Attachment 3 - Concert_Hall_Acoustics_and_the_Sounding.pdf

Concert Hall Acoustics and the Sounding Heritage of the Inter-War Period in America:

The Coolidge Auditorium (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1925)

In 1895, when the young physicist Wallace Clement Sabine examined the reverberation time of a lecture hall on Harvard’s campus, the science of architectural acoustics was born.

Sabine’s work influenced countless architects and physicists alike, including the famous New

York City-based architect Charles A. Platt and MIT physics instructor Clifford Melville

Swan, a former student of Sabine's. Both Platt and Swan collaborated in the construction of the Coolidge Auditorium, which is housed in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of

Congress in Washington, D.C. Built in 1925 and dedicated “to promoting the study and appreciation of music in America,” the 500-plus seat chamber hall exemplifies the idealized music listening environment of the inter-war period in America.1 This was an era that rose from the horrors of World War I, when many Americans found themselves besieged by the sounds now shaping modernity, be they the hustle and bustle of the automobile, office machines of endless motion and activity, the riveting of steel, or even the latest jazz tune thumping from a local bar.

By the 1930s, several cities throughout North America and Europe established anti-noise commissions, which encouraged local governments to pass noise-abatement laws in order to counteract the increase in nervous anxiety and mental illness in urban communities.2

Architectural acoustics then became a necessary science due to the increasing levels of sound that defined the spread of urbanism in America. The concert hall acoustics of the Coolidge

Auditorium is a result of this societal view on the destructive impact of noise in American cities. It is ironic, however, that with the increase of noise abatement within concert hall construction, early twentieth-century music became louder and more discordant. It was as if the composers and musicians of the day, in opposition to local governments, sought to mirror in the music the noise of the modern world rather than to avoid it all together.3

Beyond the repertoire of the musical vanguard and its ability to disrupt the sound control measures in the concert hall, the introduction of live radio broadcasts forced acousticians to adapt to a new listening paradigm that embraced the engineered sound of aerial transmission and reception, a factor which still influences the design of modern concert halls today. This article therefore attempts to reconstruct the listening soundscape that informed the construction and patronage of the Coolidge Auditorium in the mid-1920's, a time bombarded with the noise of "progress" and the proliferation of sound recordings and electronic distribution systems. By so doing, my hope is to highlight the changing attitudes towards music, broadcast sound, and noise in the early twentieth century that shape the current listening environment in the concert hall. The 1925-built Coolidge Auditorium thus represents a "sonic oasis," a separate space in the nation's capital that underscores for us today the conflict in society between preserving the live music of the past and embracing the electroacoustic sounds of the future.4

LISTENING IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY AMERICA

Following his acoustical work at Harvard, Sabine was asked to construct acoustic environments for other spaces around the country, most notably the Symphony Hall in

Boston, modeled after the famous 1884 Leipzig Gewandhaus theater designed by Martin

Gropius. The long-awaited opening of the Boston hall took place on 15 October 1900. After an initial number of mixed reviews, the hall was soon trumpeted as one of the best spaces to hear music in America (see Fig. 1). In fact, the Boston Sunday Herald declared the sound in the hall a veritable “feat in acoustics,” further noting that “everything is heard with the most perfect distinctness, the contrasting timbres of the different instruments stand out clearly, and at no time, even in the heaviest fortissimos, is there any cloudiness of tone.”5 To acknowledge the successful acoustics in the hall, a memorial plaque was installed by members of the governing board in October 1946, which highlighted the work of Sabine. It reads: “the first auditorium in the world to be built in known conformity with acoustical laws was designed in accordance with [Sabine’s] specifications and mathematical formulae the fruit of long and arduous research through self-effacing devotion to science…here stands his monument.”6

With the building of this hall, science made its definitive mark on the sound of live music in

America.

Figure 1: Boston Symphony Hall, Interior, 1900. Photo Courtesy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives.

Beyond the concert hall, the war effort in the United States further imposed a heighted acoustic reality upon the everyday lives of its citizens. During the war, the use of acoustical theories on the battlefield helped to mitigate the loss of line-of-sight due to trench warfare, submarine conflict, and aerial bombardment. Unlike any other time in the history of war, soldiers as well as civilians were faced with hearing their enemies rather than seeing them, a phenomenon that Axel Volmar describes as an “auscultation of the acoustic warscape.”7

Additionally, the extreme levels of volume emanating from land and naval artillery created an

“acoustic landscape [that] constituted a violent, inhospitable environment” that dramatically defined a desire to control unwanted sounds like no other.8 Although the fight against noise in

American cities began before the war, the physical and neurological effects of the "acoustic warscape" of World War I on American soldiers (e.g., PTSD and "shell-shock" syndrome) increased the need for better sound control measures to be defined within the built environment back at home.9

