Posted on Mar 1, 1999

“Having
been born a freeman, and for more than thirty years enjoyed the blessings of liberty in a
free State — and having at the end of that time been kidnapped and sold into slavery,
where I remained, until happily rescued in the month of January, 1853, after a bondage of
twelve years — it has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be
uninteresting to the public.”

So begins Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup's 1853 autobiographical account
of his kidnapping and rescue from slavery. A bestseller in its time, the book had been
largely forgotten, save for a 1968 reprinting, until a new exhibit in the Nott Memorial
brought the story to life.

The idea for the exhibit began when Rachel Seligman, director and curator of the
Mandeville Gallery in the Nott Memorial, read Northup's autobiography more than a year
ago. She found it “incredibly engaging” and shared the book with Clifford Brown,
professor of political science and a member of the Nott Memorial exhibition committee.

Brown, too, was struck by the book — “it was about so many things — the horrors
of the slave system and the triumph of the human spirit” — and the two agreed on the
idea of sharing Northup's story with the public through an exhibit in the Nott Memorial.

To get the project going, they enlisted the help of four students — Heather Buanno
'98, Heath Fradkoff '99, Khayree Miles '01, and Wendyanne Ramroop '01. Like Brown and
Seligman, none of the students had heard of Northup. Now, however, they take great delight
in sharing his story with others.

Northup's story

Although slave narratives are a well-known component of American literature, Northup's
story is unique because, as Brown says, “he was a northern man with a northern
education thrust into slavery. It is significant because he lived to tell the tale.”

And certainly the details of his experience are extraordinary:

Northup, a free black man whose father had been emancipated in the will of his owner,
lived in Saratoga Springs with his wife and three children in 1841. He made his living as
a craftsman and a musician, playing his violin at local dances.

In the spring of 1841, two men approached Northup on a street in Saratoga Springs and
asked him to accompany them to New York City to perform with a circus there. Then, he
traveled with the men to Washington for another performance. But after going out to a
tavern in Washington with his fellow travelers, Northup found himself drugged, shackled,
severely beaten, and held in the pen of slave dealer James Birch.

“I was seized. And Burch commenced beating me,” Northup wrote. “When his
unrelenting arm grew tired, he stopped and asked if I still insisted I was a free man. I
did insist upon it, and then the blows were renewed. At length the paddle broke — still I
would not yield. All his brutal blows could not force from my lips the foul lie that I was
a slave.”

But Northup's resistance did little good, as he was soon sold and shipped to Louisiana
to begin his twelve years as a slave on various plantations. He describes his first owner
as a “kind master,” but his second owner, he says, was a “crabbed,
quick-tempered spiteful man.”

On an average day, Northup recounts, a slave was required to pick 200 pounds of cotton.
Slaves were in the cotteon field as soon as it was light in the morning and worked until
dark, save for ten or fifteen minutes at noon when they ate their cold bacon.

Northup's opportunity for freedom arose after years of hardship. A sympathetic white
carpenter with whom Northup worked agreed to send a letter to Northup's family. Northup's
wife received the letter and went to Henry B. Northup, district attorney of Washington
County and nephew of the man who gave Solomon Northup's father his freedom — and his
name.

Henry Northup gathered the necessary legal documents and went South. He quickly tracked
down Solomon Northup, who was known by the name Platt, and traveled to the plantation
where he worked. The local sheriff, who had accompanied Henry, asked Solomon if he knew
the stranger before him. After a brief pause, he recognized the district attorney.

“In an instant I comprehended the nature of his business, and felt that the hour
of my deliverance was at hand,” Northup wrote.

Solomon and Henry Northup went to New Orleans, where they obtained a pass so that
Solomon could travel through other slave states. When they arrived in Washington, D.C.,
the saga became an instant sensation, with a three-page story on the front page of the New
York Daily Times.

Later that year, Northup's autobiography (written with the assistance of David Wilson,
Union Class of 1840) was published. It sold nearly 30,000 copies in its first two years.

