had just become Children’s Physician-in-Chief. In fact, she was still finding her way about the place, both physically and professionally. It was my second interview, the first resulting in less than positive news about the possibility of my obtaining a senior pediatric residency for the coming year. She did not let me be discouraged, made it known that she would welcome me there, and suggested I could pursue the start of a fellowship before completing my full pediatric training. What type of fellowship? I certainly hadn’t spent much time contemplating this. How about neonatology, she suggested, and immediately arranged for me to see Dr. Bill Taeusch, newly appointed Neonatology Division Director. So serendipity, and more importantly, Dr. Mel Avery are responsible for my career in neonatology: I joined the first official JPN fellows’ group that started training in July of 1975. Dr. Avery was a pioneering researcher in the field of neonatology and a great research motivator as well. She had overseen a recent publication associating an increased risk of hyaline membrane disease in infants of diabetic mothers (1). She “shepherded” me into examining this further, thus leading me both to the delivery room to collect infants’ cord blood for C-peptide measurements (2) and into the animal lab with alloxan-diabetic pregnant rabbits and the lung development of their offspring (3–7). I remember her delight when I presented my findings at research meetings and had my first peer-reviewed publications in the New England Journal of Medicine (2) and Journal of Applied Physiology (3). In fact, when I moved on to University of Miami, I continued the line of research looking at lung development in the animal model of the IDM, this time examining pulmonary antioxidant enzyme development in offspring of streptozotocin-treated rats (8). She opened her heart to me not just professionally but socially and personally as well. I remember a cozy Thanksgiving evening when just she, my husband, and I sat by the fire in her Wellesley condo and dined on delicious leftovers from the day. She hosted the two of us to a very special Boston evening: a “double date” with Dr. Fred Rosen for dinner at the Harvard Club and then to hear the Boston Symphony. When I was about to have my first child, she was glowing when I came to her with the news. She wanted to make sure I would be nursing him which of course I was. When he was born, she presented us with a beautifully framed print of a mother rabbit and her pups (how appropriate!) which we hung above his changing table. And once I had successfully established nursing and returned to work, she invited me to write an article with her on the benefits of breast feeding for the Harvard Medical School Health Letter (9). My respect and admiration for Dr. Mary Ellen Avery are without bounds. There is no doubt that Mel brought me into neonatology, fostered my career, and opened her intellect and heart to me many years ago. For this I am eternally grateful.

Patriotism, Art, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in World War I: A New Look at the Karl Muck Episode

While scholars have tended to position overtly patriotic works firmly on the lower registers of American cultural hierarchies, the debates surrounding German conductor Karl Muck’s reluctance to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra during World War I serve as a lens into the complex, shifting cultural position that patriotic music actually occupies. Competing opinions on whether Muck should conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner” placed patriotism alternately below, above, and on the same hierarchical plane as art. Moreover, these debates activated a preexisting discourse on the song’s difficulty level, allowing “The Star-Spangled Banner” to operate simultaneously as a popular work to be sung by all Americans and a sophisticated composition to be studied by skilled performers.