Owing much to the effects of the "acoustic warscape" on returning American soldiers, the study of acoustics in America became less about controlling the flow of sound and more about isolating individuals from it, or, in the case of auditorium construction, quieting the hall entirely in order to create a "dead" space for sound to live again. In 1919, prior to his work on the Coolidge Auditorium, American acoustician Clifford M. Swan wrote an article titled, “Architectural Acoustics,” for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects that summarized the situation as follows:

A few decades ago such problems commanded but little attention, but modern office machinery and the hard and non-absorptive materials used in fireproof construction have conspired to make the ordinary business office almost as noisy as the proverbial boiler-shop. The increases in errors and the loss of efficiency on the part of the clerical force due to this nerve-shattering racket are facts now being considered by the welfare department of many of the most progressive business houses.10

The desire for noise-abatement in America’s sprawling cities thus took on a “medicalized critique of modernity,” one that grew with intellectual fervor among writers and cultural critics of American music.11 Big band jazz and "talkie" films of the so-called "roaring twenties" were, at the time, characterized by academics and conservative music lovers alike as a noise-filled blight upon the sensibilities of all art-loving Americans.12 For example, after listening to the jazz-influenced music of George Gershwin at Aeolian Hall (1 November 1923), a critic published the following remark in Musical America, an established journal of American musical conservatism and pedagogy: “Jazz expresses merely the easy joy, insouciance, vulgarity and love of motion characteristic of America’s big cities.”13 To many conservative music listeners, the sound of jazz and its “dogmatism of the commonplace” presented a threat to those who championed an artistic legacy for America that rivaled Europe.14 Like the everyday noises of the modern world, jazz was viewed by many social critics as a danger to the health and well-being of the American listener. As Isaac Goldberg, the first biographer of Gershwin’s music and life, wrote in 1930:

To the theological dogmatist [jazz] is a new guise of the ancient devil, to be fought as a satanic agency. To the pagan, if he is minded to interpret novelties in the language of social ethics, it is the symptom of a glorious release from the bonds of moral restraint.

The musician, if he is one of the old school, looks upon it with mingled amusement and disgust; if he is of the modernist persuasion, he beholds in it rich possibilities of a new style.15

Conversely, it was the sound of American jazz that, following the devastation of World War I, revitalized the European modernist spirit. For Europeans, American jazz was a celebrated by-product of the modernist aesthetic for noise, movement, hybridity, and spectacle.16

The Coolidge Auditorium was built in the context of these early twentieth-century debates surrounding the harmful implications of urban noise and jazz. The hall was designed to host classical chamber music and to serve as a counterpoint to the sounds of populist entertainment, thus “removed from the sphere of social rivalry and commercial intrigue.”17 In the program booklet for an inaugural set of chamber music concerts in Washington, D.C., the

Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, Carl Engel, characterized the importance of chamber music to the American public:

No class of composition affords so great a variety as does chamber music…If, during the second half of the eighteenth century, chamber music rapidly spread in favor and fashion, this was due not only to the genius of men like Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and

Beethoven, but also to the encouragement these men received from enthusiastic amateurs of birth and culture…Fashion, for once, meant advance…It is unfortunately no longer so; and if it is to retain its natural and well-qualified place “at the head” of musical composition and performance, it must rely more than ever on the support of munificent patrons.18

The creative directors of the Coolidge Auditorium were not alone in their desire to reform American cultural tastes with a return to artistic genres of the past. The size and intimacy of the Coolidge Auditorium expressed the values of the so-called “Little Theater

Movement” in America, which began in 1912 and ended in the mid-1920s with the rise of sound in film.19 Advocates of the movement, who were drawn primarily from the upper-middle class, desired intimate theatrical spaces as opposed to the visual and sonic effects of cinema houses in order to create “an image of reform, struggling against a conservative corporate society.”20 Hollywood films and formulaic stage spectacles were perceived as enemies of high art and were described by members of the movement as “mindless, bloated, and detrimental to psychic well-being.”21 The Little Theater Movement's architectural response was to construct and promote small playhouses and unconventional theatrical spaces for the performance of experimental and classic revivals of European works by artists ranging from Shakespeare and Moliere to the latest epic-theatrical works of Max Reinhardt.22 The promotion of such works were grounded in moralistic terms and in the spirit of reform and the revitalization of the fine arts in America.

The Little Theater Movement (and its ally, the Coolidge Auditorium) was one of many national reform projects in the early-twentieth century that sought political and social change in the so-called “Progressive Era.” Be it the prohibition of alcohol, the granting of voting rights to women, the creation of labor unions, or education reform, the era presented a call-to-arms for the elimination of waste and corruption in all areas of society. At the heart of all these reforms was the hope for a prosperous society for all; a collective vision for the country to be greater than it was in the past.23 Even the wealthiest in society took up the call, increasing philanthropic activity by creating public spaces to educate and enrich the masses.

