Word: scharoun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Symphony audiences have traditionally had to face the music from the loud end of the horn; most concert halls put the orchestra on a stage and send the sound through a proscenium arch. German Architect Hans Scharoun, 70, the cigar-puffing, beret-topped president of West Berlin's Academy of Arts, believes that this is thoughtless imitation of the theater or the opera. He had observed that listeners at jamfests naturally circled around the musicians, and wanted to test his idea that "the natural location of music, spatially and optically, is in the center of a music hall...
There are 136 pyramidal ceiling reflectors for sound, but no one is eager to tinker with them. At its opening, Scharoun's new hall seemed acoustically excellent as Von Karajan filled its angular spaces with squiggles of sound from softest pianissimo to heftiest fortissimo, leading his firstchair men through a delicate movement of a Haydn string quartet and then the full orchestra through Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Critics breathed sighs of relief over the splendid sound-function, it seemed, had not been betrayed by revolutionary form...