EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay, originally published in May, 1985 as “Unemployed to Self-Employed” in Art & Design magazine, contains some thoughtful observations about human nature and the place of the craftsman. We think these thoughts are important for musicians and orchestral leadership to consider. The push to adopt technology as our savior (or replacement, as in “the virtual orchestra”) is not a new one and in many ways we are, as a society, trying to recover from the effects of our unconsidered rush to modernize.
After spending the first three years of my adulthood in an office, I became convinced that this was not to be my kind of life. Liszt had been my first hero and by comparison, my achievements seemed bleak. I dreamt of performing some heroic deed and then laying down arms because, like so many, I thought that regular work would mean more pain than pleasure. If I was any good, where was my princely protector now?
Rather than continue to force upon people ideas which nobody save me was very keen about, I felt I owed myself an early retirement. I would do what I fancied; read a lot, paint a little, travel most of the time and, best of all, play my grand piano in a lofty room with a fine view of the Mediterranean Sea somewhere in the hills above Portofino. It didn’t happen exactly that way, for I soon found out that doing nothing but reading for more than six months at a time, albeit in elegant conditions, is a trial on one’s sanity, that traveling for pleasure is a nightmare, and that, given the state of the industrial world, early retirement is not unlike playing golf between lines of battle.
I had no qualms about staying out of the fight, but the general unpleasantness surrounding the violent action rendered my youthful dream quite absurd. The prospect of wasting the rest of my life in shallow pursuits held little excitement: it is true that anyone following his vocation, be he an artist, a statesman, or a craftsman, abhors the mere thought of retiring at whatever age.
“Retirement from active life” as a mass phenomenon is largely a product of industrial society and the “civilisation of leisure,” a fantasy of thinkers and the alienated industrial masses. Marx promised them heaven on earth; their toiling lot reduced step by step through systematic mechanisation. With the exception of Ruskin and Morris most thinkers of the industrial era turned out to be “industrial” thinkers. Refusing to consider industrialism as a mere ideology, they posited it as an irreversible fact of history and progress, as unquestionable as the laws of nature, as irrevocably useful as the discovery of the wheel. Confusing the ideas of work effort and toil, they assumed that all forms of production were in unresolvable conflict with the idea of pleasure and liberty. In that line of thought the realm of liberty – meaning leisure time – could easily be expanded at the expense of the realm of necessity – meaning production time. With industrialism promoting itself as the ultimate form of civilisation, this mere hypothesis has become an imperative justifying the relentless industrialisation of all extra-productive branches of life: culture, leisure, education, sports, etc.
Everyday experience, however, tells us that the sensation of pleasure is inseparably linked to the idea of effort.* Ironically, the demands of industrial man’s brain and muscle are generally higher on weekends and holidays than on workdays. For then and there he undertakes deeds which no employer could persuade him to suffer, which no union could dissuade him from sustaining. He indulges freely in the sheer expansion of effort. He deploys anachronistic artisan, moral, and gastronomic activities; he preferably works manually; he climbs mountains without shying hardship; he goes on marches to support lost causes; he fancies dancing, fighting, running, and fishing without apparent gain. Regardless of whatever ecologically, aesthetically, or morally doubtful job he may be doing to earn a living, he becomes, in his leisure time, a devout ecologist, a conservationist, a samurai, a pacifist, a christian, a poet, a craftsperson, socialist, an antifascist, and what not? Instead of earning a livelihood by following his vocation, he wastes energy and savings doing just that in his leisure time. Whenever he feels free to do what he thinks right, homo industrialis turns into his own negation.
Cultures of the past have only been great when they have educated people to become independent and earn a living by doing what they were good at. There are born hunters who are deaf to music, there are unsuccessful bankers who make excellent cooks. All great philosophers, teachers, and wise men have insisted on people choosing the profession which suits them best; they have even seen in the differing vocations a demonstration of divine providence, of nature’s harmony and miraculous equilibrium.
God creates men and women fit to shape their own destinies; to use His creation for their own advantage and pleasure. Thus humankind creates objects of stupendous beauty and celebrations of awesome majesty. Surely God would not give men and women five senses and a soul if He intended them to become occupational slaves; if He destined them to toil in office-blocks, to become fragments of machines and organisations, to live in rabbit hutches and travel in underground tubes – exchangeable, replaceable, and expendable.
All great cultures of the past used industrial processes to perform necessary and unpleasant deeds. Industrialism merely generalises these processes to the exclusion of higher, i.e., artisan and artistic, forms of work. I ask you, would it be any less cruel to let machines do work in which men take great pride and pleasure than to let them take care of our sexual and gastronomical functions?
It is no secret that the industrial system is going to employ fewer and fewer hands and brains. The chairman of ICI says that despite its increasing activities the company needs less and less manpower; that the purpose of such companies is not to employ people but to make profits. Why indeed should God’s proudest creatures be employed in doing dangerously boring jobs which machines are much better at? William Morris said as much a century ago.
All this, however, does not explain the central paradox of all industrial societies, namely, that the availability of handwork decreases and the cost of handwork rises in direct proportion to the number of unemployed hands. In the UK alone there are approximately seven million unemployed hands and half as many unemployed brains. I assume that the same numbers could be made redundant from overblown local and national bureaucracies without any loss of efficiency.
One of the most perennial subjects of high-minded Modernist blabla is to speculate about the forthcoming age of leisure, where happy folk are to work for two days at the most and spend the rest of the week and their luxuriant earnings on harmless nonsense.
Irrespective of political ideology, industrial systems produce, instead, a sizable nation within the nation, which is not only un- or ill-employed, but whose hands and brains have been permanently, and it seems irreversibly, put OUT OF WORK and OUT OF BUSINESS. Not only are they ill-educated and over-specialised, unfree and dependent – exactly what industries and unions have always wanted them to be – they are also, as a result, frustrated, helpless, angry, jealous, and vengeful. Like children they consider unions and industries, governments, and states to be Godfathers who should look after them from the cradle to the grave; Socialism and the Welfare State have promised them as much. To ask these people to become responsible therefore sounds like asking a drowning man to take up swimming lessons. It is painfully evident that the greatest achievement of the industrial system is not keeping such vast numbers away from the streets, away from rebellion and political mischief, but rather succeeding in holding so many hands and brains in docile submission; in anticipating and preventing them from ever entering serious competition with the industrial economy and ideology.
It would, however be short-sighted of any government to believe that the long term unemployed masses would be less dangerous politically than unionised masses, or that the problem could be solved by “new wunder-technologies.” The fact is that you cannot negotiate with the unemployed; their reactions are unpredictable. I find it more stimulating, therefore, to speculate on what these millions of hands and brains could be doing once they became apprenticed as competent and self-employed craftsmen, traders, and artists.
When Chartres built its cathedral it was a town of approximately 10,000 people; when Florence was the centre of the world it had no more than 60,000 citizens. In theory our unemployed nation could build, in the next ten years and with artisan methods, about 100 cities and 500 white cathedrals no less splendid than Chartres or Florence. It could plant forests where now there are poisoned wastelands, replace suburban sprawls with richly varied agricultural landscapes. It could build for all to see the true alternative to industrial mass society, to the bleakness of industrial parks and council housing, office compounds and comprehensive schools, university campuses and shopping precincts. Very soon it would down on us, on our dreary suburban masses, our silly entertainments, our crude sports and violent games, our depressing factories and offices.
The tragic effects of industrial modernism have not been limited to the spoiling of cities and landscapes; they have destroyed the educational, social, religious, and economic structures which had built, expressed, and maintained higher cultures. There exist, to this day, approximately 140 branches of traditional crafts, 40 of which have to do with architecture and building directly. A democracy dedicated to the regeneration of a dynamic and diversified economy will have to promote the reconstruction of self-employed and independent crafts with the same financial and legislative privileges that it now uses to lure industrial enterprise into action.
The immense success of the elite Akademie des Handwerks (Academy of Crafts) at Schloss Raesfeld in Westphalia shows the way. In this prestigious new institution the very last generation of masters has been brought from the remotest corners of the Federal Republic to teach the techniques and secrets of their crafts to “young” apprentices who must not only have the regular “master” title, but, in order to be accepted, also show evidence of ten years of self-employed professional and commercial success.
After only five years of intense activity, the Akademie has succeeded in training several thousand masters, thus laying the foundation for the reconstruction of traditional building crafts and apprenticeship.
I believe that, besides making long-due cuts, a visionary government has to promote at the highest level the establishment of such leading institutions. As HRH the Prince of Wales recently pointed out, small, efficient, and independent crafts and trades should not be located in isolated industrial zones but in the very midst of cities and villages. That is where they are needed, that is where they can offer their services most effectively. All this demands nothing less than the complete lifting of mono-functional and suburban zoning codes.
After the well-intentioned revival of the central city, after years of urban over-expansion and schematisation, a radical contraction of the cities and a parallel reconstruction of non-industrial agriculture has: 1, to be envisaged; 2, to be legislated; 3, to be promoted; and 4, to be effected. Only such a project truly transcends the accepted political and ideological divergences; positing organic growth against mechanical over-expansion; putting quality into competition with quantity. It is now a matter of ecological and cultural life or death. It may well be the only way to break the deadlock which paralyses and traumatises industrial man and society.
Craftsmen are needed everywhere all the time, and where there are great artisans, artists will inevitably prosper. It will be good for the arts, it will be good for the economy, and it will be good for democracy.
Endnote
* This is one of Hannah Arendt’s main themes in The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958).
Just because the Powell & Moya site is available doesn’t mean it’s the right place for a concert hall
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is reprinted here with the generous permission of Building Design, where it first appeared.
The idea of a new concert hall for the London Symphony Orchestra and other classical music producers has gained currency in the last six months, after its new conductor Simon Rattle raised it as part of his discussions about moving back to London. The imperfections of Barbican Hall as an acoustic venue seem to be widely agreed and, after some time, Boris Johnson has become a supporter of the idea. The government has agreed to fund a business case for the new venue and there is to be a favourite site.
Official opinion has coalesced around placing the concert hall into the site vacated by the Museum of London’s planned move to Smithfield’s General Market. In an urban cavity hard by the Barbican, the site is both a traffic roundabout and something of a pedestrian island, accessed by the fragmentary high-level walkaway that was to have replaced street pedestrian activity in the City in the Sixties. Location of the new hall would have to await the move of the Museum of London. With all this in mind, others have suggested an alternative venue on the north bank of the Thames at Blackfriars, opposite Tate Modern.
Now comes provocateur Léon Krier with his own proposal. Krier, a former associate of James Stirling, is perhaps best known as the designer of Poundbury for the Prince of Wales, along with a new town in Guatemala. What’s perhaps less known is that his love for classical music may exceed his love for architecture and urbanism.
Krier proposes a site redolent with both meaning and urban importance along what Terry Farrell has called the Nash Ramblas. The proposed Nash Ramblas stretches from the London Zoo through Regent’s Park down Portland Place past All Souls Church and down Regent Street to Piccadilly and thence to Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace.
Krier proposes to site the new complex, which he calls the London Music Forum, on Park Crescent at the terminus of Portland Place and the entrance to Regent’s Park. His elegant and typically lyrical site plan references both Nash and his own predilection for a playful classicism.
According to Krier, “a new concert hall, a chamber music hall, a state-of-the-art educational facility, practice rooms, restaurants and exhibition galleries can form a new urban ensemble that includes the complementary amenities required for successfully supporting the London Symphony Orchestra’s mission.” He also proposes a new Waterloo monument and a monumental portico to terminate the major vistas on the site.
With this proposal, Leon Krier reminds us that the siting of major cultural monuments is a decisive act in city making, and in the making of what Camillo Sitte called our collective memory. In linking the new music venue to Nash’s master stroke to create urban coherence out of a succession of individual London estates, Krier joins contemporary London to its ongoing narrative.
Nash’s plan for the Park Square and Crescent site, including a circle with a church at the centre.
This proposal stands in sharp contrast to the commercial opportunism that characterises most urban regeneration, which seems to deny London’s essential character in favour of a kind of internationalism driven by the needs of investment portfolios. Cultural venues are seen merely as attractions or enhancements to commercial schemes and often seem dominated by retail and speciality food.
Whatever one thinks of the architecture, and I like the way it continues a conversation with Nash and neoclassicism, Léon Krier’s urban proposal has challenged us to see the new home for the London Symphony Orchestra not just as a complex which can fill a conveniently vacant site, but as an opportunity to add a significant monument in a way that enhances London as a great city. This is what Nash did with Regent’s Park, his grand boulevard and the planning of Trafalgar Square and is what post-war planners did with the Royal Festival Hall and the South Bank. Hopefully his counterproposal will be considered as the uplifting proposition that it surely is.
Classical Modernity
EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with kind permission of the author. It first appeared on his blog, where the reader will find much more of interest.
Sometimes one hears the critique that classical music is no longer compatible with modernity. What “modernity” is supposed to mean always remains in darkness, as if the very word “modernity” were so obvious in its meaning that any further explanation would be superfluous. If “modern” means “of this time, of today,” this category is quite ephemeral because tomorrow there will be another today. But it is something else: modern culture, with its contemporary human condition, is felt as a fundamentally different way of life with values and experiences, strongly deviating from the past. All this is of course a generalization, but it paints a mood, and suggests that culture of the past has become “another country,” inaccessible to modern people. And it is quite remarkable that the core repertoire of classical music stems from that “other country”: modern musical life has one foot firmly in the past. And since the other foot inevitably stands on the brittle ground of contemporary times, the position becomes increasingly uncomfortable if the culture of the past is seen as fundamentally different from modern life experience.
Is there any fundamental contradiction found in putting a CD with a Mozart symphony in the player while driving a modern car on a paved road through the suburban sprawl of a big, modern city? Or in performing a piece by J.S. Bach on a piano, or his Brandenburg Concerti on modern instruments? Or in viewing a Vermeer painting dressed in modern “clothes” – the canvas being lightened by carefully adjusted spotlights which were unthinkable in the 17th century? The Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement in music, which presents music from the past on old, authentic instruments or else on exact copies of them, is a very modern phenomenon and nobody would demand that such performances are presented with the musicians dressed in 18th-century garb, with candles on their music stands. On the contrary, successful ensembles like John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, though composed of period instruments, use all the modern means and recording facilities available to spread their vision – which does not in the least diminish other possible interpretations of the same music. It all forms a rich palette of varied artistic experience which is the hallmark of true modernity.
