The Science and Emotions of Lincoln Center’s New Sound
The New Yorker
By Rivka Galchen, October 10, 2022
Geffen Hall’s ambience was under a “curse.” How should it be changed?
“ I have a very specific answer to your question,” Jamie Bernstein told me. Bernstein is the daughter of Leonard Bernstein, the famed conductor and music director of the New York Philharmonic. “At the Moab Music Festival, one of the things they do is the Grotto Concert.” She described taking a boat down the Colorado River, into Canyonlands National Park, then walking a sandy path that led to a small cave. In that natural amphitheatre, she heard a two-piano performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” “Michael Barrett was playing one, and he was playing so intensely that he split open his thumb. In the pause between the two movements, his thumb was bandaged and they wiped the blood off the keys. In the second half, some large bird—not a canyon wren—started cawing with the music. And it was like the earth itself was opening up from the sound.” Each note hung in the air for a moment and then a few seconds later returned from across the river, echoing off formations some two miles away. “And those are the best acoustics I have ever experienced,” she said.
Founded in 1842, the New York Philharmonic is the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States. Carnegie Hall—known for its creamy, embracing acoustics—served as its home starting in 1891. In 1962, a few years after Leonard Bernstein became the Philharmonic’s music director, it moved to Philharmonic Hall, at Lincoln Center. Lincoln Center became the new home of the New York City Ballet and of the Metropolitan Opera, too—it was a Cold War showcase for American high culture. Bernstein was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants; his father ran a beauty-supply company. The Philharmonic was revered; Bernstein was perhaps even more revered. But the new Philharmonic Hall was not. Its acoustics were described by Harold C. Schonberg, the music critic for the Times, as “antiseptic” and “very weak in the bass, with little color and presence”—and Schonberg was one of the hall’s gentler critics. In addition, the members of the orchestra often couldn’t hear one another properly. “This building went up, and it was brand new and very glamorous and modern,” Jamie Bernstein recalled. “But also it had this marmoreal solidity. My father used to call Lincoln Center the Travertine Mausoleum.” Philharmonic Hall had been built to accommodate bigger audiences—in those days, the symphony’s concerts consistently sold out. But acousticians agreed that the hall was too big, and had too many seats, whose occupants absorbed sound waves.