Putting the pieces together

The main task of the Union researchers was to recreate visually Northup's remarkable
experience. Seligman says she wanted to “construct an exhibit that would let Solomon
tell the story. What we had in hand was a textual narrative, and we wanted to augment that
with a visual narrative. Therefore, we needed to go back and search for the various items
referred to in the book.”

Thus began the treasure hunt to draw a picture of Solomon Northup's life.

The student researchers spent much of the summer and fall in historical societies,
libraries, and graveyards, investigating and corroborating Northup's story. They
photographed graves, interviewed historians, rifled through files, and struggled to
decipher 150-year-old maps.

“This was completely different from any type of research I had ever done,”
says Heather Buanno '98, now a first-year law student at American University. “My
other research involved summarizing journal articles. Here, you didn't have the luxury of
having the materials ready for you, so we all just read the book and began taking field
trips.”

Wendyanne Ramroop '01, a women's studies and sociology interdepartmental major, began
her research with a genealogical search for Northup's relatives.

“I had wanted to do a genealogical study of my own family, and I thought that this
would be a great way to learn,” she says. “We began by searching for the name
Northup on the Internet and then wrote to the relatives we found. We also looked at census
records, cemetery records, and birth certificates. The research was very tedious, but it
was worth it.”

The research highlight was a trip that followed Solomon Northup's trail to Washington
and New Orleans. Brown; Heath Fradkoff, a senior visual arts and English interdepartmental
major; and Khayree Miles '01, an Africana studies and English interdepartmental major,
visited the plantations on which Northup was a slave, the store to which he traveled for
goods, and the swamp in which he attempted to flee.

Fradkoff, who describes his work on the exhibit as an attempt to “recapture lost
history,” says that the project truly came together when they arrived in New Orleans
and started finding the actual records.

It was in New Orleans that Fradkoff and Miles discovered the centerpiece item in the
exhibit — Northup's actual bill of sale.

“We were in a small, crowded area surrounded by books from the 1800s when we found
the original bill of sale,” Miles says. “I turned the page with anticipation and
anxiety. It wasn't fiction anymore; it was real. The whole time I wished that my family
was there to see it with me. There was something very spiritual about reading and seeing
and touching the bill of sale.”

Fradkoff adds, “It was amazing to go back and see the evidence that it was all
true.”

Brown says that the accuracy of Northup's recall is extraordinary. “The degree to
which historical events can be verified by documents, photographs, maps, and contemporary
artifacts is remarkable. Once the research verifies that this story is real, it adds
tremendously dramatic emotion to the facts of the story.”

Bitter justice

It is ironic that Solomon Northup fared better under the justice system of Louisiana
than he did under the systems of Washington, D.C., and New York State.

When Solomon Northup arrived in Washington, he filed a suit against Birch, the owner of
the slave pen where he was held and beaten. But the case was dismissed because Northup,
although a citizen of the United States, was not allowed to testify because he was black.

About a year after Northup's book was published, Thaddeus St. John, a resident of
Fonda, N.Y., read the book and recalled seeing two acquaintances in the company of a black
man riding on a train to Washington. He also recalled that he met the men again on the
return trip to New York, but they were without their black companion. Noting their much
more affluent condition, he asked them in a light vein if they had sold their companion
for $500, and one of them had responded that the figure was $150 too low.

St. John immediately contacted Solomon Northup and identified Alexander Merrill and
Joseph Russell, who were soon arrested and indicted on four counts of kidnapping and
selling a free man. The defendants' lawyers objected to three of the four counts on the
grounds that the actual kidnapping and selling took place outside of New York, and the New
York Supreme Court agreed in 1855. On appeal, the New York Court of Appeals dodged the
issue, insisting on a trial in the first court before they would rule on the other three
counts.

But the case was never brought to trial.

“Here is where we enter the realm of surmise and conjecture,” says Brown.
“One hypothesis is that the prosecution lost interest, but that doesn't seem logical.
Another is that the new district attorney was not interested in pursing the case. The
third hypothesis is that witnesses might have disappeared.”

What happened to Solomon?

From the beginning of the project, one question plagued the researchers — what
happened to Solomon Northup after his rescue?