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was one such individual who dedicated much of her fortune (made by her father in the wholesale grocery business in Chicago) to reform music in

America.24 When her father died, Elizabeth’s first philanthropic act was to establish a pension fund in his honor for musicians of the Chicago Symphony. This interest in supporting music for the enjoyment of others led to the building of Sprague Music Hall at Yale University (her father’s alma mater), the establishment of music ensembles, and the creation of a chamber music festival in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, complete with residences for the musicians and a festival hall.25 1925 marked the eighth anniversary of the Berkshire Chamber Music

Festival, annually held since 1918, and the opening of the Coolidge Auditorium in

Washington, D.C. The auditorium was the capstone of Coolidge’s philanthropic support of chamber music in America.26

THE COOLIDGE AUDITORIUM

Frustrated by the lack of a suitable space to hear chamber music in the nation's capital, Coolidge approached Carl Engel, the chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress, and explained her desire to build a music auditorium in the Library. Engel later introduced

Coolidge to Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress. In November of 1924, Coolidge presented Putnam with a personal check for $60,000, which allowed Putnam to begin work on the auditorium.27 By January, Putnam met with the Architect of the Capital, David Lynn, who suggested that Charles A. Platt serve as an architectural consultant in the design. Platt was the architect of record for the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art, where

Putnam, Engel, and Coolidge all saw and heard a chamber music concert the year before (see

Fig. 2). Trained in both New York and Paris, Platt was a favored landscape architect and garden designer for Rockefeller, Astor, Roosevelt, and even the gardens of the Sprague estate in Brookline, MA, Coolidge’s paternal home.28 Given his fluency with European artistic traditions and American idealism, Platt seemed well-suited to fulfill Coolidge's vision for the auditorium.

Figure 2: Charles A. Platt. Architectural Sketch of the North Exterior Elevation, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1915. Photographic Print Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image # AI-29413.

Before submitting his plans for the auditorium, Platt consulted with the acoustician

Clifford M. Swan.29 Initially, Platt designed a thrust stage with seats on three of the four sides.

According to Engel’s letter to Coolidge, Swan advised against such a design for the auditorium, reasoning that “such a stage would tend to create one limited area…where the acoustics would be excellent, and all the rest of the hall would have to suffer.”30 Swan thus recommended that Platt design a rectangular-shaped theater, similar to his mentor’s own architectural design for the Boston Symphony Hall. The rectangular-shaped hall was placed on the ground floor of the northwest courtyard of the Jefferson Building, with a seating capacity of 512 (see Fig. 3).

Figure 3: Charles A. Platt, Architectural Sketch of the Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 4 Feb. 1925. Photographic Image Courtesy of Charles A. Platt Architectural Records and Papers, 1879-1981, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Instead of acquiring a new piece of land, the single-storied auditorium was placed in the large inner courtyard of the Jefferson Building, which houses the Music Division of the Library of Congress.

The design of the Coolidge Auditorium was based on the acoustic work of Swan's mentor, Wallace Clement Sabine, who referred to Swan as “the only student I have had, and, as matters now stand, my sole hope of making the subject of Architectural Acoustics an engineering science.”31 Swan used a pitch above middle C, or 512 vibrations per second, to measure the sound absorbent ability per unit area of material, including painted cloth panels, cork tile, wool seat covers, etc.32 After measuring the area volume of the auditorium, Swan was then able to determine the reverberant nature of the empty auditorium before construction even began. To mitigate sound leakage into the library, the space was equipped with heavy double doors encased with one inch of wool-felt. The felt created a tight closure around each door that was enhanced with a lever door handle, which, when depressed, would push a felt stop down in between the doors so as to seal the space between them.33 In addition, the reinforced concrete floor was covered with cork tiles, which have a natural sound absorbing capacity and reduce the amount of airborne noise that travels through lateral walls and floors.34 In a further attempt to control echoes and reverberation time, the ceiling was coffered and ventilation grills were installed near the front of the stage. The walls were lined with one-inch thick wool felt and covered with painted cloth panels so as to absorb the sound even further and to reduce reverberation in the room. And finally, to bring about a neo-classical aesthetic to the hall, oak-paneled wainscoting was put in place throughout (See Fig.

4a and 4b).35

All of the sound-absorbing materials proposed by Swan were implemented by Platt to create an ideal listening environment for chamber music. According to the second edition of

Acoustics of Buildings, published in 1930 by Floyd Watson, founder of The Acoustics Society of

America, the outdoor Greek theater was the model for "ideal" acoustics for both speech and music in an auditorium:

Figure 4a: Charles A. Platt, Architectural Sketch of Cross-section through Auditorium looking towards Stage, Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 10 March 1925. Photographic Image Courtesy of Charles A. Platt Architectural Records and Papers, 1879-1981, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Note the use of Doric columns in the in-lay as well as the classically-inspired broken pediment over the door frame. See also Fig. 4b.

