Made for Music: Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall

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    The Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall was created in 1980, to provide a year-round performance space for the San Francisco Symphony (previously the symphony had to share performance space with the SF Ballet and SF Opera in the War Memorial Opera House). It is located in San Francisco’s Civic Center, among older buildings that are of the Beaux-arts architectural style. The architecture of Davies hall is said to be a modern interpretation of Beaux-arts, so that it will fit in the other buildings in the Center, but still feel contemporary. Beaux-arts, as I understand it, involves an eclecticism of Classical European styles: columns, pediments, archways, flourishing details, etc. Davies Hall indeed reflects some elements of that kind of building, but I feel that the style is meant more to be reflective of the performance within.

       This is particularly evident in the lobby. The coloring and shapes of the interior and architectural designs look reminiscent of instruments that would belong in a symphony. The coloring in the lobby is largely white, with gold, silver, and a warm wooden brown accenting in the handrails, counters and lighting fixtures. The other color present is a velvety, deep maroon that is above all the entrances to the hall, and in the carpeting and seats inside the hall. The gold is like the brass instruments, the silver like the wind instruments (i.e. the flute), and the wood brown in the strings (violins, cellos, violas, etc.). The maroon paired with these colors has a kind of regality that seems appropriate for a music hall that performs mostly classical music. The walls along the lobby have a façade of lots narrow white columns that are sometimes interspersed with mirrors. These columns look, to me, like the strings of a harp or stringed instrument. The cables from which some of the lamps hung also felt reminiscent of the strings. The endings of the counter of the refreshments station looks like the top of a violin, or the bottom of a treble-clef in sheet music.

     The inside of the concert hall itself contains similar musical elements, but is also built to provide favorable acoustics for the orchestra. At the back of the hall, behind the stage, a pipe organ rises in the background. It's grand, vertical lines are mirrored in the panels on the right and left of it. The panels are lit from below, giving an impressive appearance. The balcony seating stretches across the hall, but isn't continuous. Separate, box-seat balconies stack on top of one another like a rising musical scale. Above the orchestra, there is an adjustable cloud of plexiglass sheets that can be lowered, raised, and tilted to correctly reflect the type of music being played (lower and closer for a small, quiet ensemble, or raised and far away for a loud chorus). While these exist mostly for the acoustics, their repetitive quality complements the multiplicity of the orchestra members, and the general shape the cloud makes is similar to the hemisphere of the stage. 

        This Friday, my class and I were given a tour of this building, and were also allowed to sit in on part of a rehearsal. Seeing music in the making made me realize some things about music as an art, and the reception of all kinds of art in general. I have seen symphonies before, and it always just seemed like the conductor was doing some fancy dance in front of a bunch of people who were doing the real work of making the music. Seeing the rehearsal made me see how this was not so. In a symphony, the conductor is rendering their interpretation (or own creation) of a song using a multitude of musicians. This seems a particularly difficult task, because he must conform the actions of many separate individuals to create one artistic vision. A conductor to his orchestra is like a painter is to his pigments. I guess we get it easy as visual artists, as our mediums don't have a minds of their own (even though it may feel like they do sometimes...) The conductor's creativity was evident during the rehearsal: the symphony would play, and when the conductor would feel something needed to be different he would stop the orchestra, and explain how he wanted it to be. While I couldn’t clearly hear what he was saying, he would sometimes sing out a stanza, “daaa-daaa-daa-ba-baaaam!” and distinguish that he’d like it to be played instead like, “da-da-daa-BA-BAAAM!” In my mind, I paralleled this to an artist drawing a picture. The artist will define the shapes, lines and values in a particular way so that it will give the form and meaning they desire. Whether it is visual or auditory, it is the manipulation of the perception of an audience through their emotional responses. A note can be played delicately and lightly, and perhaps give a feeling of airiness or sweetness. The same note played strongly and loudly might instead give a feeling of awe or discomfort. The same emotions could be applied to the quality of a drawn line. So I guess the reason it always seems like the conductor isn't doing too much during a performance is that he's already done the work of expressing his vision upon his symphony beforehand. During the performance he is directing the orchestra, but for the most part he can just watch with pleasure as his work is expressed to the world. This seemed evident to me in the expressions of the conductor in this video of Bruckner's 6th symphony being performed in Germany (this was the song we heard, but the conductor in the video is different). 

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