Concert Halls and Opera Houses: Music, Acoustics, and Architecture

by Leo Beranek

This illustrated guide to 100 of the world's most important concert halls and opera houses examines their architecture and engineering and discusses their acoustical quality as judged by conductors and music critics. The descriptions and photographs will serve as a valuable guide for today's peripatetic performers and music lovers. With technical discussions relegated to appendices, the book can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in musical performance. The photographs (specially commissioned for this book) and architectural drawings (all to the same scale) together with modern acoustical data on each of the halls provide a rich and unmatched resource on the design of halls for presenting musical performances. Together with the technical appendices, the data and drawings will serve as an invaluable reference for architects and engineers involved in the design of spaces for the performance of music.

Genres: Music, Architecture

684 pages, Hardcover

First published November 3, 2003

Reviews

[Jeff Vandegrift · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered this in MIT's Art and Music Library while I was studying Acoustics under Dr. Bose. This is a beautiful coffee table book that I remember (possibly incorrectly) as pairs of pages with a picture of a hall on one side and the acoustical measurements on the other along with more descriptive text. Measurements included reverb time, first reflection time, etc.

The unfortunate thing was the last entry, Leo Baranek finishes off the book with a predictive description of Avery Fisher Hall with its movable sound absorbing panels designed to support tuning the room for each event (e.g. lecture = maximum panels, Gregorian Chants = minimal panels). The story of the Hall is complicated in that decisions were made without consulting the Acousticians not realizing they had undermined the science (what harm could a few more rows of seats do?). The Hall was not considered a success when it opened, but I've read that that was in no way Beranek's fault.