Figure 4b: Charles A. Platt, Architectural Sketch of the View of the Back Stage, Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 10 March 1925.

Photographic Image Courtesy of Charles A. Platt Architectural Records and Papers, 1879-1981, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Note the classic-inspired panels and the floral molding above the rear-stage door.

It has been known since the time of the Greek theater that outdoor auditoriums have good acoustical properties…Consideration of the outdoor theater shows that it is quite dead acoustically. It has almost no reflected sound as in the indoor theater, and is thus at once from the various defects of echoes, blurring of sounds and excessive reverberation. It suggests the desirability of deadening the indoor theater to make it comparable with outdoors.36

The Coolidge Auditorium was thus designed to be a classically-inspired listening environment, equipped with enough sound-control measures to create a "dead" acoustic space (i.e., having a short reverberation time) to allow the intimacy of classical chamber music to resound and to restore America's artistic future.37

The Coolidge Auditorium opened in October 1925 with a three-day festival of chamber music. The festival featured music from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Neo-

Classical periods, as well as contemporary works based on traditional compositional forms.

The festival repertoire exemplified a desire to return to the past and to do it in a space that literally shut itself off from the noise of the modern world. In contrast to the large theaters and movie houses that were populating cities across America, the Coolidge Auditorium presented an intimate, unamplified sonic experience for both listener and musician. Thus, the highly controlled acoustics, the neo-classical architectural design of a federal building in the nation's capital, and the select repertoire all represented a cohesive effort to institutionalize chamber music in America.

The new hall and the three-day music festival were well received by the press, with one reviewer remarking: “Among its splendid features is a very fine pipe organ, and although the architecture and decoration of the hall is severely simple in design, the acoustics which are said to be perfect, compensate for the entire lack of ornament.”38 After the successful opening of the hall, Ms. Coolidge took to the airwaves to broadcast chamber music directly into the homes of the American public. From the very start of the building project, Coolidge desired a space in the nation’s capital that would arouse American listeners to the pleasures and educative sounds of chamber music, hence one of the reasons why the Library of Congress was chosen.39 The relatively new practice of radio listening in the home allowed this to occur on a scale that was previously unimaginable, uniting “the nation physically, across geographic space, connecting remote regions with centers of civilization and culture, tying the country together over the invisible waves of ether much as the telegraph and telephone lines had stitched America together, pole by pole, in the preceding century.”40 The success of these live radio broadcasts, hosted by Ms. Coolidge herself, prompted the Library of Congress to initiate the Chamber Music Hour, which was presented on major radio broadcasting companies across America. With the radio transmissions from the Coolidge Auditorium, which shared airspace with other music shows like The Standard Hour (the San Francisco Orchestra and

Opera Company), The Majestic Hour (the Majestic Orchestra and songs of Eddie Cantor), and the Palmolive Hour (concert music sponsored by the Palmolive Soap Company), members of

Coolidge’s artistic circle could carve out a restorative sound culture in opposition to the chaotic “noise” of the day. In 1936, after 10 years of radio broadcasts from the Coolidge

Auditorium in Washington, D.C., Coolidge presented the following self-congratulatory remark:

To NBC, I cordially say, “I told you so”...the splendid victory for chamber music over those doubts and misgivings…of broadcasting it to the largest audience possible…and by doing this freely and frequently until we cannot live without it, thus serving art through mankind by serving mankind through art.41

In the end, the acoustic reality that Swan and Platt set out to achieve by building the

Coolidge Auditorium was undermined by the radio listening audience that was so sought by

Ms. Coolidge to reform music in America. As Emily Thompson writes in her penetrating study, The Soundscape of Modernity, at the same time that the Coolidge Auditorium was being built to counteract the “noise” within American society, a new acoustic reality began to take shape, whereby acousticians sought to develop an ideal soundscape for a mass audience outside the built environment of the hall:

Acousticians began to promote a new “ideal” type of auditorium in the 1920s, and architects simultaneously made that ideal a reality. The new auditorium was low and wide, “spatulate” or fan-shaped, with diverging side walls spreading out from a small stage area to form an increasingly wide seating area…The acoustic result was the performers on stage effectively occupied the apex of a large horn…There was little opportunity for reverberation to develop, as the shape and material constitution of the new auditorium were designed “to blend and unify the music at its source and then transmit this music efficiently and uniformly”…Efficient transmission—a primary goal in electroacoustical design—was equally in the realm of auditorium design.42

With the advent of radio broadcasting, the sound engineer superseded the acoustician, “creating spatial effects and acoustical illusions by using electroacoustic devices in conjunction with, or even independent of, architectural space.”43 The soundscape of the concert hall was now defined by the outside radio listener. This new emphasis on radio transmission forced architects to build concert halls to broadcast music to an unseen external audience whose listening desires were to hear the music via the broadcast medium and not necessarily the hall itself. The 1932 opening of Radio City Music Hall in New York City can be viewed as a logical outcome of a profound shift in the sonic reality of the built environment.44 As