Northup's last reported sighting was in an 1855 book engagement in Montpelier, Vt. Five
years later, the census listed his wife as the head of household. Union's researchers had
hoped to solve the mystery, but so far they have not found the answer.

Brown cites sources that suggest Solomon Northup died shortly after his return home.
There was speculation at the time that Northup might have been killed by his kidnappers
before the trial, which is supported by two different sources — the author of The
Bench and Bar of Saratoga, published in 1876, and John Henry Northup, Henry B.
Northup's nephew.

“I might also add that no known burial site for Solomon Northup exists,”
Brown says.

There is some consolation in the fact that, at last, the story of Solomon Northup is
being told. “Even though justice wasn't served, I think that Solomon is smiling down
on us today,” says Ramroop.

The Northup exhibit

The dual exhibit at the Nott Memorial this winter combined the retelling of Solomon
Northup's story with sculptor Terry Adkin's reflections on Northup's experience, slavery
in general, and the powerful architecture of the Nott Memorial.

A number of events exploring issues of the American slave experience also accompanied
the exhibit, including:

— a panel discussion on the issue of kidnapping free blacks prior to the Civil War;

— a panel discussion on the role of history in contemporary art;

— a lecture on the art of liberation lost and found;

— a lecture on African-American life in antebellum Saratoga Springs;

— a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa of a work written
specifically for the exhibition;

— a lecture on the literature of slavery;

— a showing of Daughters of the Dust, a film;

— a performance/concert with Adkins and students and faculty who used four
eighteen-foot-long brass horn sculptures;

— a dramatic reading by members of the African and Latino Alliance of Students.

Rachel Seligman, director and curator of the Mandeville Gallery, says the exhibit is
significant because it touches on so many different areas of interest. “We have had
faculty and students involved from Africana studies, English, history, music, political
science, visual arts, and women's studies.

“It is important for Union to offer both history and art exhibitions, as well as
exhibitions that combine other disciplines such as art and science, because life is
interconnected,” she says. “At an institution of higher learning, it is
important to emphasize the interconnectedness of the disciplines, and this exhibit did
that beautifully.”

Read More

Posted on Mar 1, 1999

Jordan Lippman
'00 says that reading always made him feel stupid.

“I couldn't focus the way other kids could, but I got by.”

In his junior year of high school, he received the proper medication for his learning
disability (LD) and attention deficit disorder (ADD). The medication enabled him to focus
on a book, a step that sparked his interest in what he calls “his own discrepancy
between intelligence and performance.”

This interest in learning disabilities and learning-related disorders has inspired him,
in turn, to organize a support group for students who have similar difficulties. Three
percent of the students at Union have a documented learning disorder, and there are
estimates that an additional ten to fifteen percent do not want to admit that they suffer
from an LD or ADD.

Lippman has found that some learning disabled students “advocate for themselves
and want to do something to change their intellectual situations.” Others have become
so frustrated with their inability to perform at their potential that they become
apathetic to the entire learning process. “Although these students do not actively
work to alter their academic circumstances, that does not mean that they should not get
what they deserve,” he says. “That is why I am willing to do it for them.”

In addition to forming the support group, called enabLeD, Lippman organized a panel
discussion earlier this year that examined adaptive technologies for LD students, the
varieties of support services and programs available, the law regarding LD programs, the
problems of overdiagnosis, the teaching strategies and coping techniques for students with
LD or ADD, and the difficulties students face on a daily basis due to their learning
problems. He is planning another panel discussion that will engage both faculty and
students in conversation surrounding LDs and ADD.

Lippman has worked with professors to create his own major in cognitive science,
combining philosophy and biology. He is interested in “the basis of human
understanding and the mechanism by which we see the world,” he says. Reading
constantly and conferring frequently with professors, he is always questioning, reasoning,
and thinking. “I need constant stimulation,” he says. Before going to bed at
night, he does sit-ups, writes in his journal, and reads Einstein.

