Music For The Thinking Ear

“Music for the thinking ear” is the slogan for Berlin’s new Pierre Boulez Saal, which opened its doors to the public on Saturday, March 4. Why a new hall? The city’s Philharmonie (Zirkus Karajani, or “Karajan’s Circus,” as West Berliners dubbed it) remains a monument to architectural, acoustic, and indeed performative modernism; there are no bad seats, whether visually or acoustically; the surrounding of the orchestra by the audience offers a different experience from more traditional halls; and the sound holds its own with the world’s best, such as Vienna’s Musikverein and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw (let alone the miserable examples with which London has been cursed). Still, although Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie has a chamber music hall attached, Berlin has had nothing like this. Frank Gehry’s oval design, with no stage, merely a center, genuinely seems to open up, in the spirit of Boulez’s long-held desire for a flexible salle modulable, the possibility of the “thinking ear”: to engage, to reflect, to make itself part of the performance. The greatest possible distance between the conductor and the most distant member of the audience (682 seats in total) is just 14 meters. There is intimacy—the intimacy, its initiators hope, of collaborative endeavor.