Thompson writes, "Radio City Music Hall was not just a symbolic tribute to the tremendous industry of sound communication and control; it was also constructed of the very products of that industry."45 The main auditorium boasted over 6000 seats with the latest hardware in electroacoustic reproduction, which were encased in the most advanced sound absorbing materials on the market. Here, in this "gigantic cathedral of sound," music stages were constructed that contained no seats for listeners, only areas for observation behind sound-proof glass, thus further isolating the music from the acoustic reality of a live listening audience.46

The acoustic environment of the Coolidge Auditorium was eventually superseded by the efforts of sound engineers to meet the growing demand for radio listeners (and, it must be said, the increased revenue from advertising dollars). After serving the chamber music community for over 60 years with its original acoustic construction, the Coolidge Auditorium was renovated in 1996-1997 to accommodate electroacoustic reproduction. The Library of

Congress contracted famed acoustician George C. Izenour to serve as consultant for the renovation project.47 Following Izenour's advice, the hall was equipped with movable acoustic panels in the stage shell, an acoustic curtain to simulate a full hall for recording sessions, a new audiovisual recording system, and a sound-proof booth for the recording engineer.48 In the end, the increasing demand by the public that the Coolidge Auditorium be equipped to accommodate radio broadcasting and electronic recording meant that its original acoustical construction was reconfigured to meet modern listening devices. The impact of electroacoustic reproduction on the design of concert halls is still being felt today.

THE SONIC LEGACY OF EARLY 20TH-CENTURY AMERICA

In the contemporary listening environment, the ultimate sonic ideal of what music should sound like is commonly understood to be represented by a music recording, whereby an audio engineer eliminates any extraneous sounds that get in the way of the music. As a result, digital music recordings present a disembodied sound, which isolates the sound source from its environment to such a degree that we come to consume only the sound signal and not the actual space or person who produced the sound. The sound of music making, the sound of an individual interacting in a physical space is thus eliminated in a digital sound recording.

In his essay “The Grain of the Voice,” Roland Barthes reminds us that the grain, the actual physical body of the performer, or in our case, the performance space, is a text full of erotic meaning for the listener.49 By eliminating the spatiality and corporeality of the sound, we are disregarding fundamental aspects of the sound inherent to its production. In fact, the

MP3 digital audio format, the most pervasive music file format played on digital devices, has eliminated the actual physical “presence” of the music to such a degree that select audio layers of the original sound signal, which imprint the uniqueness of the built environment on to the sound, no longer are heard. What remains is a curated sonic reality, a virtual “presence” that is native only to the digital medium itself.50

In the concert hall today we find a similar process at work. As we have seen throughout this article, the main goal in architectural acoustics is to create a sonic environment in which preferred sounds are enhanced, while others are absorbed, blocked, or otherwise eliminated from the space as soon as they are produced, so that an idealized listening experience remains. What has changed in modern concert hall acoustical construction is the use of compressed sound (i.e., the MP3 digital audio format) to shape the listening environment for the hall, so much so that the unique timbre of the live sounding body, be it the performer or the space itself, is eliminated so as to produce a sound in the hall that is akin to a music recording, the sonic ideal for the modern listener.51 This process of

"scrubbing" the hall of its corporeality creates a sameness of sound that distances the uniqueness of the sounding space from the uniqueness of the music, a point echoed in a recent

Los Angeles Times article from March 2017, where music critic Mark Swed laments “the sameness of sound” across the globe of halls designed by the famed acoustician Yasuhisa

Toyota (b. 1952).52 Since his first project with the Suntory Hall in Tokyo in 1986, Toyota has come to define how we hear, or, better yet, how we should hear classical music. As Jacques

Attali argued in his 1977 classic text, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, when music listening is defined by uniform conditions, these conditions become “a powerful factor in centralization, cultural normalization, and the disappearance of distinctive cultures.”53 It is interesting to note that what Attali cautioned in this mid-century essay was similar to the acoustic ambitions embraced by the Coolidge Auditorium and the Little Theater Movement, whereby populist entertainment (e.g., theatrical spectacles, "talkies," and big band jazz), mediated through large amplified audio reproduction systems, was seen as eroding the distinctive culture of high art and its moral implications for society.

Concert hall acoustic design today has little to do with foregrounding the site-specific characteristics of music production (e.g., complexity of timbre, resonance, pitch range, and dynamics) and more to do with the predictive modeling of sound. To this end, one of the most commonly used acoustic software programs for concert hall design is CATT-Acoustic, a 3D-computer modeling program for acoustic prediction and sound field simulation.54 The computer program can be used in the actual space, virtual space, or through miniature models of the hall, built with the same materials as used in the full-scale hall.55 Tools such as CATT-

Acoustic contribute to defining an “all-purpose soundscape,” which neither highlight the uniqueness of particular pieces of music and their performers, nor the distinctive sound of particular auditoriums. Like the recording studio, the acoustical reality of the modern concert hall flattens our perception of diverse bodies of sound.