I think that our human nature, in its essential elements, does not differ very much from that of our ancestors and that changes in society, lifestyle, and opinions happen quite slowly while the basic human needs remain the same. Since the 19th century, the West has been fascinated by the leaps of progress made in science and technology, which inevitably fed the myth that “progress” would be the answer to all the troubles of mankind. Looking back at the upheavels of the 20th century, we know now that this is not the case. In science and medicine, progress is definitely of great value, but in other spheres of human activity, “progress” is a dangerous notion because it may disguise decline and erosion, as can be noticed in the visual arts where obvious decline in abilities and aesthetic sensibility is so often sold as “renewal.”
Our distorted view of the relationship between modernity and culture has much to do with the idea that culture develops like a timeline: first this, then that – development from A via B to C and so on, with the implication and the hope that it is, in general, an upward line. If this were so in culture, we would end up with some obvious absurdities, like the notion that Picasso was an improvement on Velasquez, and that Xenakis was an improvement on Bach. In fact, the art of the past is with us in our present. It has not just survived the erosion of time but transcended the boundaries of time and place. The best works from the past are thus contemporary forever and any new art can only aspire to contribute to the ongoing accumulation of works, representing the creative mind of humanity. History in art thus looks like a quantitative accumulation process, and not like a timeline.
During my studies in Rotterdam in the seventies, the musical world was shocked by the appearance of a new music intending to break with the music from the past – which was still very much alive in performance practice. There were heated debates, and music – old as well as new – became gravely politicized. If audiences rejected Boulez or Stockhausen they were bourgeois and did not understand their times; and people embracing the Brave New World of sound demonstrated their keen commitment to modernity. Since the political climate of those days was predominantly Left-wing, modernity was Left, and bourgeois rejection of modernity in music was Right. So simple was the world in that time. In my parental home, classical music was a natural presence through radio and recordings, forming an organic backdrop to a rather bohemien life style: both my parents were painters. I never considered music as being related to some political point of view, and I was quite surprised when, in my first years at the conservatory, Beethoven, Mahler and Ravel were labelled “outdated” and “bourgeois” by my teacher, who tried to get our small group of composition students interested in the “real stuff”: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern and everything following from their heroic explorations. Interestingly, the music of Schoenberg had never been aired on the classical stations at home, let alone Berg and Webern, and our record collection went no “further” than Ravel’s piano concertos and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Third Piano Concerto. Also, I was surprised to find out that all the music which I had got accustomed to was “old.” I never experienced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms et al as something “old” or as something far removed in time. In contrary, it was all very “of now” and bursting with life. Something that was so directly expressive and fresh could not possibly be of “another country.” Of course I knew that the music had been written long ago, but given the character of the music, that seemed to be entirely irrelevant, and loving and understanding that music did not make me feel “old fashioned” or “’bourgeois” – which would have been quite strange given the rather chaotic and un-bourgeois milieu in which I was growing up. But in the composition class, all that was put into a very different context.
Of course the students were fed with all the “subversive” music which was, in general, rejected by bourgeois concert life. I remember these group listening sessions as fascinating nightmares during which we were led into the dark world of atonal despair and into the postwar experiments with pure but chaotic sound and electronics. On one particularly sunny and clear April morning, the Three Orchestral Pieces of Alban Berg seemed suddenly to turn the weather into a dark hole of rain and angst: a thunder storm had landed on the quarter. Exercises in dodecaphony and serialism posed some considerable challenges, and I found it interesting to wrestle with complex constructions – like trying to get a puzzle right and hoping that the image that would appear in the end would be something artistically meaningful. (It almost never was, since a puzzle is not an artistic undertaking.) A falling fifth in one of my early pieces provoked some contemptuous sniffing by the teacher because it reminded him of the beginning of Beethoven’s ninth symphony – an embarrassing faux pas which I should avoid in the future if I ever wanted to be a composer. All this made very clear that music was not just music, but an embodiment of political values related to interests: so much new music was being written but not accepted in concert practice, where people were supposed to merely repeat the same “old” works like zombies in a perpetual state of comatose cultural confusion, ignorant of the demands of modernity which was knocking on the closed doors of the concert hall.
Modern visual art did not suffer from those bourgeois rejections and quickly developed a specialized market with big money passing through ever more eager hands, accompanied by a rapidly emerging army of theoretical “experts” encouraged by the infinite horizon of necessary and salaried explanation. Interestingly, the museums with the “old” collections everywhere in the Western world continued to attract visitors, as is still the case today – and now those works have become another half century older since the new wave of modernism appeared. Modernist music and modernist visual art created a territory of their own, separate from the culture of the past, underlining the “newness” of the phenomenon and its disconnection from existing art and music. To explain this distinction, theory and ideology were wielded as weaponry against the scepticism of “the bourgeois.”
Understanding that musical meaning was not to be found in modernist ideologies, I began to study art history, hoping to find examples of debates which could throw a light upon those of the present. And indeed, I found some: in 17th-century France a debate flared up among artists and architects around the question of whether or not modern artists were superior to those of Antiquity – the art of the ancient world then being considered so great that one should always try to take it as an example. It appeared that the rejection of a past culture was a relatively recent phenomenon and that in former ages the accumulated presence of achievements from the past was merely a huge repertory of means to be used and varied in the present. Sometimes harking back to an even older past was, for that reason, considered more “modern” – like the revival of classicist architecture near the end of the 18th and deep into the 19th centuries and the entire Italian Renaissance which was inspired by the art of Antiquity, both movements adapting the achievements of the past to the different needs of modern times. Opera was invented as a fantasy about the way the great plays of Ancient Greece might have been performed. Sources spoke of reciting and singing accompanied by instruments, but because concrete information was completely lacking, composers had to invent such presentation themselves – a beautiful example demonstrating modern invention as a result of looking backwards.
Panthéon de Paris
After my studies in Rotterdam I spent a year in Paris, keeping myself alive with private music teaching and a shabby little job at the Chamber of Commerce, where I sorted cards and filed them alphabetically and fetched coffee for the office’s real employees. Exploring the poetical cityscape and visiting the Louvre and the big monuments was a revelation: beauty and aesthetic meaning was everywhere – not as some alien object in a glass box, but as a natural part of life. To take just one from numerous examples, the Panthéon – this impressive monument to “the great men of the fatherland” – had been designed as a church in a very spare classical style, with a hughe dome topping a really excentric structure. The outside looks like a very square tomb, but the inside is light and elegant with vaults airy as a gothic cathedral. And indeed, the architect, as I discovered, had wanted to create the same high-rising effect of the medieval churches but with the vocabulary of classicism. The result is breathtakingly beautiful and also very original, now forming an important signifyer of identity to the nation.
Panthéon de Paris
A very instructive lesson in classicism: although the separate elements are borrowed from examples (the entirely traditional, “over-used,” but always impressive temple front; the dome following the design of the dome of St. Paul’s in London; the tall interior with customary pillars and vaults, using 18th-century decoration in a structure resembling gothic vaults), the resulting mix has a distinctively original effect, demonstrating Roger Scruton’s description of originality as the personal touch which becomes visible against a background of tradition. Also, it’s not ”just” a temple front: details and proportions are extremely well-designed, adding to the effect of tallness and forceful expression of grandeur.
Leonardo da Vinci: Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1483–1486. The mystery of new life in the loving, golden light of a spiritual presence that is, at the same time, entirely human and emotionally accessible.
Of all the treasures of the Louvre I only want to mention the Italian paintings from the Renaissance, showing that the particular imaginings of ages ago are capable of transmitting their beauty and meaning to crowds of people living in entirely different circumstances.
It became very clear to me that, in an artistic sense, “the past” does not exist. The works exist. The implication is of course that artists today can take these works as examples to learn their craft, so that they acquire the means to express their own inner drive to contribute to the better aspects of the world. After my return to the Netherlands, it became my goal to get to the heart of the classical tradition – classical in the widest sense, like we speak of “Indian classical art” as distinct from “modernity” – and to learn to adopt the techniques which were best suited to what I wanted to “say” in the “language” of music. As with all cultural endeavors, we learn through imitation. In the process of internalizing creative processes we become what we have learned, and the craft turns into a personal means of expression.
Titian: Pastoral Concert, c. 1510. With its complex yet quasi-improvised structure, both in terms of the flat surface and its three-dimensional depth, it looks like a slow middle movement of a Mozart symphony. (I always wondered why the guys in this painting, obviously discussing the music, don’t pay the slightest attention to the ladies, who do so much their best to distract them.)
Of course such ideas fell completely outside the world view of modernism and of modernity as a narrowly defined moment on the timeline of history – and outside the established circles of “contemporary music” with their specialized festivals and performances by specialized ensembles. But maybe that was a good thing, because exploration and development that is endorsed by establishments may hinder the inner freedom that is a precondition of authentic creation – certainly if such establishments cultivate ideologies, party lines, and taboos for their adherents. Attempts to restore something of the classical tradition in music are, of course, important targets for taboos in a cultural climate where a narrow-minded notion of modernity is de rigueur. Yet we have seen in today’s contemporary music scene those hard-line taboos erode considerably. And in the end, that may offer possibilities of development exceeding those of modernism and its watered-down progeny, the ideas of which seem by now completely exhausted and feeble in comparison with the best of our traditions.
Even if we acknowledge that we live now in a post-postmodern era, I believe that works of art available or accessible to us should be judged by their ability to enrich our lives and that we must make ourselves accessible to the ideas and aesthetic expressions contained therein, because they may have something of value to impart to us. This is basically a timeless, a-historical position. And from that position, we can see how much of the art and music from the past is still very much present all around us, and how powerfully it still “speaks” to us. This is a reassuring sign that the human condition may be strong enough to endure even the most disruptive influences of modernity; and it shows us that one of the blessings of this same modernity is that so much art from the past is still available and accessible. More and more painters, architects, and composers no longer feel inhibited to explore these examples of humanism for their own artistic endeavors. And it seems to me that this is contributing to the available territory of meaningful art. May this be a renaissance of authentic culture, taking its place within the broad context of available, contemporary artistic experience.
An Alternate Site for London Symphony’s New Hall, and A Long Due Act of Redemption
As an erstwhile resident of London and attendant of innumerable classical concerts, it is not the ravishing beauty of the music but the ghastliness of the Southbank and Barbican concert halls and surroundings which leaves the most enduring, albeit painful, imprint on my mind. What the urbane theater and opera life so successfully achieves in Covent Garden is hopelessly lacking in these desolate music venues. Along with countless music-lovers and performers I have wished that those buildings would disappear forever from the face of London and the music world. The tabula rasa mentality that bestowed on us those loathsome aliens should at long last be turned against its coarse products in an overdue act of redemption.
And yet, judging from the glitzy brochure “Towards a World-Class Center for Music” – with foreword by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Mayor of London – an aesthetically dumb kultural nomenklatura have not finished tormenting the good citizenry with conceptual incubi. How else could the Museum of London site and the Barbican environs be considered, even for an instant, as possible locations to re-found London’s classical music life? For all its political correctness and digital newspeak, the recent initiative proposes but a repetition of the errors that landed London with the unfortunate Southbank and Barbican complexes.
If it wasn’t for the gruesome architecture, the Waterloo bridgehead and Southbank site would be superb urban locations, rivalling the Piazza San Marco in Venice and Charles Bridge in Prague. However, while the redevelopment of the sinister music and theater buildings is a liberating prospect, it is yet unthinkable for political and cultural leaders. The partisan project of listing as historical the widely un-loved buildings has instead degraded the very notion of historic and cultural heritage. Why preserve what is not worth preserving?
2016.” width=”700″ height=”496″> London Music Forum, conceived and drawn by Léon Krier, copyright 2016.Aerial view of Regent’s Park and Park Crescent
Meanwhile there is a choice location for London’s unrivalled musical offerings that, as far as I know, is yet unconsidered – namely, Park Square and Crescent. The fenced private reserve between Great Portland Place and Regent’s Park is served by two Underground stations and traversed by the major Marylebone/Euston Road axis. John Nash’s laconic and elegant crescent buildings make a quiet urban backdrop for a grand architectural “cymbal stroke” to resonate around London and the musical world: The London Music Forum, an inviting campus for everyone. Here, in the green “vestibule” of Regents Park, in proximity to the Royal Academy of Music, a new concert hall, a chamber music hall, a state of the art educational facility, practice rooms, restaurants and exhibition galleries can form a new urban ensemble that includes the complementary amenities required for successfully supporting the London Symphony Orchestra’s mission.
London Music Forum, conceived and drawn by Léon Krier, copyright 2016.
The main entrance and foyer, completely surrounding as a glazed-in arcade the concert hall itself, sit on a piano nobile dominating the new urban square to the south and Regents Park to the north and accessed by wide ramps and stairways through a monumental freestanding portico.
London Music Forum, conceived and drawn by Léon Krier, copyright 2016.John Nash’s Park Crescent
The concert hall replicates the Vienna Musikverein and Amsterdam Concertgebouw halls in size and proportions, while properly befitting the storied London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). The architecture of the new forum’s buildings and paving should speak the elemental classical language with which John Nash so brilliantly set the stage in character and color. Any required 21st century technology can be elegantly embedded in the design.
London Music Forum, conceived and drawn by Léon Krier, copyright 2016.
The new Waterloo monument and fountain, the monumental portico and the campanile are placed in the foci of the major vistas, Portland Place, Marylebone and Euston Roads, and Regent’s Park York Terrace, Broadwalk and Chester Terrace, all converging in this landmarked location. The entire space between the Nash Terraces and the music buildings is uniformly paved across Marylebone/Euston Road and shaded by the preserved venerable “Waterloo trees”.
2016.” width=”307″ height=”400″> London Music Forum, conceived and drawn by Léon Krier, copyright 2016.
The colonnades along Park Crescent will soon animate with elegant cafés and restaurants an extraordinary new civic space, that anchors at long last, London’s musical life in a sophisticated urban setting.
Astute observers will notice that this very specific vision represents a departure from the orthodoxies that have lately governed civic and urban development – and that left their indelible scars upon the face of London in both the Barbican and Southbank. While the machinery of mega-project planning is already underway to impose on Londoners yet another soul-crushing, inhumane super-structure, it would be prudent to take a step back and consider just what were the mistakes of the halls we now need to replace, what should be done differently this time, and what are the priorities that follow from a broader, long-range goal of making a truly accessible and enduring home for the London Symphony.
A New Concert Hall for London?