Mahler on DVD: An Overview of Art Films, Documentaries, and Concert Videos

Several recent releases on DVD concern- ing Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) call atten- tion to the ways this medium has in dissem- inating his music not only to the current audiences, but also to future audiences who will benefit from the perspectives found in recent documentaries and various recorded performances. In fact, such an effect is not unique to DVDs, but forms a continuum with the ways in which recorded sound is a longstanding part of Mahler's legacy. The composer's strong presence in early twenty- first century culture relies in many ways on the film and broadcasting culture of the twentieth century, the renaissance of inter- est in Mahler occurred at the centenary of his birth.While the renewed enthusiasm for Mahler in the mid-twentieth century bene- fits from the composer's champions at the podium, interpreters like Leonard Bern- stein brought the music to audiences be- yond those in attendance through telecasts that took Mahler's name to viewers who might not attend live concerts. Bernstein was not alone in this regard, since other conductors were also known for their broadcasts. For example, the televised per- formances of the Boston Symphony Orches- tra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf include Mahler's First Symphony in a concert from 1963, which is preserved on DVD.1 Several years later the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony received national attention when Bernstein conducted it at the funeral of the assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy on 8 June 1968.2Events like these brought Mahler's music to various audiences in their homes, with- out involving the cost of concert tickets to hear these works. Beyond such televised im- ages, film became a vehicle for presenting the composer's life and works through mo- tion pictures, documentaries, and concert DVDs. If postmodern culture is familiar with Mahler, it is important to discern the ways in which film popularized the music by making the composer's works accessible outside the concert hall. While Mahler re- ception has been documented in various ways,3 the focus is often on the critical liter- ature. Yet it is important to emphasize the ways in which film has served in Mahler's legacy as the medium for conveying some images of the composer to a large interna- tional audience and also documenting per- formances for future generations. These ef- forts also gave Mahler's work a sense of currency, as his art remains part of the mu- sic culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and endures on DVD.Biography and BiopicsWhile references to Mahler occur in vari- ous art films of the twentieth century,4 two works deal directly with the composer: Ken Russell's 1974 retelling of Mahler's life in the eponymously titled motion picture Mahler; and Lucchino Visconti's adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice (1971).5 While the latter putatively serves as a film of the famous story, the director brought Mahler into the main part of the story through the transformation of Gustav Aschenbach from an author to a composer whose fictional life resembles in some ways that of Gustav Mahler. Beyond the use of the same given name Gustav, the connec- tion between Aschenbach and Mahler is not unique to Visconti, but part of Mann's intention to memorialize the composer in the description of Aschenbach's face.6 In his film Visconti made Aschenbach a com- poser, who resembles Mahler. Visconti also supported the association with music, by using Mahler's Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony throughout the film. The promi- nence of the latter made Mahler's music popular in film audiences, who might not have encountered the piece in motion pic- tures or even link it to Mann's novella. In a film which reached an international audi- ence, the use of both Mahler as a surrogate for Mann's protagonist, with the music un- derscoring this characterization, Visconti 4 5 6 gave prominence to the composer whose legacy was then being rediscovered, and made Mahler's name known to audiences beyond concertgoers. …

Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin de Siècle by Joseph Horowitz (review)

Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America's Fin de Siecle. By Joseph Horowitz. Berkeley: University of Cali - fornia Press, 2012. [xv, 263 p. ISBN 9780520267442. $39.95.] Illustrations, index.Moral Fire is book with mission. Like four individuals who comprise its portraits, Joseph Horowitz makes powerful case for music as valuable intellectual and cultural pursuit. His goal is to change our perspective on period that Mark Twain satirically labeled Gilded Age. For Horowitz, decades between Civil War and 1900 are characterized neither by self-absorbed wealthy nor proponents of genteel tradition (p. 6). On contrary, era burned with passion of civic idealism and melioristic vision. Individuals such as Henry Lee Higginson, founder of Boston Symphony Orches - tra (BSO); Laura Langford, creator of Brooklyn's Seidl Society; critic Henry Krehbiel; and composer Charles Ives epitomize this zeal. Their activities show the moral passion animating classical music at turn of twentieth century (p. 8).The origins of this project can be found in Horowitz's earlier studies, Wagner Nights (1994) and Classical Music in America: A History (2005), in which Higginson, Lang - ford, Krehbiel, and Ives made cameo appearances. As Moral Fire elaborates, their activities overlap in numerous ways, but especially through Anton Seidl and Antonin Dvorak, whose American visit spurred vigorous debate about formation of national school of composition. Another recurring theme is 1893 Columbian Exposition, which was visited by Dvorak, Krehbiel and Ives. Boston's musical horizon is repeatedly compared to New York's and found wanting by numerous figures, from critic J. S. Dwight, who poisonously personifies snobbish discomfort (p. 233) to inbred composers' community (p. 295) around John Knowles Paine.As an alternative to term Gilded Age, Horowitz calls years circa 1900 United States' de siecle. The latter term typically describes a dynamic moment in European culture . . . freighted with decadence that lasted from about 1880 to 1914 (p. 11). Just as Wagner Nights described specifically American response to Wagner's operas, Moral Fire posits distinctively American response to modernity at century's turn. What was shared across Atlantic was pursuit of intense experience. The difference is that Americans cloaked this desire in garb of moral improvement. Higginson, Kreh - biel, Langford, and Ives were all agents of upliftfor whom great art seemed . . . inherently ennobling (p. 226). It would be mistake, however, to characterize their actions as embrace of tradition. On contrary, their activities are signposts of an intense high culture in vigorous transition (p. 12). They were all fulcrum figures living in a moment in flux, American fin de siecle (p. 227).Horowitz's portrait of Higginson is an inspiring sketch of man who balanced profound musical interests with lucrative career in finance. The young Higginson dropped out of Harvard but spent several years studying music in Vienna. He returned to Boston just as Civil War began, and he served Union cause heroically. Having decided against musical career, he joined his family's modest firm and helped it become one of Boston's most prominent investment banks.In 1881, Higginson announced his intention to establish symphony orchestra offering twenty concerts each season. Its players would earn full-time salaries, relieving them of need to work for theaters and dances. Ticket prices were kept low, reviving Germania Musical Society's policies of 1850s. Anticipating that new organization was unlikely to survive through ticket sales, Higginson personally guaranteed payroll. He chose George Henschel and then Wilhelm Gericke as conductors and advised them closely on repertory. Although Higginson was sometimes seen as exercising an artistic dictatorship (p. …