The unique listening environment of live chamber music, with its intimacy of space and performer, was conserved in America with the building of the Coolidge Auditorium at the

Library of Congress in 1925. The Coolidge Auditorium evolved from a heightened awareness of sound in society, the philanthropic will for collective reform, and the progressive mechanization of modern American life. The marriage of all these elements influenced the auditorium's construction and acoustical design. The focus of listeners and the wider public, however, soon shifted to the futuristic sound of radio transmission. This gave rise to the creation of new types of concert halls such as Radio City Music Hall, which privileged predictable electro-acoustical recording over the spatial particularities of hall construction.

The legacy of recorded music continues to influence concert hall design and listener expectations of how music should sound regardless of the unique particulars that define an acoustic space. And, as we have seen, outperformed the seemingly progressive agenda of music reform in America and the medical critique of noise in the early twentieth century.

1 Letter, Herbert Putnam [Librarian of Congress] to Frederick H. Gillett [Speaker of the House of

Representatives], 4 Dec. 1924, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

2 There is much historical research in this area, see for example Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008);

James G. Mansell, “Neurasthenia, Civilization, and the Sounds of Modern Life: Narratives of Nervous Illness in the Interwar Campaign Against Noise,” in Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century

Europe, ed. Daniel Morat (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 278-302; and Emily Thompson, The

Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1939 (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2002).

3 The increase in volume, abstraction, and noise in twentieth-century music is discussed at great length in Alex

Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).

4 This same sonic division is at the heart of sound studies, a relatively new interdisciplinary area of research that explores the materiality of sound and its mediation within the listening environment. A good introduction to the field of sound studies is The Sound Studies Reader, edited by one of the founders of the field Jonathan Sterne (New

York and London: Routledge, 2012), as well as the more recent The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

5 “A Complete Success,” Boston Sunday Herald, 21 October 1900, quoted in Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of

Modernity, 52.

6 The ceremony was held in the hall on 23 October 1946 with the famed Boston Symphony conductor Serge

Koussevitzky presiding. Sabine’s widow, Dr. Jane Kelly Sabine, attended the ceremony as did friends and professional colleagues of Sabine. The Boston Daily Globe 150, no. 116, (24 October 1946), 10.

7 Axel Volmar, “In Storms of Steel: The Soundscape of World War I and its Impact on Auditory Media Culture during the Weimar Period,” in Sounds of Modern History, 231.

8 Volmar, 232.

9 After the war, medical experts became the driving force in creating noise abatement organizations, who lobbied governments to view noise as a public health crisis. This medical critique of noise became the basis for the introduction of new acoustical materials in construction as well as an industry dedicated to a range of sound control products and services; see Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 59-62. For more information on the physiological effects of the sounds of World War I on soldiers and citizens, see Annessa C. Stagner, "Healing the

Soldier, Restoring the Nation: Representations of Shell Shock in the USA during and after the First World

War," Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 2 (April 2014), 255-274; Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and

Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Fiona Reid, Broken Men:

Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain, 1914-1930 (New York and London: Continuum, 2010); and Anton

Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

10 Clifford M. Swan, “Architectural Acoustics,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 7, no. 12 (December

1919), 550. Interestingly, the article was reprinted in 1921 by the Johns-Manville Corporation, an acoustics material firm where Swan worked as their chief consultant. The reprint of the article was published as a book “to architects with our compliments, in the hopes that in it they may find the possibility of a solution of many acoustical problems.”

11 Mansell, “Neurasthenia, Civilization, and the Sounds of Modern Life,” 278.

12 The auditory-filled adjective “roaring” is often used to define the cultural environment of 1920s America, both now and then, so much so that the term takes on the powerful image of a machine-like beast that is noisy, savage, and wild. In this era, the first feature-length film with synchronized music and speech appeared in 1927, The Jazz

Singer, starring Al Jolson and directed by Alan Crosland. The film was an instant hit with audiences, where some critics even noted a kind of hysteria among the patrons who heard it for the first time, calling it a “sensation.”

These critical reports are not unlike those concerning jazz music in general, which speaks to why Hollywood would choose such a subject to premiere the advent of sound in cinema. For information about the premiere and the rise of sound films in America, see Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-

1931 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). For more information on the characteristic use of the term "roaring" when defining American culture in the 1920s, see Stuart A. Kallen, History Firsthand: The Roaring

Twenties (Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2001); David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920-

1940: How Americans Lived through the “Roaring Twenties” and the Great Depression (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004);

Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004); and Warren I. Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of America in the Twentieth Century (New

York: Pantheon Books, 1973).

