The Golden Hall of the Musikverein, Vienna. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Ask an orchestra which three halls have the most beautiful sound on the planet and the answer, with minimal variations, will be: the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Symphony Hall in Boston. Three buildings from the nineteenth century, or nearly, and all three with the same elementary shape: a tall, narrow rectangular box. In the trade it is called a shoebox, and the fact that the best acoustics ever achieved live in the most banal shape is one of architecture’s most solid ironies.
The secret lies in the lateral reflections. In a narrow hall, the sound of the orchestra bounces off the nearby walls and reaches the ears from left and right a few milliseconds after the direct sound: it is this double origin that the brain translates into envelopment, the sensation of being inside the music and not in front of it. The height of the ceiling gives the long reverberation, about two seconds with a full house, which lets chords bloom without muddying the detail; and the decorations that look to us like mere nineteenth-century pomp, caryatids, coffering, balconies, are natural diffusers that break up the reflections and spread them around. The Musikverein opened in 1870, designed by ear and by tradition; science arrived thirty years later, when the Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine, measuring with organ pipes and a stopwatch, formulated the law of reverberation time and applied it to Boston’s Symphony Hall, 1900: the first calculated hall in history, and still among the three queens.
The twentieth century tried to rebel against the box. In 1963 Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie invented the vineyard: audience all around the orchestra, on stepped terraces, a democracy of vision in place of the hierarchy of the rectangle. It is the model for the great recent halls, from Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie to the Japanese halls of the acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, and its best results are splendid. But it is revealing that when an orchestra wants to record a reference sound, or a conductor speaks of the dream hall, the mind almost always returns to the golden rectangle of Vienna, the one of the New Year’s Concert. A hundred and fifty years of acoustic science have served above all to explain why the masons of 1870 were right: sound, like wine, ages better in simple barrels.