Nicolai Ouroussoff in The Times gives us the rundown of the new behemoth variety of concert hall that is cropping up in cities around the world. Included in that category is the much publicized Disney Hall in dowtown L.A.
Ouroussoff tells us that the concert hall heard round the world was Hans Scharoun’s 1963 hall for the Berlin Philharmonie, which broke the architectural tradition of the western music hall from a symetrical, classical model, to a more modern, fractured exterior and a tiered, “democratic” internal space. He writes, “Scharoun’s masterpiece…was an aggressive attempt to tear down the traditional social hierarchies of the classical music world.”
In the case of the great music halls, any such “attempt” seems to be exactly what it appears, a surface bid to generate audience without any effort to reform the social structures that inhibit everyday people from participating in the classical arts–i.e. exorbitant ticket prices, membership programs that cater to the wealthy, and programming that is out of touch, repertory and dependent upon a classist presupposition of appreciation.
I’m not saying these new halls are bad, but they, like the great cathedrals of Europe, seem to ring of a familiar tune: that casing is more important than content; that a grand, brand new structure will alleviate with tourism the problems that ideological reform would be too radical to enact.
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