Sir Simon Rattle recently visited London with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he is resident conductor. The orchestra’s ‘London residency’, during which it gave sold-out performances of all the Sibelius symphonies, was hosted by the City’s symphony hall at the Barbican Centre. During the course of his visit Sir Simon also conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, to which he has recently been appointed as music director, and indicated that he might even return to his native country as that orchestra’s resident conductor, if a suitable venue were provided. The implication is that the Barbican Centre, currently home to the London Symphony Orchestra, is not suitable, a judgment with which almost all music lovers agree.
Built in the 1970s in the brutalist style by the firm of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, and attached to a housing complex of jagged concrete towers, the Centre is surely one of the ugliest buildings in the City of London, and one that lies athwart a once beautiful pattern of mediaeval streets as though dropped there by the Luftwaffe. It is approached from the Barbican Underground Station via a long tunnel with bare concrete walls, in which the roar of traffic makes all conversation impossible. At the far end of this tunnel a concrete platform rises from the street with the promise of an entrance – but leads only to a blank concrete wall. After a search around destroyed street corners the entrance is eventually revealed, and takes the form of a fissure in the cliff of concrete, leading downwards into Nibelheim. Glass doors and blank walls open at last onto a vast cave without orientation, in which visitors are entirely dependent on signs to direct them. You can wander in this shapeless space for many minutes before discovering the concert hall, which you enter through obscure doors in occluded corners. In its narrow concrete amphitheatre you can then listen to music whose beauty is such a reproach to the surroundings that you are not surprised that the acoustics seem designed expressly to muffle the sound.
Wigmore Hall, London. The frontage on Wigmore Street is very narrow, just the width of the pediment over the canopy. It was built in 1901 by the German piano company Bechstein as a showcase, and has excellent acoustics. It became the Wigmore Hall in 1917 and is a leading hall for recitals and chamber musicl. Image credit:David Hawgood.
The Barbican Centre is not the only offensive concert hall in London. The pattern began with the Royal Festival Hall, designed by the modernist Sir Leslie Martin for the South Bank of the Thames as part of the Festival of Britain ‘renewal’ in the 1950s. Like the Barbican the Royal Festival Hall is a concrete shell, disconnected from its surroundings, and dependent on a work of clearance that has left nothing standing of the pre-existing urban fabric. Because it can be reached by a footbridge from the comparatively unspoiled North Bank of the river the Hall remains connected to the life of the city, and has given rise to its own community of washed up Bohemians, who congregate in the untidy downstairs bar. For all that, its obtrusive form and dead acoustic have for half a century prompted Londoners to ask themselves whether concert halls have to be visitors from alien planets, and whether there might not be a way of continuing what was once the accepted custom, of building them as part of the city. The Royal Albert Hall is in no way out of place on the edge of Kensington Park, and the beautiful Wigmore Hall is just another terraced house in Wigmore Street. Could we not build like that today, so that the concert-hall is restored to its rightful place – the place that it should share with the theatre and the restaurant – at the centre of urban life?
Royal Albert Hall, London. Image credit: www.royalalberthall.com.
Two obstacles lie before that commendable goal: modernist architecture, and the architects who design it. From the outset of the Modern Movement it has been dogmatically assumed that the form and situation of a building is determined by its function, and that the interior of the building is therefore what matters. Maybe the exterior should express the function, or maybe it should in some way stand out from its surroundings, so as to announce that function or (preferably) to declare the genius and originality of the architect. But it is the thing that goes on inside the building that matters, whether or not it is integrated into the surrounding life. Hence, when the building performs its original function badly – with a dead acoustic, as at the Barbican and the Festival Hall –people become painfully conscious of its alien character. The acoustics of the Albert Hall are by no means perfect. But who objects to it? With its Pantheon dome, its classical orders and its terra cotta frieze it is a smiling presence in the life of the street and the park. For that reason it is also adaptable. You can use the Albert Hall for reunions, dances, lectures, stage performances as well as for concerts, and if ever people ceased to need a concert hall on the edge of Kensington Park it would surely serve almost as well as a University auditorium, a mosque or a temple to some future deity.
Boston Symphony Hall, Boston.
But here is where we have to reckon with the other great obstacle to building an acceptable symphony hall in a real city, which is the modernist architect. When Adolf van Gendt began work on Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in 1883, he was working on open pasture outside the city. But he built in the accepted classical style of the day, as though designing a city hall, with walls that could line a street without oppressing it. In due course the city grew to meet his building, which now stands proud amid classical and baroque facades, a citizen among citizens. Around the hall has grown a lively quarter of the city, and the cafés and restaurants in the neighbouring streets are popular not least because they give a view of this serene and dignified building. It is perhaps worth remarking that the Concertgebouw is one of three symphony halls – the others being the Vienna Musikverein and the Boston Symphony – which are noted for their superlative acoustics, and all three are built in the classical style, the last by McKim Meade and White, who took the trouble to consult the physicist Wallace Clement Sabine as their acoustical engineer.
Unlike Stanford White modernist architects are singularly reluctant to adopt a style that fits in to the urban fabric. Typically they wish their building to stand out, to attract attention to itself as a visitor from the future, whether by negating the lines and details of the surrounding streets, as in Baltimore, or by standing stark and isolated in a park, like the new symphony hall designed by Jean Nouvel in Paris’s Parc de la Villette. Nouvel’s building, now the subject of dispute on account of its cost overrun (and what modernist project has ever stayed within budget?), has the appearance of a flying saucer, though with too many knobs and struts to navigate the dense atmosphere of our planet, with the result that it has crash-landed in a Park in Paris. Whether it will work acoustically has yet to be definitively proven. But that it does not work as architecture, still less as part of the world’s greatest city, is immediately apparent. Only because it is in a park does it wreak no havoc on its surroundings, and it is inconceivable that the neighbouring streets, were they too to invade the greenery, should incorporate it as one of their neighbours.
St. Luke’s Church, London. This church was closed by the Diocese of London in 1964, and it lay empty and unwanted for almost 40 years. The roof was removed and the shell become a ruin. It was finally converted for the London Symphony Orchestra and now serves as a concert hall, rehearsal and recording space, and an educational resource. Image credit:Chris Talbot.
This point is, it seems to me, absolutely vital if the symphony hall is to have a real future. The modern concert venue is designed with only two things in view: to create a space uniquely designed for a kind of laboratory listening, and to announce to the world the arrival of yet another architect of genius. The combination of inner sterility and outer megalomania essentially cuts the venue off from the life around it. The resulting hall is not part of the city but stands in opposition to it, defiant testimonial to a dying culture. In this it also contributes, as does the Barbican Centre, to urban decay. Who wants to linger in those destroyed streets, to take time out beneath an aggressive concrete overhang, to look in vain for a coffee shop or a bookstore in the shadow of a building that looks as dead on the outside as it sounds to the ear within? Only if we wake up to the fact that this kind of modernist architecture is the enemy of the city will we begin to build the concert venues that we need – the venues, namely, which attract people to their neighbourhood, and provide a hub around which an artistic culture can again begin to grow.
Of course, architects will object to the suggestion. Modernist buildings are expensive and produce monstrous fees for their designers. They are also unadaptable, and therefore constantly in need of expensive adjustments, on which their architects usually have a lien. For this reason a struggling arts organization cannot normally afford a modernist concert hall, and would do far better to take over some existing building, such as a disused church or meeting hall, so as to adapt it for the purpose. Such, indeed, has been the normal practice in London, with the London Symphony Orchestra using the beautiful 18th century church of St Lukes in Old Street for its chamber concerts and its educational programs.
Moreover, large modernist buildings are almost invariably exercises in branding: They declare that their architects belong among the stars. Hence everybody has heard of Jean Nouvel, whose Wikipedia article is spread over two pages of uncritical hype, while nobody has heard of Adolf van Ghent, who has no Wikipedia article at all.
Cooper Union New Academic Building at 41 Cooper Square near Astor Place in the East Village of Manhattan, New York City. Image credit:Beyond My Ken.
The problem of adaptability is not confined to the design of concert halls. From its inception, modernism has been a style against the city, and not a style that seeks to be a part of it. This is apparent in Le Corbusier’s original plan for Paris, which involved demolishing the city North of the Seine, and replacing it with glass towers amid sterile squares of trampled grass. It is apparent in the Centre Pompidou, built by Presidential decree, and which involved demolishing street upon street of classical houses in the Marais and replacing them with a collection of steel pipes and girders in infantile colours. It is apparent in the huge kitchen appliance dumped by the architectural firm Morphosis in New York’s Cooper Square.
All such projects show the extent to which our delicate urban fabric, built over many years in styles that exist because they are publicly accepted and adaptable to our changing uses, is under threat from the new architectural forms. These are usually designed for the specific use of a single client, and designed at a computer. Their shapes are dictated purely from within – they have no facades and no real attempt is made to fit them to their surroundings or to make them adaptable to any other use than the one that first required them. Eventually, when our city streets are lined with magnified hair-dryers, iPads, refrigerators, computer gadgets and food processors, all surviving awkwardly from a use that has vanished, people will wake up to the fact that the city has disappeared. A few lonely souls will drive in of an evening to take their seat inside a streamlined kettle, there to hear the strains of a Mahler symphony bouncing along the concrete walls. But most people will stay at home in the suburbs, preferring phones in their ears to live music, when live music must be reached by travelling across a desert of decaying gadgets to a comfortless kettle in a moonscape.
Civic Hall in Cayala, designed by Richard Economakis of the University of Notre Dame. Image credit:Driehaus Museum.
All is not lost, however. The New Urbanist movement, and the emergence of schools devoted to real architecture such as that at the University of Notre Dame, are sources of hope. And there are growing numbers of architects willing to take on big projects in a style that can be integrated into the fabric of a liveable city. I think of Leon Krier, principal architect of the Prince of Wales’s development at Poundbury, of Quinlan Terry, whose work on the restoration of Williamsburg provides a model for American urbanism, of John Simpson, architect of a new concert hall at Eton College, of Pedro Godoy and Maria Sanchez, graduates of the Notre Dame architecture school and architects of the impressive New Town Cayala in Guatemala. There is no longer an excuse to think that modernism is the only style available, or that the aesthetic of a symphony hall should require it to stand out from its surroundings, and not to belong to them. The time has therefore come for a real concert venue, one built into the city, and not against it like that at London’s Barbican. Such a symphony hall, built in the classical style, need not involve the acres of demolition and clearance required by the modernist gadgets. It can be built behind a façade that respects the fabric of the city, as the old theatres were built, and if, against our hopes, it fails to revive the concert-going habit, it will change its use quietly and inoffensively, remaining as a restaurant venue, a university or – best of all – a school of architecture, devoted to the ideals that caused it to be built.
London Hall-ing: A New Home for the London Symphony Orchestra
Hot on the heels of what was surely disappointing news for Maris Jansons and Munich’s musical community – that, despite their protracted efforts, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra will not be getting a much needed new hall – came the triumphant announcement that Sir Simon Rattle, appointed as London Symphony Orchestra’s new chief, has secured a commitment from the city’s mayor to seriously investigate the possibility of a new concert hall for London’s top ensemble. Rattle has brought his political capital to bear right out of the gates – for good reason and while all eyes are on him. Despite the loud assertions of pundits who prefer to question his motives, this isn’t just a case of the new music director throwing his weight around. Sir Simon Rattle is instead pointing out the elephant in the music room: London, a concert capital with an embarrassment of riches measured in great orchestras and visiting performers, has somehow managed in all its centuries of legendary activity not to erect a single great concert venue the likes of Carnegie Hall, The Royal Concertgebouw, Musikverein, or even anything approaching the grandeur of St George’s Hall in Liverpool or Usher Hall in Edinburgh.
The Barbican Center was voted London’s “ugliest tall building” again in 2014. Is this a fitting home for the London Symphony Orchestra? Image credit:damo1977.
Each of the city’s major orchestras, besides being important and accomplished in its own right, supports and nourishes the rich ecosystem that is London’s classical music community. We can draw an analogy to the many museums in London – and we’ll do so despite the increasingly popular, pejorative reading of the word museum. Here we are using it as a wondrous term, connoting a sanctuary for our vast and beloved tradition. The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is like the British Museum. It is the repository of the best knowledge collected within the lifetimes and experience of its musicians, arguably standing a head above others in stature for its longevity of scope, its relationships with the world’s greatest conductors, and the breadth of its output. For the LSO not to have a proper and fitting home is akin to the British Museum existing only as a traveling collection.
London’s Royal Albert Hall.
So what, then, of the concert halls that London does have? The Barbican Center is a colossal, concrete bunker and the Royal Albert Hall, though storied and beautiful, has no acoustics to speak of. The Royal Festival Hall in the Southbank Center, meanwhile, combines the most lamentable attributes of both. Certainly, musical life in London could and would go on without a new hall. But so will many of the institutions and traditions we treasure continue to sputter along despite our neglect until tarnish and inertia overtake them and we become accustomed to decayed and hollow versions of the vibrant and living things we once loved. Why should London’s most prized assets, including both the LSO and the city’s musical life itself, be left just to “go on” this way? A proper concert hall represents an important piece of the city’s cultural puzzle, still waiting to be solved, and, equally meaningful both to London and its famed orchestra, an opportunity for renewal.
So, if we were to agree about the necessity of such a grand project, what would we build and where would we build it? Is it too early to even open such a discussion? Certainly not – for, as we have often seen, the political jockeying to win such a project begins immediately and dominates everything that happens behind the scenes. Too often the end result of these Machiavellian maneuverings leaves many disappointed observers wondering, “All that money…how in the world did they come up with that?”
At the Future Symphony Institute, we have come to understand that the most important consideration for a concert hall, beyond its acoustics, is the relationship it establishes between the orchestra, its patrons, and their community. The concert hall is the orchestra’s home – the space into which it invites the public as its guests, the setting in which it extends its hospitality and friendship. But it is also the face with which the orchestra looks out upon its neighbors and through which it participates in the conversation of settlement that invests a place with the meaning of home. Its physical presence creates an immediate and lasting impression that communicates directly to the community just what the orchestra believes about what it has to offer and what it perceives to be its role in the life and conversation of the community. For this reason a concert hall, in our estimation, can be either a major driver of or a serious impediment to demand for classical * concerts.
THE HALL AS A HOME
Wiener Musikverein, Image credit: Wolf-Dieter Grabner.
