Bouncing Off The Walls: Music and Architecture

The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott, together with PostClassical Ensemble and Spanish Music Director Angel Gil-Ordoñez, will examine the relationship between music and architecture and their unique explorations of time and space.

Music and architecture share a vocabulary and they overlap through analogies and metaphors. Composers “build” symphonies, which are highly structured. And architects dream of buildings that unfold to the senses like music, a seamless flow of experience through time and space. Both forms use terms like ornament, balance and symmetry. But is architecture really “frozen music,” an idea that emerged in the late 18th century when musical forms were becoming longer and more complex?

Join Post Classical Ensemble for Bouncing off the Walls: Music and Architecture, a concert which explores the complex relation between the two art forms, from music that was specifically written for particular buildings to early 20th-century modernist efforts to reduce both forms to their elemental materials.

The program includes an overture by Beethoven written to celebrate a newly remodeled theater and opera house, works by Gabrieli, composed for the mighty Basilica of San Marco in Venice, a symphony by Haydn featuring one of the most complicated “architectural” forms ever composed, a short but volcanic work by Anton Webern and a classic overture by Rossini, reassembled to maximize the acoustic possibilities of the Kennedy Center Terrace Theatre.

Accompanying the music, visuals including hand-drawn architectural sketches from Centennial Medal winner Hany Hassan FAIA will be projected on stage.