by EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
HALL WITHOUT WALLS
The great debate as to how we should actually reproduce the various forms of classical music into the ambient air, into space, or spaces, goes on and on-now more than ever, as the ads would say. Who remembers when it all started? Perhaps at the Trocadero in Paris, where, in the 1890s, an Edison phono with a huge horn attached appeared on stage before a large audience, or similarly, early in our century, at the Metropolitan in New York, "live versus recorded." Everybody declared the reproduction not only uncanny but perfection to the life. That took imagination, but we always have that when we need it, don't we? Now that there is near-infinite audio horsepower and lots of audio quality to go with it, the emphasis is shifting. We know how to bring music into living rooms and small cars-the smaller the louder-but now we wonder how to create simultaneous audio reproduction of live music to reach large numbers of people, both indoors and, especially, outdoors, in sonically infinite space. Do we try for an invisible concert hall? Or would the battering sound of car stereo be more appropriate to the great outdoors? How about a living-room sound? Enlarged, of course, several million times. The very thought gets zanier and zanier. But we have to do something when faced with reality. Maybe something new under the sun?
WIDE OPEN SPACE OF NEW YORK CITY PARKS TO GET LIVING-ROOM SOUND, said the advance publicity for an astonishing new exploration of this area that burst upon the sonically polluted ambience of New York's Central Park one chilly morning last August. A rehearsal for a first outdoor concert via a brand-new outdoor system, for use by the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera and jointly sponsored by the City, which has always liked to bring classical music to its masses since the days of Minnie Guggenheim and the famed stadium concerts. (I went to one of these, ages ago; thanks to the audio then being used, I was treated to the sound of several very loud French horns in a Brahms symphony and not much else, except for lots of planes overhead.) This system is, I quote, "portable" and will indeed be transported all over greater New York for outdoor concerts beginning in the summer of 1991.
Quick-its formal name: The Carlos Moseley Music Pavilion. Even the name is innovative. If a pavilion looks vaguely like an enormous Chinese kite, or maybe the front end of an amplified Concorde seen from below with its nose removed, then this is surely a pavilion to end all such.
A full-sized concert stage is inside, surrounded by canvas-like plastic walls. Above the three slender steel supporting members, forming a pyramid outline, is a strange and beautiful round plastic shield-decoration, or is it a sound reflector? I do not know. Out in front, stretching away into the sonic outdoor distance, are ghostly white towers in a fan-like array, as far as the eye can see, a good many football fields away-the loudspeakers-each surrounded by a neat white fence. All of this is carried portably on six vast trucks, which-somewhat to my dismay-are described as "weighted with concrete ballast." More innovation, these monsters act as the solid foundation for the entire central rig and also include hydraulic lifters, like those we see in telephone and power-line work, to raise things into position. Most decidedly ingenious! My only thought in this connection was the memory of the end of New York's elevated highway, built in 1928 and mostly unmaintained until the day when a large truck, followed by several cars, dropped through the pavement to the street below. I have disturbing visions of the Carlos Moseley Music Pavilion suddenly dropping 50 feet down from, say, the corner of 59th Street and Columbus Avenue to the subway platform underneath, with disastrous results.
But let that be as it may. Maybe the City should reinforce the streets that lead to its many parks.
All this and more I found out postmortem, or post-vital, after the morning rehearsal. I was there, but the publicity wasn't, or didn't reach me. We somehow missed each other. So my experience was pristine, and all the better. I saw and heard the thing itself, which was, after all, what really mattered.
Central Park is large, and the greenery has grown immensely since I used to inhabit it as a youngster. Nothing goes in a straight line in that park-it was the new semi-Gothic approach to nature in the 1870s and still is, now more than ever. In moments I was lost in dozens of spiral pathways, going 'round and 'round and hither and yon and up and down-phew! Where could that Great Lawn be? Then I heard the distant sound of familiar music, a mile or so away, and zeroed in via my handy built-on binaural ears until-there it was a vast white kite about to take off from a huge open, green space, laced with miles of red fencing and blue police barriers. A buzz of talk came out of the 24 speakers in their towers, emanating from the distant stage. Then suddenly a blast of Tchaikovsky/Sibelius-does it matter which?--in a "testing-testing," mode.
Two or three minutes and then a stop, normal rehearsal style. Squeaks and trills from an oboe nearby, a half mile distant. A horn playing successive triad exercises, up and up by half steps.
Muttered instructions, laughs, scraping chairs. Then a speaking voice, up front on the stage, crisp and right in front of me, trying out the "P.A." for speech.
Even he was innovative. Instead of the usual "testing-testing," he said with firm energy, "Announcing, announcing, announcing, announcing, check-check check, announcing." One could hear the click of his teeth. The level being okay, he retired and another sudden blast of music hit the ambient air, still a half mile distant, or so it seemed to me as I looked at the tiny blur that was the entire stage, with the N.Y. Philharmonic in all its majesty seated upon it.
