Since there's been a little bit of discussion of this on the list recently, I thought I'd point out this post by composer Galen H. Brown over at Sequenza 21, which deals with the acoustical problems that plague jazz and rhythmically active classical music in large, reverberant halls like Carnegie. Galen endorses modest amplification as a solution, and while I know many will find this controversial, I absolutely agree. The trouble, of course, is finding sound engineers that can handle the considerable challenges of handling live sound for an entire orchestra (or even a 17-piece big band). But such creatures do exist. Amplification itself is not the problem, and is in many cases the solution -- it's only BAD amplification that's a problem. Anyway, here's the post: How do you get decent sound in Carnegie Hall? There was an excellent article in the New York Times over the weekend about the difficulties of playing Jazz at Carnegie Hall -- actually, the difficulty in surmounting the acoustic problems that make said Jazz difficult to hear. "Opened in 1891, the hall has a large proscenium designed for unamplified music; the room's natural acoustics enable sound to travel both back and forth across the stage and outward into the audience. Today roughly a fifth of the performances at the hall each year have amplified instruments —often jazz shows put on either by JVC or other outside producers — and in those cases the hall's natural strengths become weaknesses." The basic problem is that many concert halls that were built to accomodate large 19th century orchestras playing big, lush music for large audiences, and so they have extremely reverberant acoustics -- which is great if you're playing Mahler, but not so good for other things. The Times article discusses how "Bands unaccustomed to only light amplification for their stage monitors — the small speakers at the lip of the stage facing the musicians — often turn them up beyond the room's capacity to handle the volume, creating sonic Similarly, bass and drums can be hard for the room to handle. Tones in that pitch range take longer to decay, and in a room that already has a lot of natural reverb, like Stern, low-end music can become a jumble. Likewise, the Unfortunately, much non-Romantic period classical music suffers in these halls too -- if the music has a lot of rhythmic detail that's intended to be audible, it can get completely swallowed up by the reverberations. I recall that New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall is widely regarded as first-rate, and for many kinds of music it is. But the performance of my piece Pulse-Point was undermined by the acoustics -- I had 16th note pulsation happening through almost the whole piece, and it turned into mush. Is there anything that composers can or should do about this problem? When writing for orchestra, bear in mind that the hall is an unavoidable part of the way an orchestra sounds. When writing chamber music, things that work great in small rooms will sound bad in orchestra concert halls, and probably vice versa, so it might be worth considering the venue for which you are composing. And composers might consider asking for amplification in large halls, and performers might consider playing with amplification even when the piece doesn't call for it. |
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