Home is an expression of both who we are and where we belong. We mark the places where we belong – the spaces we call home – with those things that reflect how we understand ourselves, who we aspire to be, and how we want others to know us. And we gather these clues, consciously or not, whenever we enter someone’s home – gather the myriad, little, aesthetic decisions and with them assemble a portrait, however astute or incomplete, of the person who made them. The privilege of being invited into a person’s home is the privilege of glimpsing their soul. In a very real way, the hall is the orchestra’s home; everything about it and within it should attest to the orchestra’s deepest convictions about itself and about classical music.
For instance, while it’s something of a fad to build halls that resemble spaceships, there is nevertheless a general lie and an injustice in doing so. And that’s because classical music does not come to us from outer space, or even from the future. It is not created by robots or by alien beings we cannot approach or begin to understand. It comes to us instead from a very long and very human tradition – from people we would recognize, people we can approach and come to know intimately through their music. It’s not slick, plastic, or high-tech. On the contrary, it still relies on a legacy of meticulous, human craftsmanship and unplugged, acoustic instruments. The hall should be the embodiment of classical music’s character: it should above all feel human, feel familiar, feel knowable, and feel intimate as often as it feels exalted.
St. George’s Hall in Liverpool
Likewise, to reduce classical music simply to pretty sounds accumulated accidentally over the centuries is to ignore the fact that it revolves around ideals of beauty drawn from the innate order of the universe, and that we recreate that order through music painted on a canvas of time. It’s as great a contradiction to bury classical music in a disorienting and convoluted labyrinth – however shiny or pretty – as it is to stage it in a spaceship. By building such a home for itself, whether it realizes it or not, the orchestra risks suggesting to its patrons that its music is more complicated than it needs to be and – even worse – that they might not “get it.” Every little aesthetic clue in and about the hall inevitably tells its guests not only what the orchestra thinks about itself, or what it wants them to think about classical music, but also – and perhaps most importantly – what the orchestra thinks of them.
Dining inside Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw.
A hall is more than a holding pen and an acoustic space. It is a place in which its guests, too, must come to feel that they belong. Though they will likely never come to know each member of the orchestra, they will nonetheless feel like they know the orchestra as a whole – as if it is a friend to whom they relate, and with whom they while away their evening hours in a sort of intimate communion. In the symphony hall, guests sense the orchestra as a neighbor into whose home they have been invited. The hospitality they experience there can inspire a friendship and gratitude that connects directly to a sense of belonging. And an orchestra can only be successful to the extent that those friendships and that gratitude manifest themselves in the charitable donations of patrons and in the pride and enthusiasm with which they, in turn, offer the orchestra’s hospitality to their own friends and neighbors – especially to those who have not yet come to know this sense of belonging in the symphony hall. The most important contribution a proper hall might make to an orchestra’s success is its propensity to cultivate deep and lasting friendships.
THE HALL AS A FACE
The dignified and approachable face of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw.
Every act of architecture is an enduring act of imposition wherever it’s committed. Whether a monument, a hall, a home, or an office, every building becomes part of the community upon which it’s imposed. While not everyone will find reason to engage directly with it, they will nevertheless live in its shadow. They must inevitably despair or delight in its company forever after – or at least as long as it remains standing among them. It’s the realization born of this fact, the realization that we’re all “in it together”, that tempers our adolescent urges toward defiant self-expression.
Just as the youth, who thinks little of imposing his window-rattling, musical misadventures upon his neighbors, eventually in adulthood comes to appreciate the reciprocal consideration that obliges him not to offend his neighbors with his noise, so we become sensitive to the plight of our neighbors the more completely we understand our situation to be bound up with theirs in the identity of community. This is the foundation for the manners that make good neighbors. And this is what makes the homeowners’ associations of America’s transient suburbs as perennial as they are reviled: they are an attempt to enforce good manners in the absence of genuine neighborliness from which the sentiment naturally springs.
The neighborliness of settlement is visible in this square in Old Quebec City.
Our home is for us a private sanctuary, but it is also part of a larger, collective sanctuary. And we feel this larger place as home too, inhabited as it is by our many neighbors, probably none of whom we chose. In this larger place called home – in our community – we are only one voice of many. And each building, like each neighbor, looks out upon the community with its own face and participates in the ongoing conversation of settlement with its own voice. Like neighbors themselves, these buildings do not always echo each other or even agree, but because they are architectural reflections of their very human subjects, their differences too are tempered by membership in the community. They attune to each other and relate to each other in the community’s natural and never-ending process of becoming home. The result is an organic harmony of individual voices, and this is what we sense in the world’s oldest and most beautiful cities and neighborhoods.
This should be especially interesting to us when considering the case of concert halls. The blending of a chorus of individual voices into harmonious polyphony is precisely the hallmark and heritage of our musical tradition. It would be the most natural thing imaginable for an orchestra to build for itself a hall that sits comfortably in its community, shoulder-to-shoulder with its neighbors, that participates in the act of settlement by accepting its role in the compromise and conversation that makes a place home and strangers neighbors. But how often do we see halls built like this today?
LA’s Disney Concert Hall may just perfectly reflect its city’s character.
It seems as though the adolescent obsession with individualism now nearly always trumps neighborliness. Too often the modern hall is designed as a solipsistic monolith that rises faceless from a shallow sea of concrete somewhere off the shore of its community. It shuns its neighbors – it does not participate and does not relate. It does not invite the passerby inside with welcoming familiarity that reads as approachability. In fact, should the passerby wander into its remote realm, it’s far too likely that it won’t even be clear to him where the entrance might be. The modernist hall stands defiantly as a foreboding monument to its architect’s ego, and perhaps to the colossal blundering of the planning committees who mistook this emphatic statement of irrelevance for its literal opposite.
But a concert hall is not built for planning committees or for architects. It is built for the ordinary people who will become its neighbors, the music patrons who will become its friends, and the orchestra for whom it will become a face. It must communicate the inspiration and the achievement of the composers and musicians that live within it, but it must speak of those things in the local language and in tones of civility. It must enfold not only concert spaces of varying size, but also spaces for communion, where people can come together and discover neighbors, and spaces for education, where they can come together and discover music. This last point deserves to be stressed: given the incredible responsibility orchestras have to impart their legacy to future generations, it’s imperative that their halls should enfold facilities that reflect both the central and permanent nature of their educational role in the community.
Philharmonie Berlin.
One more word on the idea of the concert hall as the orchestra’s face: It is important for the LSO to remember that a concert hall really does become an orchestra’s identity – what we might otherwise called “brand” in the commercial world. In the case of orchestras, branding is often a bit of an abstraction since visually one orchestra isn’t very distinct from the next in the way that a Lamborghini is distinct from a BMW. They have logos, to be sure, but since concerts aren’t purchased in stores off a shelf, the logo doesn’t become invested with the weight and power associated with physical goods. In some cases, the music director becomes the “face” or identity of a group. But that becomes a problem when the conductor moves on or even passes on. For instance, Herbert von Karajan was synonymous with the Berlin Philharmonic (BPO) for decades, and despite the equally important leadership of his successor Claudio Abaddo, the orchestra was challenged to assert its autonomy and identity through another focal point following its contentious breakup withKarajan. In recent decades, the BPO has adopted its own iconic 1962 Cold War era hall by Hans Sharoun as its face. And now that is precisely how it is known. We can cite other examples where mentioning the orchestra calls to mind immediately its hall and creates for us a vivid association with the character that we recognize in it: Boston Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw, Vienna Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, LA Philharmonic.
LONDON’S CASE
Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center.
What we will also point out, probably to the consternation of dear Sir Simon’s modernist, downright futuristic leanings, is that LSO’s identity is wrapped up in its connection to a rich and storied past – a great tradition stretching back to the British Empire. There are many great orchestras in London. What sets LSO apart is its pedigree, its traditions embodying the collective experience of having played with so many of the world’s greatest conductors. It is, as I said, the British museum of London orchestras, not the Tate Modern. Therefore, it would do well to position itself among its true peers – Vienna, Amsterdam, and Boston, with their profound connections to the history of classical music. (Philadelphia could have been included here, except that it abandoned its connection to its illustrious past when it moved into the Kimmel Center – what a passerby might for all the world suppose is just another corporate office building on Market street. Philadelphia is a cautionary tale.) To this end, it is most regrettable that Edwin Lutyens never designed for LSO a concert hall that would have rightfully stood among the other great halls of the world.
London is a city beloved by residents and cultural tourists for both what it has retained and what it has become over the centuries. But sadly, what the air raids of WWII didn’t manage, the modernists are now pulling off with the banishment of traditional architecture. Yet one would be severely challenged to find a tourist who came to London to see the Gherkin, the Barbican, or Southbank. Nor is it at all surprising or unusual that we see in the choices people make about where to live in London that traditional areas are much more desirable and therefore much more valuable than the cold, faceless clumps of glass and steel that one always comes across with disappointment when walking through town. Even the modernist architects, as architect Léon Krier memorably points out, usually live in gorgeous, traditional homes, leaving their glass and steel monstrosities for everyone else. Public vice, private virtue, as he says.
Inside the Royal Concertgebouw.
We can imagine at this point that LSO will have a choice between two halls: let’s say either a Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam or a Walt Disney Hall of Los Angeles. That may seem like an absurd scenario – a false choice, really – but as long as traditional architecture remains a clear and viable option and modernist “starchitects” continue to be driven by an adolescent urge to challenge and shock everyone, then that might be the very scenario we are looking at. That brings us to another important consideration. It may be crushing to many in the modernist Kulturekampf, but the ideal source for funding for London’s new hall will likely be private. And for that to happen, there will have to be a careful alignment of branding.
For example, should a bank like Barclays or UBS, who each have a long track record of sponsorship of classical music ventures, be interested in the project, they would undoubtedly require a building that came with a great deal of prestige attached to it, and one that was meant to be permanent. George Szell used to disparage “contemporary” music by dismissing it with a laugh, calling it “temporary” music. There is always truth in a joke, however, and so it is in the case of contemporary architecture, too. Feats of modernist architecture are usually built with the idea of standing for fifty years – an act of mercy on the one hand, and an act kicking the can down the road for the next generation on the other. But traditionally designed and constructed halls, built as they are with the architectural language and techniques that have endured throughout the ages, last for a very long time. They are meant as permanent places for a permanent music.
We are greatly encouraged by the recent decision made by the Royal College of Music to engage John Simpson for its expansion and renovation. Simpson’s plans are beautifully designed to enhance the original and historic Victorian building rather than repudiate it with a glass dagger as is so popular with today’s raging, international, design fashionistas (see Dresden’s Museum of Military History or the Louvre’s Pyramid if somehow nothing comes to mind). There are also wonderfully thoughtful and successful halls being designed today by David Schwarz’s award-winning firm in Washington DC. We hope to see more of them.
In subsequent writings here, we will look at the practical implications that arise from these issues and we’ll examine others, including the question of a building site, as they unfold. More importantly, we’ll look for the insight of those who know these challenges better than we. We are here to argue not only that both the LSO and London itself need and deserve a new concert hall that is fitting for the future of the city’s prestigious musical life, but that they need to imagine it as a place that makes sense for the sake of its own success – that it should be a beautiful and harmonious part of the face and community of London, not a thumb in its eye and a middle finger to everyone else.
Endnote
* Here, as always, we use the term “classical” with a small c to denote the long tradition of Western art music. When we refer specifically to the music composed during the European age of “Enlightenment”, we will use the term “Classical” with a capital C.
Music and the Transcendental
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an edited transcription of the keynote address delivered by Sir Roger Scruton at our inaugural The Future of the Symphony Conference in September 2014. You can also watch the video of the address.
I’m greatly encouraged by this initiative to actually bring into public awareness just what matters about the symphony and what its place in modern cities should be, what its place in the surrounding way of life and the culture generally should be, and how we can support and give meaning to it. What I shall talk about today are some philosophical ideas about music itself, in particular about classical music, and why we think it is such an important thing. And it’s a difficult area for many reasons.
People who love music often find it extremely difficult to talk about it, to say what it is that they love in it; and people who dislike it nevertheless think that they have very good reasons to do so. And there seems to be no forum of debate in which people can try to come to some agreement as to why music has the importance that it has in our society. I’m going to say a few things about that and also about the theme that I have put in the title.
I think we have to begin from this idea that we’ve inherited a listening culture. Listening is not an easy thing itself to define. There is such a thing as hearing. We hear music all the time around us, but most of us don’t pay attention to it – partly because most of it is not worth paying attention to. But there’s also overhearing and that is a very common experience. Wherever we are – in restaurants or in the Metro or wherever – we are overhearing music coming at us from all angles, and we are learning how to ignore it. Music wasn’t originally designed to be ignored. But we live in a society where, if we don’t learn to ignore it, we can’t also learn to listen to it. This puts an enormous strain on us and it’s one reason, of course, for the existence of these special places like symphony halls where one can insulate oneself from the surrounding world.
I totally endorse everything that Léon Krier said to us about modern architecture and the way in which it has created alienating spaces where it should create spaces where we’re at home. And I think of all spaces where we should be at home, the symphony hall is the most important. Many of us have this sense that musical experience is of supreme value and that musical experience of the kind I’m going to be talking about – the kind that involves listening – has been extremely important in our civilization.
Western civilization is in many ways a musical civilization. Music has had a place in our civilization which it has never achieved elsewhere. Of course, all people everywhere sing and dance. Dance in particular has a profound social meaning, and without it most societies in the past could not have really held together. But dancing is a very different thing from just sitting and listening, and we have this long – perhaps a thousand-year-long – experience of just sitting and listening for long moments, and doing so in company. We detach music from collective singing and dancing and make of it what you might call a spectacle or auricle, an occasion for simply sitting together and listening. Though detached from those natural social forms of musical order like singing and dancing, it is still a social experience. It is something shared. Even when you’re listening on your own, there is an implicit sharing going on you. You don’t think of yourself as “me, alone, listening to that.” You are, as it were, representing your ideal group of fellow listeners for whom this is a communal experience. You’re being returned in some way to a deep social experience within you.
There are many threats, however, to this listening culture. In particular, there is growing around us a habit of merely hearing music, or merely overhearing music, and of having to fight music off so that you can listen. The music that you hear in most restaurants today is not music that you could listen to without going mad. Or if you if you did start listening to it then of course the whole purpose of the restaurant would be defeated, too. It is there simply to fill in the silence that would otherwise, people fear, be engendered between the people sitting at the tables by the fact that they’ve forgotten how to speak. That is only one place in which music intrudes, but it intrudes in so many other ways and so many other places that we do have to learn the habit of ignoring it. And that gives us a real sense that learning to listen is not something that can be achieved simply by doing it. We need to rehabilitate ourselves to a particular culture.