What a remarkable scene! When the Philharmonic brass took off in a loud passage of Sibelius. dogs barked, pigeons flew up in clouds as before an earthquake, some nearby soccer players went on playing soccer, entirely oblivious, and a brace of galloping horses with blue-helmeted police officers on top swerved full speed into the vast sonic space to see what was going on, caracoling and prancing like Indians in a western, then galloped away. Passersby looked up and turned wearily back, just another noise in a noisy city. A passing dump cart mixed its rattling sounds with percussion by Sibelius, an effect that would have astounded that composer. Joggers jogged in and around the Great Lawn space and the white towers, and back and forth and in busy circles, paying no attention at all. Just more noise for them, like every day. One black garbed jogger jogged into the sound field and, briefly interested, jogged backward and forward for 50 feet or so, never losing a beat, until she jogged away. White blobs of porta-toilets could be seen around the perimeter of the vast sound field, and the police barricades stretched in long lines in front of me. Press people and just plain park users wandered around; a cluster was around the up-front control installation, a mere 200-plus feet out from the stage. Then, the expected union break, and everyone filed back to the stage for the solo event.
I was off in space again, having tried just about every spot in the listening area, and I became aware of a tiny white spot on the crowded stage that was the soloist, none other than Isaac Stern, doyen of New York virtuoso fiddlers. I could not make the rest of him out nor see his violin, nor watch his bow arm move--I was that distant. Mr. Stern suddenly produced soaring fireworks of violin sound with trills attached, just to test the mikes. It could be heard miles away, yet was clean and clear, no scratch (a pop-screened mike well above his head), no heaviness, just good fiddle sound. I can tell you, after that 10 seconds of fiddle flourish, that Isaac Stern is still in excellent form! In tune. There was a pause, and then, casually, a few feet away from me (out of the nearest tower), Mr.
Stern said "Hey, I'm waiting for some reaction." Mumble-mumble from off mike voices, then, "Is there some reverberation?" More mumble, then, triumphantly, "I can tell, I can tell, I can tell!" Interesting.
Enough said. You may gather that I found this both a very potent and a surprisingly clean system. A solo fiddle, enormously amplified, is a clear test, at least of the upper range. Good old Sibelius told the rest of the story, right down to the super-duper sub woofer sound, more like real big drums than any I'd heard before. (Space, without any confinement, does indeed help, both the original low bass and the reproduction.) But what WAS the system? It took me a long while that day, after the rehearsal, to get to the bottom of the system's philosophy, which is what interested me. (I'll forego the long list of brand names for numerous units.) I had, for instance, tried valiantly to figure out if there was any semblance of stereo, more than one channel, in the speaker array, and could not detect any meaningful spatial separation--just as well, I thought. After all, should the first fiddles be heard somewhere up near the top of that apartment building at the left edge of the park, and the cellos come out of a grove of trees off to the right? Nonsense! This obviously was not a situation in which stereo is to be achieved.
Turns out that indeed there was a mono signal (out of a dozen or more mikes) that was treated to very sophisticated digital delay, adjustable at each tower. Only the innermost ring of speakers, in front of the stage, had a separate stereo (coincident) pickup for those listeners who were directly in front of the musicians and would need a correspondence between the sight they saw and the directional sound.
Very sensible and perceptive.
What was really interesting was the special use of the delay to create a kind of reverse concert ambience among the 24 speaker towers in a manner that few of us would imagine.
Each tower had two speaker systems-a multi-speaker array, but more of that later. The major system faces forward, away from the stage, with (as I observed) a rather sharp cutoff at either side. The second system, smaller, faces backward, toward the stage, and of course toward other speakers in the array; this second backward sound is given a sharply different delay time (the delay equipment is built into each tower), if I am right, that is considerably longer. This creates a very curious and, I would say, unprecedented repetitive "reverberation" field, between and around all the different speaker towers, multiplying itself at a distance and yet in no way suggesting the confinement and walls of a given indoor space. It would seem to me that this is a very remarkable approach, detaching us at last entirely from the "concert hall" sort of thinking and yet providing the sense of liveness that is inherent in every sort of classical performance.
Space is up, but you will want to know who is the prime mover in this extremely interesting concept: Christopher Jaffe, I found out afterward to my astonishment. Who else but the man who was responsible for the electronic acoustics in the remarkable concert hall at Eugene, Oregon, about which I wrote extensively back in the early '80s. Jaffe's company has finished an updated new hall of the same sort in Anchorage, Alaska, and I was in the midst of boning up on this, as well as updates in Eugene, when I was interrupted by the premiere of the Carlos Moseley Music Pavilion. Jaffe and more Jaffe! There were many other innovators, of course, involved in the creation of the Moseley, and in due time I hope to give them honor, and to follow up on the very latest developments of electronic simultaneous reproduction of live music, both indoors and outdoors.
It is, shall I say, a wide open field. Like the Great Lawn in Central Park. Infinite space! A new expansion for classical audio.
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