Boston: Saariaho's ‘Circle Map’

When the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra wanted to commission Kaija Saariaho for a work to perform at the Westergasfabriek Gashoulder, a gasholder building restored as a performance space, it did so through a consortium including the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony. The Boston Symphony, conducted by Juanjo Mena, gave the first American performance of the work, entitled Circle Map, in Symphony Hall in November.

Scarf

Scarf Rita Dove (bio) Whoever claims beauty lies in the eye of the beholder has forgotten the music silk makes as it settles across a slim, bared neck: skin never touched so gently except by a child or a lover’s breath. [End Page 511] Rita Dove Rita Dove is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011, paperback edition due out in the fall of 2013). The most recent of her nine poetry collections are Sonata Mulattica (2009), American Smooth (2004), and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). A book of short stories, Fifth Sunday, was published in 1985 in the Callaloo Fiction Series. Her novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992) was widely acclaimed as a coming of age tale, and her drama The Darker Face of the Earth was produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and the Royal National Theatre in London, among many other venues. In 1998 the Boston Symphony debuted her song cycle “Seven for Luck” with music by John Williams, under the composer’s baton. United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove received the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama, making her the only poet ever honored with both awards. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

A tribute to Norman L. Letvin (1949–2012)

A tribute to Norman L. Letvin (1949–2012)

Concert hall acoustics

Three of the world's famous concert halls, Boston's Symphony Hall, Vienna's Grosser Musikvereinssaal and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, were built before 1901, are rectangular in shape, and are known to have good acoustics. Then came the overriding postulate of Architect Hans Sharoun, “Music in the Center”, which resulted in the Philharmonie Hall in Berlin, built in 1963. This type of hall, now called Surround Shape because the audience sits on all sides of the stage, has since been adopted elsewhere. For very large audiences, a fan-shaped hall, the Koussevitzky Tanglewood Music Shed seating 5000, was erected in 1940, underwent major acoustical changes in 1959, and has become the model for summer venues. An entirely different design is the Town Hall in Christchurch, New Zealand (opened in 1972), sometimes called the “Lateral-directed reflection sequence (LDRS) type,” which emphases lateral reflections that arrive early after the direct sound and that result in reduced energy in the reverberant sound. These types are discussed along with pertinent physical data. In addition to the effects of acoustics on the orchestral sound, factors in selecting a shape are the number of seats, the distance of the farthest seats from the stage, and who are likely to purchase tickets.

Making Connections: Some Thoughts about Milton Babbitt and His Music

- 378 Making Connections Some Thoughts about Milton Babbitt and His Music Andrew Mead The last time I saw Milton was at the premiere of Concerti for Orchestra at Boston Symphony Hall in 2004. I had picked up Bob Morris in Rochester, and we had driven into Boston for the concert. The performance had been riveting; one of America’s finest orchestras under James Levine had given the work loving attention, and the players’ affection for the composer during his curtain call was undisguised. When Bob and I caught up with Babbitt at the end of the concert, he was surrounded by admirers and seemed happy and slightly dazed by the event. I remember he was startled to see us, and said something like, “Oh, the big guys are here.” The first time I saw Milton was nearly 30 years earlier, when he was a guest composer at SUNY Stony Brook. He gave a lecture, and that evening there was a performance of Reflections. I had been casting about for graduate schools, and that was the deciding moment for me. His lecture was, no surprise, a tour-de-force, but what hooked me deep was the music. While on a single hearing I couldn’t have begun to tell you what got to me, but I felt a connection with the work that made me want to hear more from the man who had made it. It is hard for me, given my age and background, to think of Babbitt as anything but at the center of things musical. When I first went to study with him, Perspectives of New Music had just published its famous double issue, 14/15, in celebration of his 60th birthday, which was packed with articles about his music and his ideas. In my undergraduate days he had been a figure who was both raised in admiration and waved as a warning flag depending on whom you talked to, and for someone who was interested in Schoenberg, as I had been since the ninth grade, he was the writer who would probably be able to tell you the most about twelve-tone music, if you could only decode his syntax. Around New York City in those years Babbitt was a regular fixture at concerts, and seemed to know everyone. Along with “My dear boy,” his most frequently heard phrase was “One of my oldest and dearest friends.” And he knew a vast amount of music. He seemed as comfortable talking about the Reger clarinet sonatas or Franz Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony as he was about Brahms’s music, and he could speak with knowledge about Krenek’s opera Karl V almost as readily as he could about Moses und Aron. And the stories were endless: Joel Krosnick some years ago told of studying the score of Dual on the subway, preparing for its premiere, when a hand appeared over his shoulder pointing to a passage and a readily recognizable voice said, “I think that’s a misprint.” A story going around Stony Brook about the same time Babbitt visited involved a graduate student, a singer who loved contemporary opera and who had been to an open rehearsal of the first production of the complete three-act Lulu at the Met. The student had not recognized the two older gentlemen sitting behind her, but had been annoyed by their complaints throughout – “that doesn’t sound right; you can’t - 379 Making Connections hear the vibraphone” and so forth. As the story went, the singer was incensed, saying, “If they don’t like modern music they shouldn’t have been there.” The punch line was that the two proved to be Babbitt and Elliott Carter. But for all this sense of centrality, and for all the acclaim he received in later years, it is important to remember in what extraordinary ways Babbitt was an outlier, and how his outlier status helped inform his development as a composer and a thinker about music. I was reminded of this a little over a decade ago when I participated in a conference in Belgium on the origins of serialism. As we tend to tell the history on this side of the...

