With its portraits of ex-Union
presidents, pews. and a pipe organ, Memorial Chapel hardly looks like an eatery where lattes and cappuccinos are served while music is performed impromptu by day and in concert by night.
Yet the chapel is a descendant of eighteenth-century European coffeehouses — “penny universities” that served as gathering places for discussions of politics, the arts, or whatever was on the minds of patrons. Combining a high-tech acoustical ceiling designed by one of America's preeminent scientists with an architectural ancestry having roots in Bach's St. Thomaskirche and Mendelssohn's
Gewandhaus, the chapel's acoustics couldn't be anything but spectacular.
Athens, Rome, Leipzig, Boston — Schenectady?
When one tells a story, it's a good idea to begin at the beginning, but with concert hall acoustics the beginning is difficult to pinpoint.
Some scholars start with the classic open-air theaters of ancient Greece. The Greeks were the first to consider the effects of architectural design on speech intelligibility (Greek theaters, for example, were always constructed downwind to reduce the sonic effects of airborne noise), and Greek innovations, such as the proscenium arch, are found in nearly every opera house and Broadway venue.
The ancient Greeks were committed to acoustic excellence because of the place drama and
music held in their society. The impact of Greek acoustical thinking was so profound that in 1893 an exact replica of an open-air theater was considered for the design of the new Boston Symphony Hall. The architectural firm proposing the design — McKim, Mead, and White — was the firm that later designed Memorial Chapel.
One also could argue that an acoustical history of the chapel should begin with a discussion of Roman theaters. Though the word acoustics is Greek in origin, reverberation is a word of Roman origin — a distinction not without significance. Reverberation, defined as the decay of sound energy, gives a hall a unique acoustic and a resident ensemble a signature sound. Without reverberation halls like the chapel would not sound much different from one's office or living room.
Vitriuvius, architect of emperors, documented the first known theories of reverberation in his treatise De Architecura. Per Vitriuvius's formalism, reverberation was
introduced into the theater via the distribution of large empty bottles and vases throughout the audience area. The size of the resonators was in direct proportion to designated musical pitches. This was the first time that architects used artificial
enclosures to redirect sound to the listener to enhance a performance. Hundreds of years
later, scientists armed with the latest computer technology are still trying to determine the true nature of concert hall reverberation, how to measure it, and how to shape its quality through architectural design.
A third version of the chapel's history would begin in Leipzig, Germany. Unlike other
major European cities in the eighteenth century, where musicians were paid by the church or royal court, Leipzig was a working-class college town without royalty. Its citizenry
relied on amateur music societies (such as the one led by capellemeister of the St.
Thomaskirche, Johannes Sebastian Bach) as well as civic groups and government support to sustain a concert season. Out of this mix grew the Leipzig Music Society, a group of musicians, engineers, and architects who worked together to cultivate the musical arts. With the support of both the church and business community, musical performances thrived as coffee houses evolved into formal concert halls.
In the tradition of cafe lena
The typical Leipzig coffee house was two stories tall and seated 300 to 400 people.
Musicians would perform on a raised platform at one end of the main floor. This stage area
could generally accommodate up to 60 players and singers. The length of the hall would be
about double its width, and these high, narrow, rectangular halls were nicknamed shoebox halls.
A shoebox design was chosen when the Leipzig municipal government commissioned the
construction of the Altes Gewandhaus in 1780. The Altes Gewandhaus accommodated 600, and
the ratio of hall length to width to height was 3.2:1.6:1. Memorial Chapel can accommodate about 950, and the ratio of hall length to width to height is 3.2:1.8:1.
Named for the drapers or cloth merchants that once occupied the renovated space, the Gewandhaus would become famous not only for its acoustics, but for the sound of the orchestra that adopted its name, the Gewandhaus Bach Orchestra. Felix Mendelssohn, musical director of the Bach Orchestra, would revive the music of J.S. Bach in the Altes
Gewandhaus. Mendelssohn's contemporaries, among them Hector Berlioz, would come to Leipzig to conduct original compositions. Richard Wagner, a hometown boy, would take the baton to premier scores for new operas. Grieg, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky would follow Berlioz, traveling from Norway, Austria, and Russia to premier their works. Soon, standing room only was the rule at Germany's premier music hall.
