The acoustics of the hall

Dad, you told me the other day about how Beethoven played the horn sonata on a piano that was tuned a semitone lower, and how he played the piano part a semitone higher, right?

Oh, you mean the story about Beethoven having perfect pitch?

Today in music class, we listened to Romantic symphonies by composers like Brahms and Mahler. Those composers lived in an era before records existed, right? Were the performances held in concert halls?

Until around the end of the 18th century, music was performed in the mansions of European nobility. The oldest surviving symphony hall is in Eisenstadt, a town on the border of Austria and Hungary, and it is said that the lord of the castle used part of the castle as a patron of music for Haydn, the father of the symphony.

Music was performed for the nobility, right? When did halls for the common people start being built?

The first concert hall built not just for kings and nobles, but by the citizens themselves, was the Old Gehanthaus, built in 1781. It is said that Menselssohn served as music director there, and that Berlioz and Tchaikovsky also conducted and performed their own works.
Many famous classical composers were also conductors or performers at the time. By the late 19th century, Bach, Handel, and Mozart had already become established classics, and Beethoven had been dead for several decades, yet his music was still a central part of concert repertoire. The four Brahms symphonies that we heard in music class today were also written around this time. In fact, many of the concert halls with the best acoustics that still exist today were built in the late 19th century.

Is this related to the emergence of many Romantic composers?

I can't say for sure, but I think there's a connection. The Musikvereinssaal in Vienna is a representative hall of the latter half of the 19th century, and Brahms conducted the Vienna Philharmonic there from 1872 to 1875, and Mahler also conducted the Vienna Philharmonic there in 1898. It seems that the sound of the orchestra that Brahms and Mahler heard in their heads while composing was the sound of the Musikvereinssaal, which has a long reverberation.

Come to think of it, my music teacher also said that composers compose with the image of their music being performed in a concert hall in mind.

That's right. It's said that Haydn wrote his symphony scores with the acoustics of the Heidsaal in mind, and apparently, many of Bach's religious works were written for St. Thomas Church. St. Thomas Church is a church that uses a lot of taperies to reduce the reverberation time to about 1.6 seconds in order to improve the clarity of the bishop's sermons, so Bach composed his works with the relatively short reverberation time of a church in mind.

Is reverberation time the time it takes for a sound to disappear?

The definition of reverberation time is the time it takes for a sound to decay by 60 dB after it has stopped, but the concept of reverberation time was first introduced in 1900 by a scholar named W.C. Sabin in the design of the Boston Symphony Hall, which was completed at the time. At that time, as you mentioned, they measured the time it took for the sound to disappear, and it seems they used organ pipes from a pipe organ as the sound source.

Measuring the acoustics of a concert hall sounds interesting. I suppose they use computers to measure it now, right?

That's right. I'll tell you more about measuring and designing the acoustics of the hall next time.