This term, Lippman is expecting a 3.7 grade point average — a significant improvement
on his previous performances. He attributes this to his voice recognition software,
reading software, and the private study room that Union has given him. The voice
recognition software allows him to dictate his papers to a computer, the reading software
lets him read while listening to a computer read to him, and the private study room
removes outside distractions so he can focus more intently. He says, “I've never done
as much reading as I have this term with the private room, and the reading software has
allowed me to increase the pace at which I read.”

Because he wants to help people and work in a field that is constantly changing, he has
thought about becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist; eventually, he would like to become
a college professor.

At Union, Lippman says he “wants to establish a path for future students like me
so that they do not have to struggle as much as I did.” He has received approval from
the Student Forum for enabLeD to become a recognized club. But since LD students have to
work harder and longer than anyone else, he says, it is difficult to ask them to join
something outside of academics. Thus, club meetings will be infrequent, and e-mail chat
sessions will be a primary way to support each other. These chat sessions will offer
students a chance to discuss their experiences at a time convenient for them and in
complete confidentiality.

Kate Schurick, associate dean of students, says that enabLeD has created an increased
awareness of learning disabilities on campus and that Lippman is providing a good service
by creating a forum for the discussion of concerns and experiences. Margaret Wadehra,
director of the college's Writing Center, has worked closely with Lippman and is impressed
by his drive, determination, and energy. “His initiative is staggering,” she
says. “He'll probably do very well in life. Look at all he's done already.”

Readers who want more information about enabLeD can contact Jordan Lippman via
e-mail at lippmanj@union.edu or enabLeD@union.edu.

Read More

Posted on Mar 1, 1999

Some mud stashed away in the back of a refrigerator at the College may begin to answer a number of questions that scientists are asking about El Niño.

Donald T. Rodbell, assistant professor of geology, reported in the January 22 issue of Science on a thirty-foot-long column of sediment he and a fellow researcher obtained in 1993 from a high-elevation lake in the southern Ecuadoran Andes.

Rodbell, the lead author of the Science article, wrote that this sample suggests that during the past 5,000 years, El Niño occurred every two to eight years — the same frequency we see in modern times. The sample also suggests that El Niño was weak or non-existent between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago.

Rodbell's co-authors are Jeremy Newman '97; Geoffrey Seltzer of Syracuse University; David Anderson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Mark Abbott of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and David Enfield of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.

Their study, while preliminary, has generated excitement among scientists worldwide who are trying to unlock the mysteries of El Niño. Previous studies of El Niño looked at coral reefs, showing changes in sea surface temperatures over centuries in places such as the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Other researchers looked at ice cores, tree rings, and flood deposits. But nothing to date provided as clear or as detailed a picture of El Niño's fluctuations as the lake sediments.

Rodbell and Seltzer obtained the sediment core sample from Lake Pallcacocha in southern Ecuador (El Niños typically begin off the coasts of Ecuador and Peru, and sea surface temperatures near the lake are among the first to warm during the onset of an El Niño). The lake was formed when the glaciers receded about 14,000 years ago, leaving moraines — piles of rock and sand formed by glacial motion. After initial analysis of the sample, the core went back into a laboratory refrigerator at Union, where it stayed for three years.

In 1996, Rodbell and his student, Jeremy Newman, began to take another look at the sample. Adapting medical imaging software to quantify shifts in the patterns of layers, they found a data-rich natural archive, the first continuous record of El Niño events dating back more than 5,000 years.

“We didn't know exactly what we had,” Rodbell says. “When we took this core, we thought the light-colored striations from landscape and flood events were very pronounced and unusual. We called them 'zebra stripes.' At the time, we were more interested in climate change associated with the last ice age, but in the back of my mind I wondered if these patterns were somehow connected to El Niño.”

The core sample contains hundreds of layers of sediment deposited over a period of about 15,000 years. About midway through the thirty-foot core (representing a period of time beginning about 5,000 years ago), there are a series of light-colored sediment bands that occur approximately every ten years or less. The bands contain the type of debris — mostly inorganic material washed from the slopes of nearby mountains — that would flow into the lake only during periods of heavy rainfall and flooding — conditions likely triggered by ancient El Niño events, Rodbell says.

El Niño researchers were excited by the findings.