Mendelssohn's Madonna-like star power moved the town fathers to build a bigger performance venue, and in 1884 the Neus (newer) Gewandhaus opened. Though destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1944, the new hall retains its reputation as a benchmark for acoustic excellence. Word spread throughout Europe and to America that not only was the music of Leipzig first class, but that Leipzig halls were engineering achievements. When the president of the Boston Symphony Orchestra began to plan for a new concert hall, he traveled to Leipzig with his architects to observe the coffeehouse tradition firsthand. He took with him a twenty-eight-year-old physics professor from Harvard, Wallace C. Sabine, who served as an acoustical consultant. He was America's first.
The physics of coffeehouse/shoebox design
While Sabine was employed by the Boston Symphony and advising on the design of practice rooms for the New England Conservatory of Music, he was concurrently engaged in the experimental analysis of reverberation. Defining reverberation time as the interval required for audible sound to dissipate one-millionth of its original intensity (sixty
decibels), Sabine developed mathematical relationships between sound absorption and
architectural materials. He generated an equation that states that the reverberation of an enclosure is directly roportional to its cubic volume and inversely proportional to the total area of its sound absorbing surfaces.
Sabine literally invented the science of architectural acoustics. Employing the skills of a trained experimentalist, he observed and documented the manner in which plaster, wood, and cast iron were implemented by Leipzig engineers. Armed with this information and the results of his own experiments, Sabine persuaded McKim, Mead, and White to abandon the choice of a classic open air theater, in favor of a hall that combined the best attributes of the Gewandhaus (what Sabine called the “acoustical model”), the old Boston Music Hall(Sabine's “dimensional model”) and another shoebox hall, the Vienna's Grosser Musikvereinssall. In his original papers, Sabine proposed the tempting possibility upon which he based his recommendation:
“The often-repeated statement that a copy of an auditorium does not necessarily possess the same acoustical qualities is not justified, and invests the subject (of acoustics) with an unwarranted mysticism…. No mistake is more easy to make than that of copying an auditorium, but in the different materials or on a different scale, in the
expectation that the result will be the same. Every departure must be compensated by some other, a change in the material used in some part of the hall, a change in size by a change in the proportions or shape.”
When an architectural comparison is made between Symphony Hall and Memorial Chapel,
Sabine's hypotheses take on meaning. The ceilings of both halls are of plaster composition
over a wood and metal frame. The walls in both halls are plaster on a metal lath covering a masonry and wood backing, and the stages are three-quarter-inch wood flooring over a large air space. Cast iron present in the balconies of Symphony Hall appears in the Union chapel as support columns.
The ratio of hall length to width to height for Symphony Hall is approximately 2.7:1.3:1 in comparison to the chapel's ratios of 3.2:1.8:1. Proportional geometry creates the proper time delay between the direct sound from the stage and the first and second reflections. The strength and pattern of these reflections are intrinsically defined by
the shoebox floor plan, creating time delays of the order of thousandths of second. In
Symphony Hall the first two of these reflections occur at seven and fifteen milliseconds.
In Memorial Chapel, they are fourteen and twenty milliseconds, respectively. Given that
the classical symphony evolved in coffeehouses with this geometry, it is logical that halls replicating this geometry would also recreate the appropriate acoustical quality.
A common misconception about shoebox concert halls is that their acoustics are accidental. Sabine had been working with McKim, Mead, and White and the Johns Manville Co. in the development of a special plaster ceiling designed to control reverberation. It had been successfully implemented in a number of halls, particularly those that were to include pipe organs. A quote from Architectural Specifications of Memorial Chapel
indicates that this type of ceiling is present for just this reason:
“Where indicated in the ceiling of the Auditorium on drawing No. 8, the Contractor
shall apply acoustic felt covered by canvas in accordance with Johns Manville Co.'s system or an equally good to be approved. On the scratch coat of plaster in the spaces indicated apply strips of clear white pine, securing them to the wire lathing by Ankyra bolts space 18' apart. On this apply an acoustic felt 3/4 inches thick, securely tacking it in its place. Cover the felt at the wood cleats at 1 inch intervals. If necessary, provide a gimp course to cover nail heads, the whole to be left for painting.”
Memorial Chapel and other halls of this period were examples of well thought out
architectural engineering, employing the latest techniques and building technologies. The
acoustical qualities of Memorial Chapel, Boston Symphony Hall, and all shoebox halls are not accidental. In 1980, I made comparative measurements of reverberation time as defined by Sabine, observing that the halls possessed similar decay curves.