Making Connections: Some Thoughts about Milton Babbitt and His Music

- 378 Making Connections Some Thoughts about Milton Babbitt and His Music Andrew Mead The last time I saw Milton was at the premiere of Concerti for Orchestra at Boston Symphony Hall in 2004. I had picked up Bob Morris in Rochester, and we had driven into Boston for the concert. The performance had been riveting; one of America’s finest orchestras under James Levine had given the work loving attention, and the players’ affection for the composer during his curtain call was undisguised. When Bob and I caught up with Babbitt at the end of the concert, he was surrounded by admirers and seemed happy and slightly dazed by the event. I remember he was startled to see us, and said something like, “Oh, the big guys are here.” The first time I saw Milton was nearly 30 years earlier, when he was a guest composer at SUNY Stony Brook. He gave a lecture, and that evening there was a performance of Reflections. I had been casting about for graduate schools, and that was the deciding moment for me. His lecture was, no surprise, a tour-de-force, but what hooked me deep was the music. While on a single hearing I couldn’t have begun to tell you what got to me, but I felt a connection with the work that made me want to hear more from the man who had made it. It is hard for me, given my age and background, to think of Babbitt as anything but at the center of things musical. When I first went to study with him, Perspectives of New Music had just published its famous double issue, 14/15, in celebration of his 60th birthday, which was packed with articles about his music and his ideas. In my undergraduate days he had been a figure who was both raised in admiration and waved as a warning flag depending on whom you talked to, and for someone who was interested in Schoenberg, as I had been since the ninth grade, he was the writer who would probably be able to tell you the most about twelve-tone music, if you could only decode his syntax. Around New York City in those years Babbitt was a regular fixture at concerts, and seemed to know everyone. Along with “My dear boy,” his most frequently heard phrase was “One of my oldest and dearest friends.” And he knew a vast amount of music. He seemed as comfortable talking about the Reger clarinet sonatas or Franz Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony as he was about Brahms’s music, and he could speak with knowledge about Krenek’s opera Karl V almost as readily as he could about Moses und Aron. And the stories were endless: Joel Krosnick some years ago told of studying the score of Dual on the subway, preparing for its premiere, when a hand appeared over his shoulder pointing to a passage and a readily recognizable voice said, “I think that’s a misprint.” A story going around Stony Brook about the same time Babbitt visited involved a graduate student, a singer who loved contemporary opera and who had been to an open rehearsal of the first production of the complete three-act Lulu at the Met. The student had not recognized the two older gentlemen sitting behind her, but had been annoyed by their complaints throughout – “that doesn’t sound right; you can’t - 379 Making Connections hear the vibraphone” and so forth. As the story went, the singer was incensed, saying, “If they don’t like modern music they shouldn’t have been there.” The punch line was that the two proved to be Babbitt and Elliott Carter. But for all this sense of centrality, and for all the acclaim he received in later years, it is important to remember in what extraordinary ways Babbitt was an outlier, and how his outlier status helped inform his development as a composer and a thinker about music. I was reminded of this a little over a decade ago when I participated in a conference in Belgium on the origins of serialism. As we tend to tell the history on this side of the...