Michael McPhaden, senior research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said, “When you find a clear signal, it's pretty important.”

McPhaden said the findings are important “because El Niño is the strongest climate signal on the planet, other than the seasons. The key to forecasting the future is understanding the past. So these longer records open up new possibilities to us.”

Characterized by warm ocean currents that begin off of the western South American coast, El Niño can affect weather systems across both North and South America — from tumultuous rainfall in northern Peru and southern Ecuador to unusually warm and dry conditions in the northeastern United States and western tropical Pacific. Until now, scientists did not have a clear understanding of when these events first began. Written records and anecdotal observations of El Niño events go back only several centuries.

“The question many scientists are asking is, 'What will happen to El Niño as the global climate gets warmer,'” Rodbell says. “The computer models are good, but they are limited by our understanding of how El Niño works.”

Rodbell says his study poses a number of questions, among them what is driving El Niño's frequency.

“The question is what is causing that frequency to change,” he says. “Could it be global warming? We don't know the answer yet. The climate system is incredibly complicated. There are so many different variables that could be at work.”

Rodbell was recently awarded a two-year grant of $90,000 from the National Science Foundation to investigate the climatic record preserved in sediment cores from other high-elevation lakes in southern Ecuador. The initial core suggests that lakes in this area may provide a natural archive of El Niño events covering the last 15,000 years, the longest continuous record of El Niño activity ever discovered.

“Based on this work, we realized that this one lake, while interesting because it may have provided the longest El Niño record ever found, is only one sample,” Rodbell says. “We want to go in and compare it with samples from other lakes in the area.”

Rodbell has led ten research expeditions into the Andes, and he plans to return this summer for two more months of research.

Defining the terms

El Niño is the name given to the phenomenon that occurs when sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean off the South American coast become warmer than normal. Those persisting temperatures influence the atmospheric circulation and consequently change climate patterns globally.

El Niño is translated from the Spanish as “the boy child.” Peruvian anchovy fishermen traditionally used the term — a reference to the Christ child — to describe the appearance of a warm ocean current west coast of Peru and Ecuador around Christmas. Over the years the term has become synonymous with larger-scale, climatically-significant, warm events.

La Niña (“the girl”) is the opposite of El Niño; sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific become cooler than normal.

Read More

Posted on Mar 1, 1999

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.

Read More

Posted on Mar 1, 1999

Rebecca Schwartz, a senior sociology major, didn't think much of her photography assignment at first. A self-described “lousy photographer,” she thought the photos in her “love-hate” project were simply “pictures of me and my life with a disease.”

But Professor of Photography Martin Benjamin saw something more, and he urged her to write some stream-of-consciousness narratives to go with each photo. In just of few minutes of writing, Schwartz's project became the perfect emotional outlet for all the feelings — from anger to solace — she has about her life with multiple sclerosis (MS).

“As Becca was showing me her work and started to talk about it, she was saying these really great things,” Benjamin recalls. “She was saying all that she thought she couldn't say. It turned out to be very therapeutic for her.”

The book of black-and-white self-portraits opens with a picture of Schwartz in sunglasses, writhing in agony. “When I first got sick, my eyes got real bad and I had to wear sunglasses everywhere,” writes Schwartz, of Califon, N.J. “These are the same sunglasses that I wore; they are a reminder to me of my first 'meeting' with MS.”

On another page with a photo of syringes, bottles of medication, and a copy of Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People, she writes, “Sometimes I feel like this is my life, all these pills … when things get bad, I need to numb myself, and have plenty to do it with. It's like I'm being overtaken by this disease … it's so much bigger than I am.”

And on a page with a photo of Schwartz injecting herself with medication, “This one makes people cringe … I do it once a week. The first few weeks I couldn't even look when I did it. I've gotten a little bit better.”

Schwartz says that when people look at the book, they find it “disturbing and dark, but this is me when I'm sick or injecting myself. I didn't realize how powerful it was until people looked at it and told me. I guess that's because it's so 'normal' to me. My book also gives me something to show people, 'look, here is my MS book.' Maybe it will help them understand about illness better.”