13 As quoted by Mary Herron Dupree, ““Jazz,” the Critics, and American Art Music in the 1920s,” American

Music 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1986), 288.

14 Paul Fritz Laubenstein, “Jazz—Debit and Credit,” Musical Quarterly 15 (Oct. 1929), 614, quoted in Dupree, 298.

15 Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of American Popular Music (New York: John Day Co., 1930), 259.

16 For more information about the struggle between art music and jazz in America in the early-twentieth century, see David Savran, “The Search for America’s Soul: Theatre in the Jazz Age,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 3 (October

2006), 459-476.

17 Carl Engel, Program notes for a chamber music program at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 7-9

February 1924, 2 (Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

Carl Engel (1883-1944) was the Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress starting in 1922, when he became acquainted with Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864-1953), a prolific patron of chamber music in

America. Coolidge formed a festival and chamber music competition in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (the Berkshire

Chamber Music Festival) in 1918. Upon hearing the music at the fifth iteration of the festival, Engel wrote to

Coolidge to request that she gift the prize-wining compositions from the Festival to the Music Division of the

Library of Congress. From that initial correspondence in 1922, Coolidge and Engel became life-long friends and allies in supporting art music in America. It was Engel who realized Coolidge’s desire to institutionalize

American chamber music in the nation’s capital with the building of the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of

Congress. For more information on their correspondence and the musical legacy of their partnership, see Cyrilla

Barr, “The ‘Faerie Queene’ and the ‘Archangel’: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and Carl

Engel,” American Music 15, no. 2 (Summer 1997), 159-182.

18 Barr, 1-2.

19 For a full history of the movement, see Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).

20 Douglass McDermott, The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14.

21 Chansky, 4.

22 Epic theater is a term that refers to a demystification of theater as spectacle and for the audience to see the world as it truly is, naked and stripped of sentimentality. The Austrian-born theater director Max Reinhardt

(1873-1943) opened in 1901 the Kleines Theater (“small theater”) to house cabaret and satirical plays and was the director of the Berlin Volksbühne Theater (“the people’s theater”) in 1915, which was dedicated to “art for the people.” For more information on the legacy of Reinhardt and the other German-speaking émigrés on the

Little Theater Movement in America, see the section “Delayed Reaction: Stanislavsky, Total Theater, and

Broadway” in Joseph Horowitz, Artists in Exile: How Refugees from 20th-Century War and Revolution Transformed the

American Performing Arts (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 311-394.

23 The most well-regarded resource on the era is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955).

24 Barr, “A Style of Her Own,” 188-189.

25 Barr, 191. The South Mountain Concert Hall was built in 1918 to serve as the main concert hall for the festival. Often referred to as "The Temple of Music" owing to its church-like construction, the hall was registered on the National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmarks in 1973 (The National Archives, Record Group 79: Records of the National Park Service, 1785-2006: National Register of Historic Places and

National Historic Landmarks Program Records: Massachusetts, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/63794358).

26 Owing to her unprecedented financial support of chamber music in America and in Europe, Coolidge was awarded the Walter Wilson Cobbett Medal in 1925. Inaugurated in 1924 by the British industrialist and amateur-violinist William Walter Cobbett (1847-1937), the silver-gilt medal is still given annually to an individual who supports the development and growth of chamber music. When Cobbett awarded the metal to

Coolidge, he referred to her as the “Lady Bountiful of Chamber Music;” see Barr, “The Musicological Legacy of

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge,” 250.

27 According to Barr, “there existed no legislation enabling [the Library of Congress] to accept and hold in trust the principal of a fund whose income might be applied to its operational expenses and acquisitions…Such an offer to the government from a private citizen was unprecedented.” Barr, “A Style of Her Own,” 192. On 3

March 1925, President Calvin Coolidge (no relation to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge) signed into law the bill to create a “Library of Congress Trust Fund Board,” which allowed members (made up of the Secretary of the

Treasurer, the chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library, the Librarian of Congress, and two persons appointed by the President) to “accept, receive, hold, and to administer such gifts or bequests of personal property of the benefit of, or in connection with, the Library, its collections, or its service.” Library of Congress, Statutes of Law, 68th Congress (1923-1925), 43, Chapter 423, 1107.

28 Keith N. Morgan, “Platt, Charles A(dams),” in Grove Art Online, ed. Jane Turner (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2003), http://www-oxfordartonline-com/groveart/view/10.1093/ gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-

9781884446054-e-700006810.

29 At the time, Swan just completed consulting work on the chamber music hall of the Eastman School of Music, the Kilbourn Hall, in Rochester, NY. Designed by the Gordon and Kaelber Architectural Firm, the hall opened in 1922 receiving immediate praise for its acoustic rendering of sound; see Floyd R. Watson, Acoustics of Buildings, Including Acoustics of Auditoriums and Soundproofing of Rooms (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1923), 40-43.

