Keep it down!

There was an interesting piece in the New York Times this morning about noise levels in symphony orchestras. Having spent almost ten years playing with the university orchestra in Helsinki and rehearsing in the far too small music hall at the student building, I'm only too well acquainted with the problems of overly loud, potentially damaging rehearsal situations.

It's a complicated problem; for me, wearing earplugs is absolutely not the solution, as it means you can hardly hear yourself, thus making it far more difficult to play in tune. There seems to be something of an obsession in Scandinavia with earplugs – incredible as it sounds, I've even heard of people who wear them in string quartet rehearsals or while practicing! I've always thought that if the music is meant to be loud, there's no point in trying to counter the effect by damping it out. Why try and regulate your experience of the music? Having said that, I do often feel sorry for bassoonists who have to sit right i front of enormous brass sections day after day.

The danger with the EU directive mentioned in the article is that it could start affecting the way people play, the way people compose and conduct. Though undeniably good news for the hearing of our orchestral musicians, this surely can't be good for the long-term development of classical music. The mere thought of a conductor asking players to keep the noise down at, say, the very end of Mahler 1 or 2 makes me shudder...

This is largely a question of acoustics. The music hall in which I regularly rehearse may be fine for smaller ensembles and choirs, but was not designed to house an entire symphony orchestra, and rehearsing loud music in there (e.g. Shostakovich 5 all last spring) can be painful. Finlandia-talo has the opposite effect. Last week I went to listen to Messiaen's gargantuan, 90-minute oratorio La Transfiguration de nôtre Seigneur, which featured a huge orchestra, four choirs and soloists, yet the performance never sounded too loud because the acoustics at Finlandia-talo swallow up the sound, making it sound as though the players are in a different room.

As for the Great Hall of the university, where the university orchestra often performs... I hate playing there because you can't hear other people and all you can hear is your own playing, but people assure me that when you're in the audience it sounds great. This, after all, is the same hall in which many of Sibelius' (often very loud) orchestral works were first performed. Let's hope the people designing the new Musiikkitalo will get it right, so that loud pieces can still be enjoyed, performed and compsoed so that neither audiences nor performers end up losing their hearing.