I want to say something in connection with this about the idea of the sacred. We all have this conception within us that certain moments, certain events, certain ceremonies, and certain social occasions stand outside the ordinary run of events. They are not simply day-to-day events, but somehow they are places, times, or occasions, which take us outside ourselves and point us to another world – a world which, whether or not we even think it exists, is nevertheless there in our imaginations and beckoning to us. And this of course is something that we experience in collective worship – those of us who are believers or are attached to a particular faith. And we recognize it as contained within liturgical words and the habit of chanting. I think it’s worth thinking about this experience, even if it may not be an experience we repeat each week in church, or mosque, or synagogue, or wherever. Nevertheless, for all of us there is deep in the unconscious memory this sense of the ceremonial presence of the divine and our collective attention to it. In this moment, our attention is turned towards the altar, and the altar is a kind of ‘no place.’ It’s a place within our world which is also nowhere because there’s nothing at it. The thing that is there is in some deep sense elsewhere. It lies outside our world. It’s not of this world.
This idea that we collectively turn our attention to something that is, as it were, absent but also for that very reason present – this paradoxical sense – is something that I think we inherited from the primary religious experience of humanity. And when this occurs in the normal ceremony of worship, the words and the music seem to fill the void that is there. It’s a very important feature of our civilization that religious worship has almost always been a matter of music as well as words. The words are formalized. Often they are words in a foreign language, words that have been inherited from a dead language. They’re not there specifically so that you should understand every nuance of them. They are there because they are correct, they sound right, they’ve always been said. But it’s the music for many of us that fills the void, that turns our attention to the altar, which is the ‘no place’ that is also a place. And through this singing we summon the real presence of the god, but we do this only because we have precise words and precise songs – the right words and songs. And that is what we have inherited.
Chant: “Salve, Regina”
This experience that we have of the sacred moment in which we are addressing this ‘no place’ at the altar with music and ritualized words is, I think, always in the back of our experience when we enter the concert hall. This is, as it were, the original experience from which we are downstream. And this experience of the real presence of the sacred, the sacramental, the consecrated, is a shared experience – even if you encounter it alone. When you walk into a church in a quiet, rural place and you’re alone in that church, you are for that very reason not alone. You are being addressed from nowhere, but as a member of something. So you adopt precise steps, precise tones – you speak in hushed tones and you look around yourself always for the precise words and precise gestures that would make your presence there into something acceptable. But I think music captures something of this ‘no place’ experience – the ‘no place’ where it all takes place. And that’s because it moves in a space of it’s own. In listening, we stand at the threshold of this space, and this is a philosophical point which is sometimes quite difficult to put across. Let me just give you a few thoughts.
When we listen to music – and perhaps not when we’re playing it or even singing it, but just listening – we experience a sense of things moving. The theme moves up and down in a one-dimensional space that is represented in the bar lines of the score. And it moves from one place to another. The opening theme of Beethoven’s third piano concerto, for instance, moves from C to E-flat to G and it comes down again. So between those notes there is a movement that you hear, but it’s an imaginary movement. The notes themselves are simply sounds if you think of them in real, physical terms. There’s a sequence of sounds but we hear in that sequence a movement up and then down. It has a certain force to it. It has a certain speed, and the sounds themselves have weight. As it goes down that C-minor scale to the tonic, you feel the weight increasing: you think, “It’s got to go further, it’s got to go further.” And then Beethoven stops it. With a couple of dominant-to-tonic commas, he stops the music in midstream.
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3
And musical sounds have all kinds of spatial features like opacity and transparency. The chords in a Debussy prelude might sound to you totally transparent, as though you could hear what is coming from behind them. There’s also a gravitational force in music: things seem to be, as it were, attracted to each other. They seem to drag things behind each other; they coalesce. Think of the beginning of Brahms’s second piano concerto where the horn announces the first phrase of the opening theme and seems to drag the piano behind it, after which, then, the piano takes over from the horn and completes the phrase. The piano is in one part of the concert hall, the horn in another part. There is no physical interaction between them, but in the notes that you hear, in the musical line, you hear a gravitational force which is making those two things cohere and move together.
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2
This is all by way of suggesting that music in the listening culture to which I’m referring is organized spatially even though it isn’t in a real space. There is no actual space comparable to the physical space in which you and I live that contains the music. The music itself is creating that space and it’s creating it in your imagination. So the musical experience has some of this character of being nowhere. It’s creating a space of it’s own, which is not part of physical space and of which we are privileged witnesses through our ears, so to speak – but into which we ourselves cannot enter, either. It is something like the way that we sense a real presence around us in the sacred moment, but one that’s addressing us from ‘no place’ where we are.
This raises the question of how we find meaning in music. What kind of meaning do we find and how important is it to us? Does this help explain the incredible weight that has been given to the musical experience in our culture? Obviously, music can occur in conjunction with words. Music is used to set words and many people think that that is the primary way in which music acquires meaning – through word setting. You have a poem on the one hand, you have the musical setting on the other hand, and somehow they come together in the experience of these things. We hear the music perhaps as an illustration of the words or expressing the same thing that the words express. Those of you who are familiar with Lieder, especially the Schubert songs, will recognize that there is something consummate in what the music can provide to a very simple poem by way of translating it from a naïve expression of something into a kind of perfected drama. But what exactly is going on here? I want to say that it’s not just an identity of expression, but much more to do with the fact that the music provides appropriate gestures because it’s moving in this imaginary space that we ourselves are imagining in hearing, that we are surrounding the words with the gestures which in some way complete them. It is as though the music is observing the words with a sympathetic gaze. It is standing next to them and moving with them.
And I think for this reason, contrasting words can be set to the same music. In many of the Bach cantatas you will find that the composer uses again and again some of the themes and structures which appeal to him because they fit into the musical context. And they seem absolutely appropriate even though perhaps the emotions suggested by the words are completely different on each occasion. Many people think this a proof that music really doesn’t express emotion at all – that it can be used in these completely contrasting ways suggests that really, after all, it’s an illusion on our part and that we attribute emotional meaning to the music. But I think that’s not right. If we see the music as observing the words, sympathetically responding to them with the gestures that are appropriate to them, then of course it could be making the same movements in response to contrasting emotions in the words. What it is doing is providing those words with a context which enables us to identify with them.
In the supreme examples, however, we want to say that the music is in some way picking up the words and taking them to another place – the ‘no place’ that is also a sacred place. Here I would play for you Bach’s famous aria from the St. Matthew Passion, “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” which perhaps many of you know. It opens with a violin obligato, one of the longest melodies that have ever been composed, simply introducing, before any words have been uttered, the state of mind that Bach wishes you to understand. And it’s a very complex state of mind. That moment in the St. Matthew Passion occurs just after Peter has a heard the cock crow, and has remembered the words of Jesus who had told him that before the cock crows he would betray him thrice. And he goes out and weeps bitterly. It’s a beautiful recitative setting of those words followed by this extraordinary violin melody in 12/8 time. And you don’t know yet what is going to be said next. But what is said by the words is something very strange: it’s not a direct comment on Peter’s emotion, but a general plea for mercy from God. “Have mercy on me, my God.” In other words, “Recognize that I live in a state of sin and that I will always fall short of what is required of me.”
Bach: “Erbarme dich, mein Gott”
Because music can have such an extraordinary emotional power of its own, independently of words even if it can be put to the use of words, there arose at a certain stage in the history of our civilization the idea that the real meaning of music would be best identified if we could separate it from words altogether. A certain distinction was made in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century between music that is applied and absolute music. Absolute music was thought to be the true music – the music which is not put to use in setting words or in accompanying a dance or in managing the conduct of a drama or any of the normal uses to which music might be put. Absolute music is just there for its own sake and in its own right. And that, surely, is the music of the concert hall: music which is simply played, which we attend to in reverent silence.
The word absolute was very appealing to the German romantic philosophers and poets who first put it forward – partly because it is a philosophical word. It seems to denote something which has purified itself of all pollution from the surrounding day-to-day reality. It’s as though this kind of music is lifted out of all its applications so as to reveal what it is in itself, in its essence. It reveals its intrinsic meaning. Now, whether you can make full sense of that is one of the great questions of musical aesthetics. And I’ll just say one or two things about it because I think, again, this is part of trying to understand why music has had the enormous significance that it has had for us.
The first point to make is that music is not a representational art. I think this is not often seen quite as clearly as it should be seen. Painting, as you know, is a representational art in its highest forms. It is an attempt to depict reality. It shows the world in a certain light, but the world that it shows is independent of the painting. You look at the painting and you see through the painting to another world – not always, of course: with modern abstract art you don’t have that experience. But that’s one reason for thinking that modern abstract art is a kind of degenerate case. In the central case, painting is there to represent something other than itself. And the same is true of literature and poetry. But in the case of music, this is not so. Although music can be used to set words, although it can be used to accompany a dance or to present a drama, in the case that really interests us – where we think that we are concentrating on the music itself – it doesn’t represent things, or if it does represent something it’s only itself. It is just there, as an object of attention. There are cases, of course, where music imitates sounds other than musical sounds. In Debussy’s La Mer you have attempts to imitate the movement of the sea in various conditions. But suppose somebody said to you that, although he loves Debussy’s La Mer, he can’t see any analogy with the movement of the sea. You wouldn’t say for that reason that he had misunderstood it. There are many forms of imitation that you don’t have to latch onto in order to understand the movement in the music. If music were a representational art you’d have to understand the subject matter in order to understand the music. And I think it’s very, very rare that that is required – that you, as it were, understand the music in terms of something else.
And again, music isn’t a language, either. It’s like a language in certain respects, but you couldn’t use music in order to conduct a conversation. When you hear in many of the Haydn and Beethoven quartets that kind of conversation-like music, as though the instrumentalists were responding to each other in the way that people do when having a friendly conversation, it’s not an actual conversation that you’re hearing. There is nothing other than the music that they are saying to each other. There is no exchange of information. It’s just something that’s very like a conversation going on. Even so, of course, music does have a kind of syntax – that is to say, there are rules that seem to have emerged over time to which we get habituated. And every note in music builds up certain expectations as to what will follow it. This is particularly true of tonal music. One of the things that worries us about atonal music is that we don’t have expectations as to what will follow any particular note in a melodic line or any particular harmony in the accompanying chords. But with tonal music, precisely because of the tonal syntax, we do have those expectations. So there is a background syntax that we seem to be able to grasp and it carries us forward through the music. It seems to be intimately connected with the meaning of the music. And in that sense, music is like a language.
But this syntax is not conventional: it’s the effect of use and not the cause of it. In language, syntax is entirely arbitrary. You can make your own rules – and there are many artificial languages of which this is true. Each language has different rules for constructing a syntactically correct sentence out of the parts of it. But in music, syntax is not conventional. There is something natural about the syntax that has emerged over the centuries in tonal music. It wasn’t somebody’s choice to create the relation between the dominant seventh and the tonic which makes the tonic such a natural successor to the dominant seventh. That’s something that we’ve learned to hear, and if you try to remake the code so that that particular convention – that syntactical rule – is denied, you’ll find that your audience won’t follow you. So it’s like the syntax of language in a way, but not conventional.
Bach: Cello Suite No. 1
There is nevertheless a form that emerges from the use of this syntax, and musical form is one of the most important features that interests us in this so-called absolute music – music which is there for its own sake and is not applied to anything else. And as in architecture, the parts of music answer to each other. Léon Krier in his lecture showed us some very wonderful examples – in his inimitable draftsman’s style – of architectural elements in which the parts enter into relation with each other, and how by altering the dimensions the relation is in some way distorted. Another meaning entirely begins to attach itself to the architectural form. But without the meaningful parts, the architectural form would have no meaning at all. It’s because there are moldings that you can divide a wall into meaningful areas and see whether they correspond to each other proportionately. It’s because a column has a capital, a base, and all the moldings around them that you can understand the relations between its parts and obtain a sense of harmony between them. And I think that one of the great errors – to add to what Léon said – of modernism is to think that you can understand the architectural form without the meaningful parts from which the building is constructed. On the contrary, you end up with buildings which, because you have no meaningful parts, have no shadows with which to measure them. I think something similar is true of music: musical form isn’t just an overall, liquid assembly. It’s generated, bit-by-bit, from meaningful details. It is only there because we have this syntax which enables us to understand the parts.
But there is a mystery, as well, to musical form. It’s not just a matter of following certain rules. The traditional forms of music were constructed according to rules. There’s a rule for constructing the perfect sonata form movement. There are rules for constructing fugues, and so on. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that you obey these rules that the resulting piece of music will have real musical form. Clementi’s sonatas and sonatinas, which all of you learn when you begin learning to play the piano, are full of perfect sonata form movements which are deeply formless. There’s nothing that happens in them. There is no real tension built up at the beginning which takes them through to the end. But they’re charming and very useful to piano teachers. In Scarlatti, you have these defiant violations of the traditional forms. Those little sonatas of his which seem from the technical point of view entirely formless are nevertheless perfect little miniatures – perfectly formed in the sense that everything given at the beginning takes you inexorably through to the end, and there isn’t a redundant element in them. This is true, too, of the great formal masterpieces like the sonata movements of Bruckner’ symphonies. But there could be formal perfection, also, without conventional form when there is no reference to any particular system of rules for generating a musical movement – as in the three movements of Debussy’s La Mer, each of which is formally absolutely perfect in the sense that I’m intending, but has no real reference to the traditions of musical structure. This is similarly true of Beethoven’s late C-sharp minor quartet.
So why should we be interested in form in this case? This is a deep question, which is extremely relevant to the whole idea of a listening culture. When you go to a concert to listen to something, you go not just because it’s live music and otherwise you only get it on your iPad or whatever. You’re going partly because the form seems so much clearer when you can engage with your eyes and with your sense of space with the individual components, the individual musical lines, that go to compose it. I think this is one of the most important aspects of the listening experience – when you’re in the presence of the players – that in some way you see and hear and are surrounded by this coming-together of separate currents of energy into a comprehensive form. And this interest is not simply the result of taking an aesthetic attitude – in other words, of attending to the thing – it goes deeper.
