Listening to Architecture Part 2– music inspired by Architecture
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
As part of my summer commission for the Colorado College Music Festival, I was asked to develop a playlist of pieces of music inspired by architecture, to be played in the exhibition space where a concurrent exhibition on architecture was being shown. For the occasion I revisited some old pieces, and found some new ones to admire, which I list below.
Vespro della Beata Vergine, Claudio Monteverdi 1610.
Monteverdi’s Grand Vespers was written for work—he wanted the job as cappelmeister at the St. Mark’s Basilica, the same building for which Stravinsky would write a tribute some 350 years later. Monteverdi’s mission was successful— three years after the writing of this piece, he landed the job. Included in the piece are such trademarks of writing for a large cathedral as antiphony between two separated choirs.
Grande Messe des Morts, Hector Berlioz 1837.
Berlioz’ Requiem, composed for a combined orchestra and chorus of between 400-800 musicians, was one of his large-scale “architectural” works, in which he sought to match the forces to the space in which the piece was to be performed. The monstrous Requiem received its premiere at the equivalently enormous Les Invalides in Paris, and makes copious use of the space, including having parts of the orchestra positioned in the North, South, East, and West points in the cathedral.
Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste, Bela Bartok 1936.
Bartok’s large-scale work, itself architecturally conceived, is an instance of music that inspired architecture. In 1992 architect Steven Holl built a house based on the piece for a client in Dallas, Texas. Called Stretto House, the house transposes the effects of the score—with its contrast of light and dense materials, its use of contrapuntal devices such as stretto—into architectural terms, contrasting wavy and straight walls, and having elements echo throughout the house in stretto-like fashion.
Correspondences, for String Orchestra and Tape, Milton Babbitt 1967.
Milton Babbitt’s music is part of a mid-century movement, called total serialism, that attempted to structure every part of a musical composition according to abstract, mathematical means. In a sense, then, there was a pre-existing blueprint for the piece, which was then put into score form and realized by the musicians. As different as this music may sound from what I write, I am a tremendous admirer of Milton Babbitt and his music remains for me among the most compelling written in the twentieth century.
Rothko Chapel, Morton Feldman 1971.
Feldman’s sparse textures seem inherently designed to evoke space, dimensionality. His musical response to the Rothko Chapel, a nondenominational house of art and worship dedicated to the work of American painter Mark Rothko and completed just after his death in 1970, bring the latent architectural aspects of his work to the fore. The meditative, spare sounds of the piece are offset by a pallid viola melody at the conclusion. “… I felt that the music called for a series of highly contrasted merging sections. I envisioned an immobile procession not unlike the friezes of Greek Temples.”
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