30 Carl Engel to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, 2 March 1925 (Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

31 Thompson, 75.

32 First established in the nineteenth century by otologist Heinrich Rinne and physician Ernst Weber, 512 Hz is the standard frequency used by medical practitioners to assess a patient's hearing. According to the National

Center for Biotechnical Information, 512 Hz "provides the best balance of time of tone decay and tactile vibration," allowing for a greater precision of sound detection by the patient (Nur Wahidah B. Wahid and

Maximos Attia, "Weber Test," https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK526135). In his original research at the

Fogg Lecture Hall, Sabine connected his work in acoustics with that of the medical community by utilizing a 512

Hz organ pipe (~C5) to measure the rate of inaudibility within the hall after the tone was struck. The organ pipe was placed on a wind chest to allow for repeated experimentation. After the tone was produced, Sabine used only his ear and a stopwatch to measure when the tone was no longer audible. He would minimize any variation in his measurements by taking a number of samples and then calculate the mean value of each set of numbers. As seat cushions and other material were systematically added to the hall, Sabine was able to calculate the rate of sound absorption of each added item. Although there is no evidence in the correspondence between Swan and

Platt on the choice of the number of seats in the Coolidge Auditorium, it is curious to note that the hall was designed to hold 512 seats. If the correlation between the number of seats and the frequency used to determine the acoustics of the hall is true, then it brings further evidence to the perception of the concert hall as a space for therapeutic listening during a time when noise was viewed collectively as a public health crisis. For a thorough discussion of the reverberation formula created by Sabine and utilized by Swan in the building of the Coolidge

Auditorium, see Thompson, 33-45.

33 Watson, Acoustics of Buildings, 129-130.

34 According to Sabine’s research on sound absorption coefficients of various surface materials, which was used by Swan, cork tile had a sound absorption coefficient of .03. Compared to a one-square meter of an open window, which represented a sound absorption coefficient of 1.00 or 100 percent absorption of sound energy, cork tile provided a sufficient mitigation of impact sound to allow optimal resonance without the blurring of tone;

see Watson, 25.

35 As listed in “Tentative Specifications for Library Auditorium” in the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation

Collection of the Library of Congress, the document specifies under wainscoting “see ‘Little Theatre’ in N.Y.C.,” thus the desire to align the look, sound, and aesthetic of the auditorium with the Little Theater Movement in

America. Placed at 240 West 44th Street in Manhattan, the Little Theater (now known as the Helen Hayes

Theater) was built in 1912 by the architectural firm of Ingalls and Hoffman. The 299-seat space was financed by the New York theater director and producer Winthrop Ames. According to Ames, the goal of the theater was to be a “place of entertainment for intelligent people” with its neo-Georgian architecture that recalled the chamber halls of Europe rather than the big-budget theaters of Broadway; see Michael Paulson, “Broadway’s Smallest

Theater is Reopening, This Time as a Nonprofit,” The New York Times, 5 Feb. 2018.

36 Watson, Acoustics of Building, second edition (1930), 58-59. “Ideal Auditorium Acoustics,” the section in

Watson’s text where this quote is taken, does not exist in the first edition published in 1923. Further speculation regarding the “ideal” acoustics of indoor auditoriums in the late 1920s can be found in Watson’s article “Ideal

Auditorium Acoustics,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 16, no. 4 (July 1928), 259. In it, Watson further discusses that the stage and nearby reflecting walls of ancient outdoor theaters are also beneficial to the acoustics of an indoor auditorium.

37 See Engel's quote regarding the legacy of chamber music (endnote 17).

38 The La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press, Sunday, 22 Nov. 1925, 3.

39 As per the letter written by the Librarian of Congress to Congress, the auditorium's stated purpose was to

"amplify the resources of the government, through the Library, for a permanent and more diversified service to the art and science of music, and to the study and appreciation of [chamber music] in America." Letter, Putnam to Congress, 4 Dec. 1924, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

40 Michelle Hilmes, “Radio and the Imagined Community,” in The Sound Studies Reader, 353. In 1919, following the ban of civilian radio operations during World War I, the U.S. Bureau of Standards began broadcasting weekly Friday night music concerts over the WWV call signal. The successful transmission of music and weekly news reports encouraged the development of radio networks throughout the Northeast and Midwest regions of the United States, which was initially operated by AT&T and then later RCA, NBC, and CBS. With the Radio

Act of 1927 and the formation of the Federal Radio Commission, new transmitting frequencies were established for AM broadcasting that allowed for the so-called “Golden Age of Radio,” which became the main source of music listening for many Americans across the United States. For information on the history of radio and its connection to the cultural milieu of the United States in the early twentieth century, see Michelle Hilmes, Radio

Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Benedict

Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Michael

Stamm, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 2011); and Tona J. Hangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

41 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Typed Transcript from the Library of Congress Chamber Music Hour, 14 January

1936. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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