We have a deep interest in form. We require the parts in a work of music to answer to each other. And, as I said, part of the disaster of modernist architecture lies here. It reminds us that we are at home with form but we are at sea with the formless. If you look at the city with which you are familiar, you have a very good example of this: Baltimore is one of the few American cities that hasn’t been yet entirely destroyed. It’s got another five or six years of life. You’ve got whole sections of the street where you see buildings that were made in very different sizes and of very different materials, but all attempting to produce form out of matching parts or out of parts that respond to each other. Then they’re interrupted by utterly formless blocks which have bulk but no detail. And we’re not at home with those other things.
Form seems to be a fundamental need of the human psyche. Why is this? I’ll offer just a very rough suggestion, which is that our lives are incomplete and we are constantly embarking on things – adventures or just a walk around the block or a conversation with a friend or something bigger like a love affair or whatever. We embark on these things and it quickly dissipates in chaos or incompletion. Something interrupts it. Nothing comes properly to an end, and then a sense invades us of the futility of things. “I should have done that properly. I didn’t bring it to a conclusion. It is simply the ragged ends of something that I began but couldn’t actually bring to any effective conclusion.” In everything we do we are aiming to get somewhere, but we never seem to arrive there.
Perhaps one of the things that art can do us is to provide us with a destination. When we enter a work of music, so to speak, we’re taken up by it and it’s moving us towards a destination of its own. Because in some deep sense we’re identifying with the movement in the music, we hear it as bringing to completion the gestures that originated in us. We follow these gestures and episodes to their completion. And there’s a sense that, after all, these ragged ends of human life don’t have to be just ragged. They could, in some ideal world, find a conclusion of their own; and we are, similarly, beings who do have it within us to arrive at our destination. You can think of your own examples of that, but to me, a very effectively example is the first movement of Brahms’s fourth symphony, which starts off with a very obvious gesture: a descending third followed by a rising sixth. And growing out of that gesture is another one of the same kind, and then you gradually realize that this gesture has penetrated the whole orchestra and has taken on a life of its own and moves through successive blocks of thematic material until finally it reaches its inevitable fulfillment ten minutes later.
As well as our desire for form, we also have a hunger for meaning. Music, as I said earlier, is not sound. It inhabits sound in the same way that a face inhabits a picture. It’s there in the sound; we hear the movement in the sound through entering that imagined space. What we’re hearing, judged as a physical object, is just sound. But the music is not that sound. It is the thing that we hear in it. So we’re always listening for something that speaks to us through the music – a kind of disembodied voice in an imagined space. And that voice is in the world but not of it, to use the religious language. It is speaking to us, but not from any space in which we ourselves stand.
Nevertheless, we judge it. If we’re listening, we want to know if it’s saying something serious. And if it’s serious, from what psychic region does it come? We have the impression often that truly serious music has, as it were, put its ear to the ground and heard the far-off murmur of the infinite. And that’s the kind of experience you have obviously from things like the openings of Bruckner’s symphonies and the famous opening of Beethoven’s ninth symphony in which the music is saying, “Look, something is speaking through me from far, far away – and you must put your ear to the ground just as I am doing.”
This connects in my view with our experience of each other. To understand an experience, of course, is not necessarily to justify it. But we still have to understand this experience that we get from music. And one way of understanding it is to see its relation to our everyday experience of each other. What I want to say is that the reaching for the transcendental is actually an everyday event for human beings. It isn’t something unusual because it’s what we are doing all the time with each other.
When I encounter another person, as I encounter you or as you encounter each other, whether in conversation or just simply standing and looking at you, I have a sense that there is a kind of barrier between me and you. There you are looking at me, speaking to me, but the thing that you really are – the ‘I’ behind that barrier – is not something that can ever be made visible or tangible to me. And yet I’m constantly reaching out to try and take possession of it, to try to be in full contact with you. And I, too, stand behind such a barrier. I know that you’re looking at my face and you’re listening to my words, but I also know that in some deep sense you can’t actually enter that space from which I address you.
We have to reach across this barrier. Otherwise, what is the point of human life? Everything that we do and hope for depends upon crossing that barrier to the other and being at one with him or her. So we do reach across it, and when we’re doing things together of the right kind, we can forget that barrier. We have a sense in communal activities that the barrier has dissolved and that the various ‘I’s have melted into a ‘we.’ And I think this dissolving of the barrier between us occurs especially in our shared attention to the ‘no place,’ as in the religious experience when we’re all attending to the altar, that ‘no place’ which is a place nevertheless.
I suspect that something similar is going on also in the concert hall. The music is, as it were, speaking for us in our communal assault on the silence that is being created in the concert hall, and we are with it in trying to get through to what it is that’s speaking through that silence. I think the sense that we find in music a transcendental voice that we can engage with and enter into communication with is something that has its origins in our everyday need for each other. And that’s part of its significance for us.
Now, I think I’ll say a little bit more. I think I have more material than I can possible present to you, but I shall carry on for a bit more. We’re all familiar with the facts of human sympathy: that we can be at one with another person in his joy or grief, and likewise we can feel sympathy for animals, for nature itself – we can be at one with the natural world in the sense that we feel a harmony between our emotions and our will, our desires, and the context that surrounds us and inspires those things in us. And when I feel sympathy with another person, I enter into his state of mind. “I know what it’s like to feel as you do.” We don’t necessarily know how to put it into words, but often in extreme moments of sympathy, especially those which are of real value to us, we have this sense of knowing from inside what the other person is feeling. And there is a kind of vindication of our own life in that. The fact that that is possible brings home to us the other dimension of our being, where we are at one with others.
Music can also shows what it is like to be in a condition for which we have no words. In Fidelio, when Leonore and Florestan are finally aware of each other’s presence they sing that famous duet O namenlose Freude! (O Nameless Joy!). And the music really does express a joy of the kind no words could possibly capture – and indeed probably of a kind that only somebody as solitary as Beethoven could think really exists. Nevertheless, the music, as it were, gives us that first person perspective on this otherwise unknowable thing.
In a similar way, much music reaches towards the transcendental – reaches beyond the limits of this world to the kind of archetypes from which we think our own feelings and states of mind have descended. And perhaps this shared moment of reaching towards the transcendental is what we ultimately wanted from music. That is one of the real questions: Is it so?
Well, I’ll conclude with a philosophical thought about ‘about.’ My feelings are directed from the ‘I’ towards the ‘you.’ This is what philosophers call an intentional relation, not a material relation. I feel maybe fear, love, shame, or whatever towards you. And it may be that I feel this even though you don’t exist. It’s unknown to me that you’ve been killed, but still my feeling is there. The feeling is a going out towards the other which doesn’t necessarily depend upon the other’s existence or anything that’s going on in the other.
And this feature of our states of mind – their intentionality – is something that philosophers regard as, in many ways, marking out the human condition from everything else in the universe. Here we have these extraordinary conditions that we undergo which are in some way incomplete. They’re reaching out from us; they are unsaturated. They’re looking for the object that will fulfill them and complete them. We have this sense all the time with each other – that we’re reaching out in that way – and I think we have this in music, too. When we’re listening properly, surrounded by others who are doing likewise, and imagining that space in which the music moves under impulses of its own, we hear the music, not just moving as a physical object might move, but having intentions of its own, reasons of its own. It’s got a reason for moving from C to E-flat, just as we might have. It is a kind of master of its imagined space.
Important works of music exhibit in that way a kind of freedom and completeness to which we aspire in our own lives, but which we don’t obtain. For this reason, I think we think of music as having an ‘aboutness’ of its own. It’s not just there, the movement of sounds in imaginary space. It is itself responding to something that we can’t directly perceive or know – in just the way that we can’t directly perceive or know each other. It is, if you like, a source of feelings which belong to it. It’s as though it is about something even though it’s not something that we could ever ourselves engage with or know directly.
And I think it’s this feature of music – this capacity it has to lift up our hearts, to take us into a world where we, too, can imagine being complete in our emotions, to take all our emotions to their conclusion, and to rejoice in them as they are – that is perhaps the most important experience of the concert hall, and one which is threatened wherever the listening experience is threatened by invasion from the noise that surrounds us.
So I would give these as my philosophical reasons for thinking that music not only gives us a sense of the transcendental, but is a part of our lives that fulfills us and depends upon the whole symphonic concert hall tradition in order to be the thing that it is. I’ll stop there. Thank you.
The Fear of Backwardness
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an edited transcription of the lecture delivered by Léon Krier at our inaugural The Future of the Symphony Conference in September 2014. The video of this lecture can be viewed here.
Many of our doings and sayings are really motivated by fear. René Girard, who is well known in this country, has differentiated very clearly desires – metaphysical desires, desires which are directly motivated by bodies, and desires which imitate other desires but which are not felt, which are not considered to be of strict necessity. We still do not quite understand what motivates this desire – that the desire of desire can be stronger than the desire itself. For instance, Girard identifies anorexia as not a physical but a mental debility in which somebody desires something that he does not understand and that can destroy him. And fashion is really that phenomenon which explains or realizes the extraordinary dominance nowadays of metaphysical desire. How otherwise to explain the fact that, for about eighty years now, many gifted musicians refuse to write music, but write a kind of anti-music which instead of giving pleasure gives pain?
How can one explain that despite the failure of modern architecture – which was very visible already from the start – such a flawed theory, demonstrated by extremely bad results in both the urban sense and the architectural/technological sense, came to be repeated so many times around the world and then became the dominant system, not only in our cities but above all in our education system, forbidding any reference to traditional architecture or urbanism except as something which is no longer allowed? I studied for two terms at Stuttgart University, and when I understood that what was being taught there was going to destroy any idea that had motivated me to study architecture, I gave up.
Baltimore’s Washington Monument at dawn.
I had the extraordinary chance to have been born in a very beautiful environment, and I found the pleasure I had known in that formidable environment again this morning, very briefly at six o’clock, when I got up in my room here in the hotel. This is not a romantic vision of Caspar David Friedrich, but it’s actually the main square on Charles Street. It is this experience, this personal experience, that has marked anybody who is really interested in traditional architecture or traditional music. Most people are marked by this extraordinary experience, and I think the most important distinction which we have to make is that traditional architecture and traditional music are not historical phenomena, but transcendent phenomena. They are like language, or like mathematics, or like anything good: they are really atemporal goods – good beyond their time.
I try to educate my students to make a fundamental distinction – not to use the term historical architecture, but to distinguish traditional architecture and modernist architecture by a technological difference. In fact, traditional architecture is defined by technology, and therefore is atemporal. It is not linked just to the past, but is that experience of humans building at their scale because there is no other possibility. Obviously the use of fossil fuel energies has created the extraordinary possibility to ignore human capacities, to ignore climate, to ignore soil, and build virtually the same kind of buildings everywhere, independent of climate and of geography.
Echternach, Luxembourg.
I grew up in Luxembourg City, which was virtually intact despite the Second World War that passed over and destroyed the northern part of the country. But I was educated in the small town of Echternach which had been completely destroyed by the Brunstad Offensif. Most of the American artillery was sitting on one side and they would bombard the Germans on the other by artillery, and on the way, they destroyed the city. This is considered by most people as an historic city but is in fact a reinvention of the 1940s and 1950s. I grew up in these building sites and it was an extraordinary experience which has lasted for a lifetime. I have pursued this kind of environment all my life. And I realize, now that I am 68, that all my theories and writings have been about how to make such an environment – not only to preserve it, but to create it ex novo.
I spend my summers in Mallorca practicing music, and also under this porch I have been writing a book which is called Corbusier After Le Corbusier. In it I am reforming, correcting, and translating Corbusier’s ideas into traditional architecture. For a musician it would be extremely interesting (and I think there are people actually attempting) to take Pierrot Lunaire and write out the ideas – because there are ideas in Pierrot Lunaire as well as interesting forms and expressions – but to translate it in a mode of Mahler or of Mozart, or of anyone who wrote music which you can listen to the second time without getting bored.
Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
Because what those great musicians have done is virtually invented a world from scratch, building on an enormous edifice of sounds, to create something which is entirely new, in the same way that architecture was invented two thousand, three thousand years ago – many, many centuries and millennia ago. Musical architecture, in that sense of symphonic monumentality and extraordinary spatial dimension, is something relatively new. It is such a glorious experience that you cannot imagine that it will go for a thousand years. There won’t be ten thousand Brahmses or Mozarts writing two thousand five hundred symphonies.
On the other hand, I think that, because they have discovered this world, once we have studied it and, with our sensibilities and the enormous talent which is born every day, met this world, that it will become our own. And then one can probably write a fifth or sixth Brahms symphony which will be as good as the first or second. I think it can be so because there really are new worlds. Discovering one is like moving into a painting – imagine a great landscape of Claude Lorrain and painting it the other way around. It’s virtually an invention of landscape but you can move in it. It’s actually what film does: from one image you create a world. The one world is concentrated in a single image.
I grew up as a modernist, of course, in revolt against my parents. My mother was a musician. I drove them mad with Schoenberg and Webern and so on. My mother always said of Stravinsky’s music, “What is this horse burial? Why do you play this?” And of course, my first building designs were extreme acts of provocation and protest. It’s really when I did my first project for the town where I had been educated, Echternach, that I realized Corbusier could no longer be my master – because plowing any of these enormous buildings which I had been drawing into such a town would mean utter destruction. It is only when I started doing these kinds of projects that I felt the necessity to really relearn a craft that is no longer taught.
Now, it took me twenty years to build the theory which is now being practiced as New Urbanism. It was truly an act of rediscovery – uncovering what had been done for thousands of years before. But what we do not do today is understand the motivating force of modernism. We really don’t understand what modernism is. Well, there are ways of approaching the problem or explaining it by metaphor and by allegory. Modernism in architecture – and music – is very much like the artificial invention of a language, like Esperanto. Esperanto was used by tradesmen and by a very small number of people. But imagine that a very powerful political group took over not just a province or a country, or even a continent, but over the world and imposed Esperanto as a single language, forbidding all other languages and declaring them as purely historical – no longer valid, no longer legitimate for use today. That is what has happened to architecture and even to music.
In architecture it can be explained very simply in a material way. Because of the introduction and use of fossil fuel energies and the fabrication of new building materials, like steel-reinforced concrete or plastics or plate glass – all of which we need enormous amounts of energies to produce – we can achieve building performances which before were not possible with traditional, natural materials. Yet there is no specificity to these new materials. Most people think that concrete or steel or the industrial production of nails created new architecture. In fact, it is not architecture that they created, because the forms which are possible with concrete are independent of the material and there is nothing you can’t cast – a classical arch in concrete as well as a square hole. There is nothing authentically modern to have square forms with concrete, or completely free forms. There is no form for these materials because they can be shaped in any way. You can cast the buildings, put them upside down, and they will be fine for a while. There’s no real authenticity with so-called modern materials.
