If you’re driving along the American suburban frontier, a McMansion is like obscenity: You know it when you see it. Oversized pediments and fiberglass columns, stickered-on quoins and a roofline that appears more like a turtle’s shell or a Braque composition than suitable shelter. Pretentious by definition, cheap by choice. But one may not be as aware of what it sounds like.
You see, McMansion is a movable concept that can be transplanted onto pretty much everything that involves aesthetic taste and (usually poor) execution. This includes the classical repertoire. Before my days as an architecture critic, I used to be a violinist and composer. I worked in my undergrad recording studio committing thousands of recitals to digital bits. I later studied the history of concert hall development at midcentury during my graduate years at Peabody Conservatory. This is all to say, I’ve sat through a lot of concerts. Today, for VAN, I shall embark upon a crossover of these two lives.
There are a handful of basic concepts that help determine “McMansion-ness.” These can broadly be described as eclecticism/pastiche, pretentiousness, ornateness, scale, and poor execution. The McMansion as we know it today can broadly be construed as “neo-eclectic” architecture—a reinvention of 19th century eclecticism made possible by global transportation routes, mass production, and the development of mass media. Eclecticism, broadly defined, describes architecture whose primary form of aesthetic composition is either imitation of past styles using contemporary methods of building, or a pastiche of many differing styles in one building. Pretentiousness is rather self-explanatory—we can also call it stuffiness or superciliousness and, in this critic’s mind, it’s usually linked with an inevitable kind of boredom. Ornateness in architecture and music is characterized by being overdetailed and full of unnecessary flourishes. Scale deals with being oversized, over-orchestrated, over-long, over-bearing. (There are lots of “overs” in McMansion discourse.) And then, there is poor execution, in this case by the composer, usually with regards to idiomatic writing or orchestration.
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