My son Nick plays the cello. Because of him I have spent years watching that section more than the others, and I have trained myself to listen for it. Cellos first, then the basses and the violins. The wooden instruments. I know there is wood in the woodwinds and the drums too. But Nick plays the cello, so that is where my ear goes.
In early December 2022, Nick, Jan and I were in New York. We walked all over Manhattan looking at buildings. On Saturday the 3rd we were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and found a room of horns called Fanfare. I remembered hundreds. The Met says seventy-four. Nick plays the trumpet too, so I was looking for the trumpets. Not one horn in that room was making a sound. But you could hear them, and feel the joy in Nick’s movements. I took some pictures of him through the hanging displays. Makes me smile.
That night we went to hear the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall. It sits at Lincoln Center, a few blocks up Broadway from the southwest corner of Central Park. The hall had reopened that October after they gutted the inside and rebuilt it. Eight o’clock. The seats now wrap around the stage and around the whole room, and ours were above the cellos. Twelve of them, I think.
Emanuel Ax played Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, and it was great. But the whole concert, I was listening to the cellos. They reverberated more than I had ever heard. They were richer. I had never experienced depth like that. Maybe it was the combination of violins, violas, cellos and basses, but the cellos in particular were outstanding. It was the ocean. Nothing else has so much complexity and depth, so many sounds at once, and is so moving.
I figured it was probably in the design of the hall. And it was. Working at a lumber company in Oregon, it’s natural to look at how wood is used, designed and fabricated. The walls are beech, milled into shallow waves. The waves scatter the high notes. The bass comes from how the boards are hung. The old walls had an air space behind them, and it cut the low end. The new beech is anchored solid to plaster over the concrete block. The board is married to the wall behind it.
It is like going inside a giant musical instrument and listening. To me the room is shaped like the inside of a cello. You have to be there to really understand it. Describing a glass of Oregon Pinot is nothing like drinking it on the hillside, under the oaks, where the barrel came from. You also have to come with an open mind. That is not easy.
The last piece was Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony. The orchestra had never played it before that week. When it ended, the hall stood up. I was looking down at the cellos, hoping one of them would look up. One did. We made eye contact and held it a couple of extra beats. I tried to let her know how much I appreciated it.
Then it was ten o’clock.