And because there is very little experience, there is of course no language. There is no language comparable to the language of traditional architecture, which is extremely complex and which is very specific to regions or altitudes formed by different cultures and climates. I think if one used synthetic materials for a thousand years it is absolutely certain that human intelligence and senses and sensibilities will create a language to be the equivalent of traditional architecture, but it will take many centuries. We have not even started. That is why these buildings, which have been produced lately, are so completely out of control. They are just the size that some financial will or political will – or some kind of will independent of traditional scales – allows us to build. Now, when you consider that in the future fossil fuels will become extremely expensive, very scarce, and probably very difficult to use, suddenly we can see that the future of modernist architecture is very limited, and therefore also of modernist art.
The question is “What is modernism?” It is the excess of modernity. It is trying to be more modern than being modern. We are all modern – we cannot help being modern. Just by being here we are modern. So it is not a quality to be modern. We are modern whether we like it or not. It is a question of fate, not of choice. Whereas modernism is definitely something to do with an ideological scheme.
A house pretending to be a monastery.
And this started much earlier than synthetic materials. It has to do with the development of Europe, with the political development and also the military expansion – this extraordinary will to expand beyond the limits of Europe and to absorb other cultures. Architectural language had been troubled for at least 250 or 300 years – well before modernism started. Modernism can actually be explained as a reaction against the trouble in the language.
We began to see strange confusions. For instance, we find a building that looks like an abbey or a monastery – some religious building. In fact it is not an abbey. It is a house for a very rich man designed by a very talented architect. It pretends to be a monastery, but it is a house.
A pumping station in Potsdam, designed by Persius.
Or consider a building designed by the very talented architect Persius, who was a student of Schinkel; and though it looks like a mosque, it is not. It is a pumping station for the fountains of Pottsdam, built in the 1840s. This was the strange trouble in the language: why would one create buildings which would no longer represent what they historically mean?
You had then extremes like a simple block of flats in Geneva where you have the whole history and all the styles of the world you can imagine just unfolded for such a lowly purpose. And that leads to protest. It is so extreme and completely absurd, that there is no more language; there is just noise, messages that are meaningless, and it leads to protest and refusal.
A block of flats in Geneva.
Twenty years later, in 1914, a very talented architect in Denmark, Ivar Bentsen, foreshadowed the Bauhaus in two competitions for the opera in Copenhagen. The square was all the same architecture. You can only distinguish the opera house by a kind of tower which is dressed like it was an actual building. Modernism in that sense can be seen as a protest against Victorian excess, against this enormous outbreak of eclecticism.
Design for Copenhagen by Ivar Bentsen.Church designed by Mies van der Rohe.
The protest led to other more important movements, producing buildings like the one Mies van der Rohe built it at the Illinois Institute of Technology. What is it? It is not a warehouse; it is a church. I think the cross has been replaced by a searchlight, which is very interesting.
Then, of course, there is the Pompidou Center in Paris. Now the question is, if you build pumping houses which look like mosques, houses which look like monasteries, culture palaces which look like some oil refinery or some building having to do with industry, or a church which looks like a warehouse, what should monasteries look like? What should warehouses look like? What should industrial buildings look like, in order that there is no confusion? It’s very difficult to understand. These buildings, these reactions against Victorian excess, are considered to be more rational than Victoriana. In fact, they have very little to do with reason. The Pompidou Center was planned not only to have the walls move, but also the floors were meant to move up and down. That is why the structure was carried outside as were the stairs – so that everything could move because movement was meant to be progressive.
Centre Georges Pompidou (aka “the Beaubourg’), Paris.
That is really where we are. How has progress – this idea of progress – come to dominate something which in fact should give stability? Historically, the stability of structure has never prohibited mobility of use. Throughout history we have buildings change use and change meanings; market buildings become churches and so on. There is a very long history of change of use, despite the solidity and immobility of the immobile. Immobilier in French and immobiliare in Italian refer to the fact that buildings are immobile. They do not move because they are not cranes or instruments. Now, why such a stupid ideology? That such an excessive set of ideas should become dominant is still difficult to explain.
Extension of the French Senate building, designed by Christian Langlois.
At the same time the Beaubourg was built, Christian Langlois built an extension for the Senate building in Paris and Spreckelsen built his arch of La Défense. They are both modern architecture produced by the same regime. But of course the French state would never see itself symbolized by the building of Monsieur Langlois.
But whatever happened in the Beaubourg could be done in any kind of building. You didn’t need the mobility. Actually the mobility never happened: they built solid masonry walls inside, in order to have a proper museum. The floors never moved. You can perform that feat on oil derricks or boring platforms on the high seas because, though they are extremely expensive, they bring in inconceivable amounts of money. But, as we know, culture does not make direct income.
All this happened in architecture at an extremely large scale, destroying historic cities of incredible value. If a painter would take a painting of Gozzoli, a beautiful wall painting in San Gimignano, and would start to restore it in this manner – saying, “I don’t believe in historic restoration; I want to express myself, so we will restore Gozzoli!” – there would be world scandal. How can such an idiotic idea to destroy a really important work of art be funded? That is exactly what is happening not only to our cities but to our landscapes.
A “restored” mural by Gozzoli.
They are guided, and now disciplined and actually ordered, by two charters: the Charter of Athens and the Charter of Venice. And these cannot be reformed. I tried to understand this set of ideas – like the Charter of Venice, this completely absurd set of ideas – that says if you restore an historical building you must not imitate history. You have to differentiate anything you do by material, by color, by proportion, by character – in fact, you must violate the historic building. Otherwise it is not modern. That’s what the Charter of Venice says. The Charter of Athens stated long ago that cities should not be reconstructed as cities, but be divided, deconstructed in extremely large zones of single use – housing one way, culture another, education – all separate, and linked by public or private transport. They are unsustainable ideas, and yet they dominate the world.
And not only do they dominate the world, but they dominate particularly bureaucracy. And bureaucracy does not think. By its nature it cannot reflect critically on what it does. It must apply what it is told to do by law and by regulations which it is supposed to administer. And that is where the thing becomes extremely toxic, because when we now try to build traditional towns or traditional buildings we are faced with a bureaucracy that not only does not understand us but opposes us.
I became interested in an important project in the center of Moderna. The officer of restoration refused the project. We went to the minister in Rome and he sat down with us. He said, “Professor, can you tell us why you put peaked roofs on your buildings?” We were sitting in a room above Rome; we could see thousands of peaked roofs from where we sat.
I said, “I’m sorry. It is either peaked like this or inverted like that. You think there is a flat roof, but there is no flat roof. Have you ever looked at a flat roof? It is always leaning one way or the other because the water has to be carried away.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, and we went on. But that is the mentality, because bureaucracy is not supposed to think.
A year later I had another project for the EUR district in Rome – a district built partially under Mussolini – and I was to restore the main square with a huge parking area going under the buildings. When the project was presented, everybody liked it. But the head of public monuments refused it, saying, “You cannot do imitative architecture. Mimetic architecture you cannot do.”
I responded, “But Signora, can you tell us what is non-mimetic architecture?”
“We are not supposed to engage in theoretical discourse.”
Again I said, “But Madame, we are imitative beings. Everything in nature is imitative, mimetic. Flowers imitate flowers, humans imitate humans, everything is imitative and repetitive.”
“We must not engage in theory,” and she stopped the project. It was never built. This is now the system which dominates our towns and cities, and it cannot be reformed. It will die its own death by the exhaustion of fossil fuels, or by simply becoming too expensive.
Traditional architecture is technology before any style. It is technology and typology of building solid buildings, responding to purposes of individuals or of communities, of small or large groups, and it is the accumulation of these experiences which creates the tradition. It is a technique to resolve the building in a pleasant, practical, and lasting way. Innovations happen when they are necessary. In the Middle Ages you do not invent hangars for airplanes. There are no airplanes. But when airplanes appear, there are suddenly hangars for airplanes. That is when innovation happens typologically. Most architects are educated nowadays to be inventive, to create typologies. They present a building and they say, “This is my typology.” Completely insane – a building is not a typology. No one can invent a typology just because he or she likes it. We are in a situation, really, of regression, not of advancement. The fear of backwardness, of not being “in tune”, not being “cool”, is I think paralleled by the fear of age. Why don’t people want to age anymore?
So they buy a beautiful, old house in a beautiful village and then they paint it red, flatten the roof, or make windows which don’t fit. It’s the idea of being different, but different from what? That is always the question. Because the fact is that we are all individuals. Whatever we do is individual. Whether we write, we sing, we walk, we stand, we cook, everything we do is marked by individuality. So there should not be any fear of not being individual. We cannot help being individual any more than we can help being modern. We are individual and we are modern. It is not something about which we should bother. Anyone playing the trumpet will play different from the one next to him, because the shape of his lips or his lungs is very different from that of the other, despite their being similar. This obsession with being individual, of developing individual expression, is nonsensical. And you can only develop individual expression within disciplines which are already shaped and which have been practiced.
The thing now with modernist art that has dominated for so long is that we have no more art. Most museums of modern art for me could be closed down without any interest. My test is always this: if you take a piece of so-called modern art and you put it next to the dumpsters and rubbish in the courtyard and it is taken away, it’s not art – because anyone with any sensitivity or any intelligence will recognize a work of art. It has something more about it than just rubbish.
This is where I come to the parallel of music and architecture. Building a very large complex is symphonic work. If you build a large complex over twenty or thirty years – like building a town – you need some discipline which is going to ensure that there will be harmony of parts despite the contrarianism of the users who are going to inhabit it. You need some simple discipline, which can be understood and shared by a large number of people. That is what traditional architecture was about; and that is why we have these incredible treasures of traditional architecture still surviving, despite the will to deform or to destroy them or to wipe them out.
I am practicing this for the Prince of Wales in Poundbury, England and it has now several phases complete. We have built about 45 percent of it. It’s going better and better. It started with enormous difficulties, because the builders were not able to pursue such complex tasks. But now they have been trained and we have architects who have been well trained; and the buildings which come now after twenty years of work and practice are really extraordinary.
A scene from Venice, Italy.
What is distinguishing about traditional architecture – and I think you will find a similarity in music and its universal differentiations – is the very great distinction between vernacular building and classical architecture. In all cultures which have practiced architecture in a systematic way, you have this distinction of vernacular building: very simple buildings which are just walls and pillars and roofs, representing a language of construction which does speak of nothing else but construction. A door is a door, a window is a window, a tile is a tile. There is no message beyond its own being, whereas classical architecture is something more. It is really an artistic translation of building beyond elements of construction into a language that transcends the pure utility of the simple nature of an opening or closure or embrasure or a covering. In Belgium for fifty years now we have given a prize which distinguishes between vernacular and classical architecture – because they are achievements which are of a very different nature, even though they are complementary. You can understand this clearly when you see it in a picture from Venice. Anyone can see which buildings are more important than the others because they are marked by a more elaborate language.
I introduce the differentiation of vernacular and classical in town planning because when people see a street that is not straight, not a gridiron design, they say, “Oh, it’s medieval.” It’s not medieval. Geometry in nature is always meandering. There is no straight line in nature. It’s an invention of the geometry of Euclid. There is no straight line and there is no square angle in nature. There is nothing regular or completely self-identical. It’s all similar, but still all slightly different. To have the correct terminology is very important if you reconstruct, because it’s not self-evident. It has to be so clear that people can easily accept it. Between the gridiron plan and more natural geometry there is enormous consequence for the experience and the use of towns.
The gridiron plan became the dominant technique of building towns in the Indies, in South and Central America, and also in North America where it was used almost exclusively – except in villages lost somewhere in the hills of West Virginia, let’s say. But once you conceptualize these two ideas, you can use them, because they are also intellectual models. You can use them to very powerful effect not only to espouse the land – vernacular geometry is much easier to conform to the land – but also to create very great tensions between the straight and the meandering, between the flow and the node. It is this mixture of geometries which is, I think, most satisfying when you experience towns. There is no better demonstration of this dynamic than Venice: the Grand Canal and so on. Even though most buildings are very regular, they often occupy positions that are very irregular when you look from the air. And that irregularity allows adaptation to the geographic and climatic conditions much more easily than does the gridiron plan.
A vision of Washington, DC.
In this differentiation between vernacular and classical, the classical is reserved for very important buildings, which are for the whole community or for the whole town or for the whole nation, creating a hierarchy of expression and locations – in contrast with the more simple, more laconic nature of the vernacular. For instance, in this form of vernacular geometry, you can have very modest architecture without being boring. It’s always very interesting. Whereas when you have Euclidean geometries and gridiron plans, you must have much better, more ambitious architecture in order for it all to be bearable. Nothing is more boring than barracks architecture. So it’s the mixture of these two geometries and the correct placing of the hierarchy of buildings going from private or individual to public and more common-use which are the tools we use to order a great town. I applied it even to Washington DC: flooding the Tiber Creek creates a big lake, and Americans do not have to go to Venice on their honeymoon – they can come to Washington.
In architecture, it is a well-accepted idea that vernacular is pure technology of building. But it is not pure technology in an abstract sense; it is human technology impregnated by the size and the strength and the capacities of the human body, just as musical instruments are designed for the human hand or for the mouth or for the ear. It is the translation of this simple, purely technical performance into an art form that is what we call classical architecture. And you have it in all different cultures which have developed architecture. But in modernism this distinction doesn’t happen: there is no distinction between concert hall architecture and house architecture. It’s just that one is big and one is small. The Villa Savoir, a charming building of Le Corbusier which measures twenty by twenty-two meters, becomes the Royal Festival Hall in London, which measures fifty by seventy meters. Same number of elements, same architecture. Yet it’s by enlarging size that you change also meaning in nature. Galileo wrote pages on the fact that you cannot design a horse that is a hundred meters tall: it will collapse under the laws of gravity. It is this appropriateness of size, scale, and character which I think marks and limits architecture and gives it shape.
I was struck by the tuning of a piano or a violin. You first overstretch the cord or string, and then release it until it comes to the right vibration, until the tone is harmonized. I do this with my students. They have to take precise measurements of a column, or a vase or a car, and then they have to manipulate those measurements in order to understand why something is classical and to understand that that is a live value, a living designation.
