In a global construction explosion that echoes the last performing-arts center boom of the 1970s and '80s, spectacular buildings for music are replacing the art museum as the most conspicuous cultural icon of the 21st century. Stylistically, they represent architecture's leading edge. Musically, they signal radical changes in place, performance and audience attitudes. In the United States alone, 360 opera houses and concert halls were completed between 1994 and 2008. These are the buildings that have become the chosen symbols of national pride and progress for countries undergoing international shifts in status, money and power.
"Site and Sound: The Architecture and Acoustics of New Opera Houses and Concert Halls," by Victoria Newhouse, is an ambitious history and critique that covers everything from the amphitheater at Epidaurus (third century B.C.) to Zaha Hadid's cutting-edge Cultural Center in Baku, Azerbaijan, which is under construction now. But the emphasis of this precisely written, meticulously researched study is on the most recent work. And there are some fascinating stories behind the more celebrated examples.
Site and Sound
By Victoria Newhouse
Monacelli, 272 pages, $50
What really happened during the Byzantine artistic and political process of creating Lincoln Center? How did a group of "patrician white males," as she so coolly characterizes them, and a consortium of architects working at a time when modernism had developed its own "establishment power elite" create the model that set the conservative consensus for a generation of performing-arts centers that followed? (Think Washington's Kennedy Center, a bland box of posh banality in a location of daunting public inaccessibility.)
Why have the results of China's record-breaking production of new opera houses and concert halls been so visually striking and so functionally uneven? The multipurpose "Grand Theaters" built as the centerpieces of China's instant new cities and new business districts have been conceived less as finely tuned music venues, along Western lines, than as nationalistic symbols featuring propagandistic displays and popular Italian operas and Broadway musicals. Are they now moving toward more sophisticated artistic and musical performance and management? Ms. Newhouse thinks so, citing Ms. Hadid's recent Guangzhou Opera House, two extraordinary, rocklike structures in contrasting white and black marble inspired by stones in a nearby riverbed, where equal attention has been paid to design and acoustics. And there are still more to come from a list of international architectural superstars.
Ms. Newhouse has visited every building she writes about, attending multiple performances and interviewing architects, acousticians, managers and users. What concerns her most is the connection between the visual and the aural, the relationship of the art of design to the act of listening, a synthesis that can take us into the sublime, one of the most complex and powerful experiences that architecture can provide. (And please, let's get rid of that old chestnut about architecture being frozen music, which is just as ridiculous as music being melted architecture, which fortunately no one has suggested yet.)
The only constant in the long history of this singular art form is inconsistency; attitudes have swung back and forth from the creation of a reverential atmosphere that stresses music for its own sake to an emphasis on music as a social event. The latter reached its apogee in Charles Garnier's Paris Opera of 1875, with its over-the-top opulence and magnificent central stair designed for social interaction and spectacular display.
It reappeared in Christian de Portzamparc's 1985 concert hall at La Villette in Paris, where a semicircular, interior processional path hugging the perimeter of the hall takes the concertgoer to the main entrance; slowly revealed vistas and gently changing colors are part of the shared anticipation of the performance.
Unlike the closed, isolated structures of the 1970s and '80s accessed through parking garages, today's buildings are open—to the view, the street, the passerby, the neighborhood and the community. They stress connection, not alienation. Cafés, restaurants and shops are standard features that are here to stay. Music can be performed in temporary or unusual locations, indoors or out, like Frank Gehry's open Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park and his New World Center in Miami Beach, with its outdoor pavilion that combines speaker equipment and projected images. Audiences may be interactive. The glistening white marble Opera House built by Snøhetta in Oslo in 2008 does not lack monumental presence, but its most popular feature is a long, sloping roof used as a public promenade that also serves as a route to informal outdoor concerts at the top.
Ms. Newhouse is no stranger to Europe's most revered classical concert halls, like Vienna's Musikverein and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, and the grand 19th-century European opera houses. But as an architectural historian with an equal interest in the past and the present, she has made a particular study of new construction in the U.S. Because she understands the nature and necessity of social, technological and architectural change, she goes beyond conventional architectural criticism and acoustical analysis to outspoken criticism of the results. And she has come to some surprising conclusions.
Ms. Newhouse believes that there is no guarantee of perfect sound. Even with scientific computer modeling, she is convinced that perfection is an unreal objective and that judgment is a subjective act. The standard, horseshoe-shaped operas and "shoe box" concert halls that worked well in the past are rarely as reliable as when they were custom-built and tuned just for the instruments and sounds of their time. Yet so strongly does belief in the tried and true persist, and so great is the fear of failure, that many of the most extreme new exteriors have traditional configurations inside. Modernism's forms may advance creativity and experimentation at the expense of familiar materials and decoration, but risk aversion remains part of the game.
