The title of thisarticle immediately caught my eye because just in class last thursday we were comparing the concert hall in Julliard to LeFrak Hall. I remember when I first began playing the clarinet and my teachers would talk about good acoustics I had no idea what they were talking about. Over the years, I learned that the room really does make a difference in sound.
In this article, the writer notes a huge difference in sound when the New York Philharmonic played at Carnegie Hall versus when they played at Avery Fisher Hall. The writer claimed that “even during hushed passages of the Beethoven , there was more body and depth to the Philharmonic’s sound than at Avery Fisher”. I have never heard of Avery Fisher Hall, and the article seems to give it a bad rep….maybe it isn’t the best hall but of course when it is compared to Carnegie Hall it is going to sound even worse.
The article is pretty short, I just wanted to mention it because it touched base on what we had briefly discussed in class. In order to make this post just a little more interesting, I’m going to post a video of Midori. She started with the New York Philharmonic as an 11 year old prodigy….crazy! This is a video of her in her earlier years and she sounds amazing!
I never really understood acoustics either, I just always knew that they had something to do with the way a group sounded. Once I got to high school, I compared my new auditorium to the one I had played in for 3 years at the middle school. There was a noticeable difference in the quality of the sound. Currently, one of the bathrooms in my house is being redone. I remember just the other day, I was practicing my flute in my room. My sound was alright that day, but I have produced a better tone before. However, during my practice, someone knocked at the front door. I walked down the hallway to answer the door, still playing my flute as I walked. As I passed the bathroom–which was, at the time, basically just an empty room with sheet-rocked walls, my flute sounded so rich and full! Afterwards, I decided to take the piece I was working on into the unfinished bathroom and practice in there! The acoustics must have been really great because the sound was phenomenal! Of course, I can’t have my performances in my bathroom, but this change in sound made me long to achieve that type of sound in any other room I practiced in. Acoustics counts!
Listening to Midori and comparing this to the trash can episode, mystery guitar man, or even painting used gum on the side gives me cause for concern…
Sorry that last comment was done too quickly. This is an interesting post and the issue of acoustics is very real. Avery Fisher Hall is the Hall at Lincoln Center that has been the home of the NY Philharmonic since Lincoln Center opened in the 1960’s (the history of how the Center came to be is a story unto itself.) the acoustics of that hall were always a problem, and Carnegie Hall was always great, and there is an endless list of theories as to why. Mostly, it has to do with the ratios of the dimensions of the space. Our hall is not very large, but it has a very high ceiling, which give the sound enough room to “bloom.” A small room like a bathroom often has a very reverberant acoustic because of the tile and hard surfaces which reflect the sound.