For instance, you take a classical column – Tuscan, the most simple Doric kind – then you vary diameters. Keep the same number of elements, the same moldings, but make it much narrower or much wider, arbitrarily. The result can be called the anorexic or the bulimic column. Or change the vertical proportions. By making slight changes you can powerfully change the column’s character. It goes from elegant to heavy, from martial to enchanting. Or use the same elements but misplace them; it becomes a-tectonic. The logic of form and construction is disrupted if you do not assemble it in the correct way.
If the vernacular and the classical languages are such a very strong reality of the historic and the transcendental experiences of architecture, is it the same with music? You cannot have an allegretto that lasts for twenty-five hours. You would go crazy. These variations of tone, of rhythm, of timbre, of quality are limited, but it is actually their contrast which creates music. So how much classicism do you need to be a happy person? That’s really the question. How much classicism do you need to build a beautiful town. It doesn’t need to be all classical. You need a very large dose of vernacular. You cannot have cream every day.
The White City of Chicago’s World Fair.
A kind of ideal of classicism was performed by Burnham and his colleagues for the White City in Chicago. It was an extraordinary creation, but it was not a model of how the world could be. It was an ideal, Worlds Fair kind of world.
Another extreme of classicism would be the Beaux Arts utopia, where everything is beautiful – even the toilet seat is decorated with pearls. But it’s unsustainable in a psychological and an aesthetic sense.
And at the opposite end of the spectrum you have animal architecture, which is without any meaning beyond its own self. It’s just a pile of material that performs a certain utility. It has also its own beauty, because whatever we do over a long period of time we can only stand it and it can only survive if we cultivate beauty. Even the most solid building cannot survive for very long if it is too ugly. It just becomes unbearable. It will be blown up and destroyed. So it’s beauty which gives a building a quality that is absolutely necessary for its survival. But I think it’s the mixture of these two qualities of classicism and vernacular which gives a town or a landscape its lasting quality. In Venice, or in Williamsburg, for instance, you will find this kind of mixture of classical and vernacular.
Today, following the categorical confusion which modernism brought about and which was largely unconscious, there is no intelligent theory of modernism. We read Le Corbusier – and I love Le Corbusier, despite his problems – because he was a great writer and poet, but his work is childish. There is no serious theory there, no rational theory of how to build the world. It’s unsustainable.
This now being the predominant set of ideas, often the industry continues anyway with the traditional models of vernacular and classical, but when they do they always get it wrong in scale or expression or size. There is a reason why very large common buildings need to be more elaborate than houses: because when you have a simple barn blown up a hundred times it becomes extremely brutal in shape. You need something more to make it not only symbolically more important but also more readable. Classical architecture is that set of forms which allows greatest readability of elements at a distance, imparts permanence, and also creates symbolic value and beauty at a scale which would not be inherent in common building forms.
Today we are faced with strange vernacular temples, hotels that imitate cottage but are the size of an aircraft carrier. Or we have little palaces – cottage size, but obviously ridiculous in scale. When you have relatively small settlements – and let’s put this in the context of music, as in the simple song with the single voice – it can go on for, say, four minutes. But if you have a single voice carrying on for twenty-five hours, you’ll get bored. To orchestrate five hours like Wagner does, you need a lot of art and it needs to be very well modulated to be bearable. I lived in a small village where there was no architecture for sixteen years. There were just three columns inside the church – just enough to have walls, openings, some tiles on the roof, and divided window panes. But art is not missing when this is placed in a beautiful landscape. The landscape takes care of the art. But in large cities you need a much richer language. In the nineteenth-century, this led to the proliferation of imperial carnival classicism – crazy buildings which become such an extraordinary performance. The education required to achieve this performance becomes tyrannical and leads to complete rejection. The Beaux Arts movement trained people until 1958, and then it was finished because, even though it was collegial education, it was also very tyrannical. The same tyranny has descended upon scientists and engineering students – it’s extremely gruesome. Doctors have to study for ten years – absolutely horrendous – day and night. Why this revolt did not happen in medical education or engineering is a mystery to me. Why just in architecture?
The best formula is this mixture of classicism and modernism, where just a few public buildings have a bit more than vernacular. And that can make very charming environments. We understand it by contrast. A building four hundred meters high topped by a statue of Lenin nearly a hundred meters high is public imperialism. The private is reduced to nothingness. On the other hand, we have private imperialism. Think of Fifth Avenue and, of course, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It is quite a nice building, but it’s utterly meaningless among the giants of Fifth Avenue. It is completely humiliated in that setting. The properly structured, classical city is much more balanced.
I limit general building fabric to a very simple theory. Despite the fact that we have motorized vehicles, and even if we have unlimited fossil fuel, no problems with technology, and equipment galore, we should still practice traditional architecture and planning because they are imbued with a humane and aesthetic scale, which is really important.
Public imperialism.
And I identify nine ways of ordering towns and placing buildings. By arranging architecture on one side and urbanism on the other, you have between them nine modes, or combinations, by which to do it. There is a lot of choice, depending on the landscape and so on. What is perfectly unbearable as a generalized proposition is the combination of classical geometry and vernacular architecture. We generally call it “barracks architecture” and it is perfectly unacceptable. It’s fine for barracks and factories, but not for common habitat. So you have these two possibilities of geometry in combination; and then what is an absolute necessity is to have, within towns and within walkable distance, mixed used and mixed scale, which naturally leads also to mixed architecture.
Private imperialism.
But mixed use is not an absolute guarantee of a fine city, because you can create a single building containing all uses – and this was Corbusier’s idea: to have a landliner where you have the church and the factory, the public offices and the art gallery, and the housing and everything all in one building. But that is not a city; it’s a building. Buildings are not cities and cities should not be buildings. A large city is not a large house.
You have another deviation when you have uniform volumes, independent of use – where the businesses, the houses, the public offices, the temple, and the library are all contained within the same uniform volumes, controlled by a cornice line and disciplined so they become completely uniform. That’s equally nonsensical. Then you have “anything goes” mixed use. Even though mixed use is a necessity, it’s not a sufficient condition for a meaningful town.
Now, the distribution of vernacular and classical: if our home is the size of a monastery, the housing is a monumental mosque and the church is a tiny, little, dog house. You can call that well-applied but mis-sized architecture and vernacular. You can also misapply classical architecture to the utilitarian building and the church becomes just a naked box. By analyzing small or large buildings according to these principles, you are able to value whether a building is correctly structured, correctly scaled, or semantically – in the sense of meaning – correct. Only once you have a correct composition can you have a beautiful building. Otherwise it is just illusion, confusion, and deconstruction.
I think that the most important book written about energy was Kunstler’s book, The Long Emergency. And I think it is absolutely necessary to read that book. What it teaches us is that the oil peak is not going to be a symmetrical figure. It rise will rise to its peak and then there will be abrupt, very brutal change – in which we already find ourselves – leading to extreme wars and extreme violence, perpetrated to maintain our dominance in that field and in order to run our pack of instruments and maintain our mode of life. Curiously and interestingly, this peak corresponds to the nadir of the traditional arch, which used to dominate.
Modernism was very interesting when it was an experimental art, when just a few rich clients would build their interesting houses. It has become absolutely lethal as a scheme for mass building – a toxic investment. And it’s going to disappear with the increased cost of energy. It’s the fossil fuel economy that really has changed our mode of managing the air, time, energy, and land, and it is going to change. We have to prepare for that because otherwise it will erupt over our heads.
What dominated traditional architecture was climate and soil, and these conditions created very different architecture between regions. For instance, the architecture of the Basque hillsides and that of the Landes region, which is just twenty kilometers away, are very, very different. Meanwhile, the architecture of the Basque hillsides is virtually the same as that in the Himalayan Mountains because they have similar climatic conditions. It is really climate and altitude which have a very strong influence on the shape and style of buildings, historically and traditionally.
When you have a lot of fossil fuel energy you can build the same building in any climate and any altitude, but it will have no permanence because the energy it will take to maintain these buildings will be too expensive. There is only one model to counter the hubris of scale we now achieve, this excess of verticality or horizontality – and they are related problems: suburbanism piled high or suburbanism spread thin. Three dominant building types – the skyscraper, the sprawler, and the landscraper – always occur in excessively large, single-use zones.
Such zones reach beyond the limits of human scale, following the Charter of Athens which we might also apply to gastronomic intake in something like this way: instead of twenty-one varied meals each week, we have all the liquids on Monday, all the meats on Tuesday, all the fats on Wednesday, pasta on Thursday, Friday (for Catholics) fish, all the alcoholic drinks on Saturday, and the baked goods on Sunday. Then after one week the individual is dead. This is what we have been applying to cities. Housing is not the same as houses. To misunderstand that leads to the deconstruction of settlement. It’s inhuman because it has nothing to do with human settlement. And it’s not sustainable.
This incredible, extraordinary repetition represents the deconstruction of the landscape of human beings. We must reconstruct our overgrown cities because exceeding their proper size, as overgrowing the specific size of a cell, is disease – is cancer. This is what is happening to cities. It is as if families grew, instead of by multiplying the number of individuals, by growing the bodies of the parents until they far exceed their natural size; and this is what has happened to cities that have over-expanded, sprawled horizontally or sprawled vertically.
It is the excess, the cul-de-sac reality, which creates planned congestion. Enormous skyscrapers are vertical cul-de-sacs, which congest the network on which they sit. Why there are not more opponents of skyscrapers I do not understand, because they are completely unreasonable. Imagine skyscrapers developing not just for a generation but for 500 years. Let’s say we have no limit to fossil fuel. It would be absolutely unbearable, except living on top, to be in such a compound. It is idiotic, a completely silly idea, and it’s toxic investment. It’s destroying the future of humankind.
This extraordinary jump of scale, which you have independent of ideology, could be represented as Medieval economy, Renaissance economy, and the economy of the nineteenth century. Most utilitarian states already have enormous lots – lots taken just for housing that would be the size of three traditional towns. These enormous lots are often given to a single architect with a single function, which leads necessarily to boring architecture, and boring architecture is unbearable. So architects invent interesting forms to make the boring program more lively, and hence there are things sticking out and leaning over – this silly ballade, which is no music, it’s terrible boredom and meaningless.
The polycentric plan for Poundbury, Dorset.
Even if we had no limits to energies we should still go back to traditional plotting – in Poundbury, after all, we have the Prince of Wales as a single large landowner, but we have lots which are very different sizes, allowing very different forms of use and therefore also of architecture. Poundbury developed as polycentric instead of having a polynuclear nature. If you have enormous concentrations, this also leads to extraordinarily and extremely rigid social stratification. It is social zoning. For instance, in Colombia you have zones according to income – something like nine categories of income. You cannot buy a house if you are from one class in a zone of a different class. But it is differentiation of scale – great variety of scale, mixed scales, mixed use, mixed architecture – that leads to a rich and varied traditional architecture environment.
Poundbury, Dorset.
The buildings at Poundbury are now as good as any historic buildings in England. We limit our heights not metrically but by numbers. I think that a good scale for towns is three floors: what you can walk every day ten times without getting bored. Anything higher is a stress. I lived in Madrid on the eighth floor, walking up it twice every day in order to keep in shape – but it’s hell walking eight floors. So imagine even the slightest irregularity in the use of energy; when electricity is no longer assured high buildings will become extremely difficult to use.
But this limitation to three stories is no limitation to height. We are not against high buildings per se. The Eiffel Tower is a three-story skyscraper. The Capitol in Washington is a one-story skyscraper. The Washington Memorial is 150 meters high; it has no story. So you can build very high, symbolically powerful buildings, without having many stories.
Going back to small scale operations, we only use small builders, with a maximum of twenty employees. In that way you bring back and you encourage small scale, local craftsmen – those who can actually live where they work. And this redevelopment of crafts allows you to use forms which you are not able to use – a richness and an authenticity of elements which you are not able to use – with large forms of industrial building.
Cayala, Guatamala.
The project in Guatemala called Cayala is now having a lot of success. It took eight years to get it off the ground, but we had very good architects who are our main partners there and who were trained at Notre Dame University in Indiana. We now have this new generation of talent that has been properly trained. In music, you are lucky because you still have the old craft of playing instruments the proper way being taught. In architecture, we don’t have that. We have one school in the United State which teaches the craft of designing traditional buildings, and unfortunately often the industry is not able to follow. But every one of these sites is a teaching instrument.
Many architects think that imitating traditional forms is not creative, but nobody can reinvent the roof or the window. It is a complex in itself. You don’t need to reinvent the window. It has been invented. All these reinventions are just noise. The problem we have to deal with is that the industry is often reproducing traditional models, but their replacements are all fake and therefore one of the toxic results – maybe the most important toxic result of modernism is that traditional architecture has become a product of scandalous inauthenticity. The market actually buys the worst kitsch. People get fake houses. They spend their life’s earnings to get a fake house, which after twenty years is just rotting, as you well know. So every building site is reeducation of the industry.
Conservation: I know architects who have spent their lives restoring beautiful, historic buildings. They never get a prize; there is no glory. There is now one prize in this country, the Driehaus Prize, which finally recognizes the quality of people who do the right thing. You can get the world star by doing something like this – I drew this long ago and now it’s built: the army museum in Dresden looks like that. There’s no word for it but idiotic, because there’s no value in it.
Now people are so illiterate that they cannot distinguish architecture anymore. When a good restoration is done properly, they think it’s historic but not inventive. But to do a proper restoration now is an unbelievable effort of invention, conviction, education, and persistence – over months and years – to get it right. Otherwise it’s just full of mistakes.
Consider the Euro bank notes: I counted on the seven or eight bank notes eighteen mistakes of architecture. Imagine that many mistakes in some official government document. The perpetrator would be locked up. But the people who drew these, they are are scot free. It’s comical.
Beauty, it is said, is in the eye of the beholder. True, but the eye has to be in a certain position, otherwise beauty cannot be in it. A man can admire the beauty of a fire, but if his feet are in it, his eye will be filled with horror. To him there is no more beauty in the fire. Everything in nature, including whatever we do, is beautiful. Even the worst sound is beautiful if we have the right distance from it. Conversely, you can play the loveliest music you want, but if you are a kilometer away from it, it’s meaningless – it’s just noise in the distance. The distance, the height, and the relationship to the beholder need to be correct. That is where modernism fails on all scales. And that is what we are trying to rectify.
2016.” width=”307″ height=”400″> London Music Forum, conceived and drawn by Léon Krier, copyright 2016.
