I have no particular answer for the observation of Lee Eiseman about the inaudibility of audience members, but for a concert it sounds like a good thing. As for the music sounding like a mono recording, this is what you get when there is very little angular distance between performers in a dry acousitc. They sound close together because they are close together.

Joel’s comment about the difficulty of hearing one’s colleagues on the Jordan stage is perceptive. But there is probably no solution to the problem that is consistent with keeping the excellent acoustics for the audience. Musicians often practice in small, relatively reverberant rooms. In such a space the reverberation starts with little or no time-delay, and it is possible to synchronize your playing by listening alone. The sound is also amplified and blended by the room, so relative balance between your own instrument and those of others is easy to hear.

Larger stages are not as forgiving. The time delays are larger, so even if there were audible reflections they cannot be used for synchronization. Reflected sound from your colleagues is considerably softer than the sound of your own instrument, and cannot be relied upon for balance – and perhaps not even for intonation. The deep empty stage house behind performers in Jordan is not helpful. It amplifies the sound somewhat, but with an average delay of over 50 milliseconds. Quite confusing. Musicians who are accustomed to playing in large spaces arrange themselves so they can synchronize their playing visually. They rely on their familiarity with each other to achieve good balance, and they always play in tune anyway. My advice to small orchestras is to “watch the conductor – that’s what he/she is there for.”

Sanders Theater – lacking the stage house – is easier for a small ensemble to play in than Jordan. But I have been in a large chorus where it was impossible to hear the basses from the tenor section. The singers watched the conductor, but he was helpless to prevent the basses from sinking a semi-tone in pitch below the tenors. Advice – listen to the guys with perfect pitch. Sometimes you need them.

The stage in Paine Hall is a good example of what not to do. There is a small enclosed shell, which can help a bit for ensembles to hear each other – but it is a disaster for the audience, muddying the sound beyond recognition.

Richard’s comments are also interesting. I remember the sound of Jordan both before and after the removal of the curtain that hung over the prosenium. The curtain absorbed some of the high frequencies from the disasterous stage house, improving the clarity of the sound in the hall. When it was removed the sound was brighter, but less clear. Seems contradictory, but so. There was also an optical effect. The intensity of lighting was increased, both on stage and in the hall. The sound was brighter because the lights were brighter. I do not know when or even if felt was installed to cut the glare a bit. The felt – as Larry Kirkegaard described it to me – was to be installed in the rear of the hall. Personally I would have installed at least some of it in the stage house.

But the 1/8″ thick felt Larry was talking about would only absorb very high frequencies. The velvet curtain was effective to below 1000Hz, which is low enough to absorb the reflections that reduce clarity. So – maybe the sound would be better if the curtain was restored – but the sound is still really good.

Yes the BSO is louder now. I just heard the Schererazade performance last week – it was really loud, and really clear. The pianissimos were also as soft as they should be. I liked it. The performance of the Mozart Requiem and Symphony of Psalms last fall was for me painfully loud – and inappropriate to the music. Levine must really like volume – or be used to playing in a hall that is not so reverberant. I had a revelation about clarity some years back when the Cleveland Orchestra played. Wow! What a difference from the BSO. But the BSO is better now.

And yes – NEVER paint a concert hall blue. It has got to be yellow, gold, or red. Else it will sound horrible. People hear with all their senses, not just their ears. In fact, the ears may be the least consciously perceived sense.

Romy the Cat could be more explicit.

Thanks, all,

David Griesinger

And is there a story to be told about Kresge Auditorium? Seated one night during intermission in the back right corner, last row, I found myself hearing noises from backstage — there was a door open — as if they were only 20 feet away. This convinced me that some kind of electronic enhancement must be at work. Not so, I was gently informed by MIT, but not before I had made some grand pronouncement or other about it in the pages of the Globe.

There’s one thing I am certain of. The reason the BSO sounds louder to me than it did when I first started going to Symphony Hall in 1955 is that it IS louder.

There’s an art to “playing” that wonderful hall, and I’m afraid that during those 30 years of death-in-life under Seiji Ozawa this wasn’t a real priority. An orchestra that COULD do this, I discovered one night, was the City of Birmingham under Simon Rattle, and startlingly so in an encore — the Pas de Deux from Stravinsky’s “Apollo” — that seemed poised on the very brink of inaudibility yet was totally and luminously clear.

Andrew Porter once said something to the effect that nothing could sound much good in any hall where the walls were painted blue …

Jordan Hall, however, is a tougher call. Audiences do love it, but many musicians, myself included, find it stressful to be onstage, with persistent problems in hearing and relating to the other members of the ensemble. Do you know why this might be so, David?

The fan or semicircle plan seems to me to be one of the profound discoveries of music and cultural history. In a traditional “Italian” theaters, no one is seated so very far from the performers, and everyone can hear well. It is the shoebox design for a hall that is the more perilous adventure IMO.

Perhaps one reason Herr Zehetmair found the audience so quiet was that the room acoustics did not allow him to hear them. When i attended a lecture/recital in the Bechtel auditorium a few months ago I was also struck by the rooms clear projection of a solo musician, but found the amplitude of the sound a bit underwhelming in the case of a forte piano.

But what astonished me was that during the discussion that followed the performance, the comments of audience members were almost completely inaudible until a microphone was placed in their hands.

From my seat in the nether reaches of the hall, the music sounded as though it was issuing from a very good monophonic high-fi set.