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Music
and architecture have for many years shared a debate and negotiation,
but have more often than not resulted in an analogous or graphic
re presentation of the work as a borrowing of compositional
strategies with questionable success. The work of Iannis Xenakis,
architect and composer, engineer and mathematician, was foundational
in seeking to resolutely identify the shared concerns and
to begin to articulately resolve those characteristics through
techniques of composition as a means to understanding the
capacity of a space not only to accommodate performance, but
to test the limits of the space by actively engaging it in
the production of sound. Whether it was in the music and choreography
of Kraanerg for ballet and orchestra or in the rhythmic
spacing of the mullions choreographing the delicate play of
light and the pace of movement in the corridor of the ambulatory
at La Tourette, Xenakis challenged the listener to engage
the space of the modern world. The success and the provocation
of the Phillips Pavilion in Brussels in 1958 credited to Le
Corbusier and Edgard Varèse, was in no doubt due to
Xenakis’ understanding the disciplines of both auteurs.
This experiment was foundational to his “construction”
of music and the installations, diotopes and polytopes.
The aural perception of spatial conditions was paramount to
its character and quality; sound defined containment; the
presence of light and the visual punctuated the clarity of
the principal text.
The limits of architectural space are set
by the physical constraints of containment and are defined
by the dimensional register of a visually perceived and conventionally
accepted system of measurement and representation. The proposition
rests in the assertion that aural perception is a more intuitive
and natural means by which we both perceive and occupy spatial
constructs. In an appreciation of the both conscious and unconscious
recognition of distance and dimension, volume and proportion,
and material resonance, it is the aural which critically identifies
the emotive qualities of architecture in its expanse and in
its intimacies. Material resonance responding to the choreographic
movement through space, complete with moments of pause and
the frictions of engagement with others, is registered though
aural cognition. Sound, or rather acoustics, must be a fundamental
principle of design conception and development of an architectural
idea. The music of architecture is evident in its articulate
resolution.
In Notre Dame de Paris Victor Hugo
spoke of the death of architecture with the rise of the book
and warned of the advent of what we now know as modernism.
With the profound change that cinema has wrought on the manner
in which we perceive both visually and aurally, the creative
register of cultural expression on the face of the city is
at an exciting threshold. Music and listening are critical
concerns; sound may very well be the significant factor in
the design and occupation of the city in a post modern world.
Toronto is blessed with musicians and composers
of great talent and eloquence; soundaXis
is an opportunity for the city to listen and for musicians
and New Music to be heard.
performity … In my life as
a practitioner, language is straight forward and/or technical;
in my life as an academic, it is not always the case –
architects tend to use language in a way that seeks to describe
and elucidate with a degree of invention. A musical colleague
raised the question “… your use of a neologism
… performity is unclear, does it signify capacity
for performance.” It speaks not only of the capacity
of a space to engage in performance, but rather more particularly
to space as an active participant in both the production and
engagement of its use. It is not limited to sound. The term,
to the best of my knowledge, has not yet found a place in
the dictionary; I do, however, remain optimistic. Clearly,
the reading of a musician demonstrates the abstracted difference
of particularized language which tends to separate rather
than integrate the disciplines. The term seeks not to confine
itself to the idea of space as an instrument; performity
is intended to address architectural space beyond its material
physicality and to embrace its emotive character. Architecture
and music share so many terms in their descriptive criticality:
color, chromatic, rhythm, timbre, proportion, scale, depth
… the list is endless, but do we understand each other
as we speak with the “precision” of descriptive
terminology. Perhaps, it is the necessity of time and movement,
the choreography of the dance that is necessary for understanding.
In architecture and in music, Iannis Xenakis
employed mathematics as a means to structure thought and composition,
searching for a reductive, spare and articulate voice with
which to address classic philosophical reasoning. The music
and the installations initiated considerations of spatial
discourse as fundamental compositional strategies. Mathematics
was the threshold of departure, geometry is the discipline
of its development; and these geometries need not necessarily
be based in the rigors of linearity. With the advent of technological
innovations in computation and fabrication, architecture can
engage and propose new paradigms; music and acoustics generate
the clarity of pure sound. It is the sound, which punctuates
the choreographed occupation of the space and most eloquently
gives it meaning.
This, then, is the place and the space of
music.
Jazz scores are often the sparest of musical
notations … a musical expression that invites improvisation
… that spare and delicate score is never played the
same way twice in its constant variations on a theme and in
its juxtapositions, be they harmonic or discordant. It is
the space between notes. The experience of that music is not
unlike, the difference of perceptions and the variations on
a theme of architecture in that each time we move through
a space, we move at a different pace and our perceptions of
space are understood in the moments of reflective pause.
Contemporary practice and compositional
form no longer are of necessity evolved in relationship to
site and are often situated in what is perhaps more appropriately
described as virtual landscape. As form evolves in the shifting
territories of an ephemeral ether, architecture becomes an
experiment in identifying parameters in terms of spatial dimension
and quality through drawing and through digital scripting
in order to understand both aural and visual performity.
Space and an understanding of one’s perception of place
within it need not be defined by the boundaries of physical
containment. Issues of perceptual acuity and relational perceptions
set the limits of territory and have begun to suggest possible
occupations. Arguably the intensity of visual and aural information
destabilizes and defamiliarizes the observer, the listener
and the viewer, setting forth the need for a new set of conditions
to establish a sense of location and questioning the need
for grounding. The fluidity or variability of context becomes
apparent in the “sea of sound.”
Architecture need define or set the limits
of its capacity for accommodation of tenancy and program.
An architecture based on the clarity of observation and the
specificity of perception may, in fact, permit the development
of a new and unpredicted manifestation as the containment
of space and of desire.
Architecture that arises from consideration
of the aural in its initial conception will produce not only
a clearer understanding of space, but will allow for an exploration
of the materiality and tectonic invention by which the space
is bound.
Join us June 1 to 11 for soundaXis
and experience the space between notes.
David Lieberman
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