Schwartz's life with MS has transformed her education. Besides Becca's Little Multiple Sclerosis Book, she has made MS the theme of her senior thesis in sociology, called “Coping in College with MS: Constructing a Disease and Defining a Self. She has searched the World Wide Web and other resources to find other people her age with MS. “I have learned a lot more about the disease both medically and, more importantly, psychologically,” she says. “Also, I have contacted other college-age people all over the world with MS, which is the best therapy possible, to e-mail people who actually understand what you are going through.”

Much of her thesis will be on the psychological aspects of the disease, for which she will draw heavily on narratives returned in the surveys she is sending to her counterparts at other colleges.

Schwartz has avoided support groups because, she says, “it's scary for me to see people in wheel chairs.” Instead, she has preferred to spend time on e-mail and in chat rooms with other college students living with MS, such as a recent University of Buffalo graduate who has become an e-mail pen pal and strong supporter during bouts with the disease. “The Web has been a huge source of support,” she says. “My favorite thing to do is talk about it.”

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic, often disabling disease of the central nervous system caused by lesions in the myelin sheath that coats nerve fibers. Its cause is unclear. Symptoms may be mild and recurring such as numbness in the limbs (as in Schwartz's case) or severe — paralysis or loss of vision. Nationwide, there are an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 people with MS, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Becca's involvement with MS began when she was seventeen, a student at Gill St. Bernard's School in Gladstone, N.J. A series of bouts with flu-like symptoms was mistakenly attributed to inner-ear infections. In her junior year at Union, she began to have trouble with her eyes. At one point, she began to find there wasn't enough light in the room to study. Then her eyes hurt and were highly sensitive to light. She tried eye drops, waiting to see if the pain would pass, wondering if she needed new glasses.

Finally, she saw a neurologist, who said she could have MS. “At the time, that meant nothing to me,” she says. Her father came to Union the following weekend to accompany her for a battery of tests. Though the MRI didn't clearly show the signature lesions of MS, doctors could confirm the disease based on her several years of symptoms and her bout with optic neuritis.

After the diagnosis, the reactions varied. “My family was great, although I think they might have taken it harder than me, even now,” she says. “Some friends were very supportive, while others withdrew and now I don't even speak to them. It was hard for me. I would want to talk about it and a lot of people, I could tell, didn't want to hear it.”

There were the insensitive remarks. A relative of an ex-boyfriend said, “Perhaps it's for the best that they broke up. After all, she is sick.” A fellow student once remarked, “They'll never find a cure.”

Schwartz says that her friends now are great. “I've made some 'true' ones and they are there for me. They actually ask me questions! My new boyfriend is wonderful; it doesn't even faze him at all as he watches me do my injections.”

Schwartz holds a work-study job in the Sociology Department, where professors seem to have adopted her. “My professors were wonderful and made it all so much easier for me,” she says. “Their emotional support has helped me so much. One professor drove me to a doctor's appointment and waited there with me. Others would just sit down and talk with me. Every one was understanding and gave me all the extensions I needed, even though I never used them.”

MS hasn't changed the course of Schwartz's plans. She is still interested in her longstanding goal of getting a master's degree in social work and then entering a career in either placing adopted children or working with ill or emotionally disturbed children. During college breaks, she works at a facility for emotionally disturbed girls, a job that she says has helped her better understand people from challenging backgrounds.

At Union, she is a member of the Sociology Club and co-editor of the club's newsletter. A dean's list student, she is also a member of Alpha Kappa Delta, the honor society in sociology.

“Now, I am really comfortable telling people about my MS,” Schwartz says. “I have nothing to be embarrassed or nervous about. It's a part of me.”

One of the last pages of Schwartz's photo book shows a man's hands wrapped around hers. The caption reads: “This is my boyfriend holding my hands. Sometimes they hurt, get weak and numb. I ask him to squeeze them for me. It doesn't help, but it makes me feel better especially when he kisses them.”

Sometimes, Schwartz says, she wonders if she has allowed MS to become too large a part of her life. “At times, I think, 'Enough with MS!' But then I think that maybe I can help somebody.”

Read More