Memorial Chapel as musical museum
Making the case for listening to music inside a piece of eighteenth-century technology is a monumental task. Music distribution systems today take the form of MiniDisc recorders, CD copying machines, DVD players, and computers with real-time streaming audio, and news reports now tout the Internet, arguably the fast food genre of music delivery, as having the potential of reproducing the highest quality sound possible.
But long before Pentium processors populated the desktop, a massive effort to create the concert hall experience in the home and automobile was already underway. Woofers, tweeters, and amplifiers were assembled to faithfully replicate violins, cellos, tenors, and sopranos. During the 1950s and '60s, the quality of the home audio system was measured against the sound heard in a concert hall, but in the 1990s the inverse is true.
Loudspeakers are now a part of the architecture itself, installed in the balconies of
concert halls in an effort to recreate the acoustical qualities associated with rectangular floor plans and plaster walls.
Even with a tremendous investment of time and money, consumer audio equipment cannot
duplicate the concert hall experience unless loudspeakers are prescriptively placed in a
reverberant free environment such as an anechoic chamber. No living room or auto interior is anechoic. Moreover, the dynamic range between triple piano and triple forte in a noise-free hall or opera house is much greater than that generated by the majority of audio systems. For vocal music, this range can be as much as 120 decibels.
It should not be concluded that rectangular shoebox concert halls are the only ones with first-rate sound. The best example of this is New York's Carnegie Hall.
Nor should it be concluded that the Union chapel is without flaws. The balcony extends
much too far over pews below, deadening the sound for patrons seated near the walls. Moreover, sound is markedly deficient in low frequency energy for those seated far back from the stage because the chapel possesses pews instead of raked seating. Because the chapel was designed as a worship space and not as a formal concert hall, it has a number of windows in direct contact with the outdoors. Glass is transparent not only to light, but to sound. Fifty percent of the noise outside can get inside, which makes the enjoyment of a concert in the chapel heavily dependent on the College's spring break. Finally, the chapel's reverberative qualities are also heavily dependent on the size of the audience, since people absorb much more sound than any architectural material.
But being with others, sharing a concert with music performed by real flesh and blood and not electronic circuitry, far and away compensates for all architectural imperfections. Acoustics can never sabotage a good performance. Being
there allows one not just to see and hear, but to share in the relationship between performer and composer.
What is to become of the concert hall listening experience? In 1982, music critic Donal Henahan of The New York Times posed just such a question:
“[P]erhaps audiences that have been raised on loudspeaker sound really do prefer to distance themselves from music. Do they want loudness and surgical cleanness rather
than the nappy tones and the washes of overlapping sound that can make hearing music in
older, unstreamlined halls such a subtle and intimate experience? The awful possibility
must be entertained. If so, acoustical science is serving its own century very well indeed
and people who yearn for the good old halls should shut up and, as pop sociologists say,
reconceptualize the problem. Either that or book a room for themselves at the Smithsonian
Institution.”
People still “yearn for the old halls,” but the
number of available options is diminishing as renovations favor electronic enhancement and
the paying public looks to other musical outlets. Leonard Bernstein argued that the
survival of the American orchestra would depend upon audience accessibility to good
sounding concert halls. He postulated that just as paintings and sculpture have their
museums, orchestras and choruses would soon need their own, especially if concert going
ceased to be a shared experience.
A good sounding concert hall, such as Memorial Chapel, brings people together and
democratizes the experiencing of listening to music. This is possible because sound itself
is a great democrat, raising each of us to an equal playing field of communication and
accessibility to a composer's message. The restored Nott Memorial isn't the only building
on campus beckoning to be rediscovered. Memorial Chapel beckons as well, urging us to
seize the day and rekindle the coffeehouse tradition.
About the author
In his senior year at Union, Jim Mastracco persuaded Ken Schick, professor of physics,
and Hugh Wilson, director of the Glee Club, to co-advise a research project — an
architectural and acoustical study of Memorial Chapel. During the project, Mastracco met
Henry Breed, a bass player in the Albany Symphony and a physics professor at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute; the meeting ultimately led to graduate work in physics and
engineering at Rensselaer, with research supported by the Audio Engineering Society of
America. In 1989, Mastracco was elected to Sigma Xi, the national science and engineering
honor society, for his analysis of concert hall reverberation. A member of the legislative
department at the American Federation of Government Employees in Washington, D.C.,
Mastracco continues to write about acoustics; a recent paper, coauthored with Henry Sneck
of Rensselaer, appeared in Acta-Acustica, a European acoustic journal.