ARCHITECTURE & ARTS (IV). MUSIC

Through most of history, architecture, composition, and musical instruments have evolved together. Simple, harmonious melodies with few notes work in a tall cathedral, where the sound mixes.  Wagner designed his own opera house to locate inside his orchestra.  The simple fact of recording the music requires the existence of a reverberation chamber, totally lined with space and architecture.

Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti said Architecture does to the eye the same that music does to the ear. The philosopher Goethe said that architecture is frozen music.

Make Architecture Dance - Agustin Hernandez (UNAM Mexico)

Apart from these philosophical ideas, the blurred professional boundaries between these practices made many architects become musicians and some musicians make some space design trials. The relationship between the art of music and the art of architecture is clear as music encompasses rhythm, texture, harmony, proportion, dynamics, and articulation as it does too to architecture. Rhythm in music is patterns of sounds concerning a beat; repetition of elements - openings, shapes, structural bays- as it does in architecture. Musical texture refers to layers of sounds produced by different instruments, as it refers to materials in architecture. Harmony is the balance of sound and all the parts together as it is in architecture with elements and space. Proportion is the relationship between parts, showed in distance between notes in music and physical distances in architecture. Dynamics is the quality of action in music as it is in a building facade or external appearance.

In his monographic photography collection Frozen Music, the artist James Zall shows the metaphorical relationship between space and time in a series of pictures that resemble a music score in a time-lapse. 

Fire Escape 019 - James Zall (Frozen Music)

Music and Architecture experiments:

Bj?rk is known for her elaborated performances. For her latest, Cornucopia, she collaborated with the engineering firm Arup in the design of a reverberation chamber for the artist experimentation.

Bjork Cornucopia - Source ShowTex

In this reververation Chamber, she could manipulate and experiment with musical instruments and the relationship with her voice. Bj?rk described this chamber as a place where “the acoustic and digital will shake hands”. This place was pure experimentation for voice and space, exploring corners in the same way we discover our echo in a cave or the voice resonance in a church.

Bjork Cornucopia - Source Bjork.fr

The project research ended up with the design of a Sound Column installed at the Palace of Fine Arts. Using a computer to set up a voice reverberation map of how the voice resonates and mixes with space, this map was replicated into a movable structure to be used during the tours. The final design was something halfway between an art installation, a chamber and a personal dress, with 3-5m wide octagonal dome made from plaster coated wood with vault structure ribs.

This resonance box experiment created a link between sounds and space and how sound waves change as the artist moves inside this chamber.

Space and Sound Boundaries:

Some musicians have carried experiments to approach to the idea that sounds and notes can be considered materials that influence and build space. As materials, sounds have physical and perceptive characteristics like grain, thickness, porosity, luminosity, density and elasticity.

The Musician Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of the pioneers of this experimentation, to be carried out not only in studios but also in concert performances: 'I am evermore convinced about supplying the public in a hall with the possibility of perceiving the source of the sound waves within a circuit of 360 degrees. In my method of composition, the movement and direction of the sounds are of paramount importance. They count as much as the volume and the timbre and little less than the sound frequencies. It is important that at a concert one instrument doesn't swamp another and no acoustic follies are resulting from different kinds of walls in an auditorium which sometimes favor a high frequency and sometimes a low one.'

Gy?rgy Sándor Ligeti was another pioneer in the music research of new dimensions that gave the music a more material perception and a role in space.

In his electronic composition Artikulation, the music piece was prepared and recorded on magnetic tape, aggregating different types of sounds, as it was a conversation without words.   

Artikulation - Gyoergy Ligeti - Rainer Wehinger (Graphics), 1958

The musician represents the electronic sounds, the duration and temporal line saturation, creating a diagram representation of sounds in time, graphically expressed. The drawings of the notes are a complete guide for an audition and represent music in a very intuitive way.

As a result, there is a sound narration with rhythm, tone, intensity and duration expressed in different colors and with different coordinates for the height of the notes. 

Music and Architecture Experiments:

One of the first music experiments in the field of architecture was the one carried by the musician Iannis Xenakis in collaboration with the architect Le Corbusier.

In 1956, the first World Fair after the Great War was going to be held in Brussels, showing the musical and architecture as a perfect breeding ground for these new melting arts experiments.

The company Philips commissioned a new pavilion to the architect Le Corbusier, who conceived it as a mix between a vessel and an electronic poem and performed the project with his design collaborator Iannis Xenakis, designer and experimental music composer and Edgard Varese. 

Philipps Pavillion - Source Pinterest

In this multimedia environment, there were two different elements: Varese's iconic Poeme Electronique and Xenakis's design consisting of a short electronic work and space itself. The title refers to the key elements of the resulting Poem Electronique pavilion design, which was the first electronic space environment combined with architecture, film, light and music to give a total art, time and space experience. While the physical form of the pavilion may have been temporary, for those with the privilege of experiencing the space it provided them with temporary relief of sound through space in their respective time.

The basic guidelines given to both Xenakis and Varese were that the interior was to be similar to the stomach of a cow, designed for audiences of 500 people and with a shape design result of a mathematical algorithm. In the entrance passage, the visitors would hear Xenakis’s transitional piece before entering a room that would go into darkness, enveloping the audience in a space of light and sound for eight minutes while an accompanying video displayed images along the walls of the pavilion. 

Philipps Pavillion - Source Arquine

For the final design of the Pavilion, Xenakis designed a three concrete shell paneled tents with paraboloid shapes.  The design also included a tensile structure that required precast concrete panels to hang these steel cables.

With this integrated music and architecture design, Xenakis wanted to eliminate the borders between walls and ceilings and create a continuous flow of surface in the architectural piece. 

Music and Urbanism:

The artist John Cage, influenced by the booming European avant-garde developed a wide variety of graphics and sound explorations, using the concept of Indetermination and applying it to the composition of 49 Waltzes to be played at 49 random locations.

For this experiment the artist drew 49 triangles of different colors, superimposed on the map of the five boroughs of New York, where the composer established 49 possible locations where these melodies could be performed, heard in a combination with the city sounds in the background. The graphical composition shows the relationships between multiple vectors on a plane and their convergence which determines for each selected location

49 Waltzes for the 5 boroughs - John Cage, 1977 (Source Research Gate)