Because we are addicted to instant gratification, we want our judgments up or down, good or bad, and we expect new or remodeled structures to receive immediate praise or condemnation. As a working journalist who covered the previous round of performing-arts construction, I was paired with the music critic, who would stride across the stage, clapping his hands, testing various spots in the orchestra and balcony for reverberation times while I studied the design. After a rehearsal and an opening-night performance, our paired evaluations would appear in the next morning's New York Times. And the job was done. What followed was usually an essential period of evaluation and fine-tuning.
But Ms. Newhouse has learned that ideal acoustics are not even necessary for a hall to succeed. The essential factor is ambience—the sum total of how a place looks, feels and sounds, an intangible combination that satisfies the senses and fills an important but unexpressed social need that extends from the audience's shared experience to its communication with the performing artists. Lincoln Center's much-maligned Avery Fisher (formerly Philharmonic) Hall, with its highly publicized, multiple corrective remodelings, is considered by visiting orchestras to be far better than its dodgy reputation. As most musicians will tell you: "You must learn to play the house."
There have been some daring exceptions to the rules. Hans Scharoun's uncompromisingly modern Berlin Philharmonie of 1963, with its industrial materials and unconventional "vineyard" arrangement of tiered seats in groups angled around the orchestra rather than facing it in rigid rows, introduced a new kind of aesthetics and acoustics. Hearing the Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini on my first visit there was a revelatory, moving and surprisingly intimate experience. The modified vineyard plan of Frank Gehry's stunning 2003 Los Angeles Disney Hall includes seats behind the orchestra that offer rich rewards in sound and spectacular views of the house and the audience beyond.
So what went wrong at Lincoln Center, aside from clashing egos and the cultural ground already shifting under everyone's feet? The New York State Theater (now the remodeled Koch Theater) is the poster child for Lincoln Center's troubles, which Ms. Newhouse ascribes to a failure of communication and coordination in which management, participating arts groups, and architects were hopelessly out of touch.
When the center was being planned in the early 1960s, George Balanchine, head of the New York City Ballet, which was one-half of the shotgun marriage with the New York City Opera as joint occupants of the State Theater, was never consulted as a programming partner. Nor was the City Opera ever asked about its needs. The pit was too small for an opera orchestra, and the backstage facilities were totally inadequate. The architect, Philip Johnson, managed to design the proscenium arch inside-out, to disastrous acoustic effect.
Ms. Newhouse offers a devastatingly succinct quotation from Johnson's explanation of why he devoted so much of the small site to the huge display lobby. "Ever the elitist, Johnson didn't hesitate to shortchange the theater's performers in favor of its patrons. 'Lincoln [Kirstein] and I knew [Palais] Garnier, you see. We knew that the theater was the least important part.' " Arrogance and absurdity called the shots.
Ms. Newhouse blames this same lack of communication between sponsors and users for today's often imperfect results. A "build it and they will come" mentality has popularized the idea of a "destination" building that will attract tourism and serve as an economic regenerator for depressed areas, a concept that began, iconographically, with the sail-like shapes of the Sydney Opera House in 1973 and, economically, with the Bilbao Guggenheim's revitalization, in the late 1990s, of a dying industrial city in Spain.
Lincoln Center, however, is moving into the 21st century. Most of the original buildings were executed in a compromised "soft" modernism that offended no one. Except the critics, who saw it as a failure of nerve and vision. After one notorious thumbs-down by everyone assigned to cover the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House for the New York Times (myself included), a plaintive inquiry came down from the publisher: "Couldn't any of you have liked anything?"
Ms. Newhouse notes a change in Lincoln Center's governing boards from a "plutocracy to a quasi-meritocracy," a quasi-compliment delivered with her customary candor. She praises the current remedial redesign by the firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro—an effort that includes rerouting lanes of traffic that had cut off pedestrian access, a complete remodeling of Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School, and even the addition of a grass-roofed restaurant. This creative solution is transforming a bastion of elitism into a more relevant and welcoming place.
It would seem that the doomsayers with their doleful statistics on aging audiences and diminishing attendance and the end of music as we know it may have it wrong. The picture is much larger than the serious problems of symphony orchestras in a time of severe economic recession; there are start-ups and superstars and young composers and performers who keep their day jobs until their work and ideas become the next big thing. There is a challenging plurality of styles and places to show them. The past is rediscovered while the present explores uncharted territory, and construction records are broken all over the world. Music and architecture will always be part of our lives.
—Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.