06 June 2007

the best buildings you'll ever hear


Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.
Originally uploaded by carillonista
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." So Elvis Costello or some other fellow quipped. But what if architecture is one of the keys to the future of music?

I finally understand the subject of one of my favorite photos from Germany. Herzog & De Meuron (one of my favorite architectural firms) is turning this building on the perimeter of the industrial harbour of Hamburg into a rather monolithic concert hall. A recent NY Times article describes the exciting marriages of innovative architecture and symphonies taking place today. The dreamlike ballpark interior of this hall will certainly draw me back to Hamburg to attend a performance. I just hope all these new halls incorporate really good organs. At least the organ still seems like a requisite piece of the pie, even if few composers actually use it in their concert hall pieces.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Or, as an anti-Bush, anti-War-Against-Terrorism statement:

"Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity".

:-)

John Lam said...

Thanks for the article. For New York Times articles, try their SHARE button on each story page to submit to your Newsvine column. From there you can automatically feed both or either your Blogspots by dropping your Newsvine Javascript (JSS) syndication into your blog templates. One big advantage of sharing via the button is non-expiring permalinks.

If you don't seed the article to Newsvine, then i will!