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the manager to see if acoustic studies had
been undertaken, just to be able to adjust the
programming accordingly. A work of José
María García de Paredes, the auditorium is
excellent, so I was awed that practically no
acoustic studies had been made when it was
designed and built. This is a concert hall
seating 2,340 for which no acoustic tests
were carried out to check how it worked. In
this case it doesn’t matter what tickets you
buy, whether for the first row down in the
orchestra or the back-most one up in the
second balcony. In truth, it’s not the same
thing. Depending on where you are seated,
the sound is different.
ACB: But acoustics can be corrected with
experts. You tell them to please tune the
building. Get the building to sing, as we
were saying at the start.
BLH: So there are houses that sound
when you’ve built them, and others that
don’t?
ACB: They all sound! It’s just that some
sing better. There are some that you’ve
studied and tuned. They are composed,
rehearsed, and especially corrected. The
analogy with music is lovely. In this I think
Paul Valéry was very much on-target.
BLH: In my view there’s so much beauty
in the idea that architecture, like music,
creates life with every new building. A
life that’s beginning, and when there’s a
change of user, another life begins. The
same happens each time you listen to
music. Although you have heard a certain
work hundreds of times because it’s part of
a collective canon, you hear it differently
every single time you listen to it. So many
differences…
ACB: Going back to formative and aca-
demic themes, what do you think of the
university nowadays?
BLH: I am a chair professor of music
history at the Autonomous University of
Madrid, where I practically single-handed-
ly created all the related study programs.
We even have a double-major program,
unprecedented in Spain, for music and phi-
losophy. And just when they’ve removed
music from schools…
ACB: It’s so hard to understand this
because, politics aside, I still clearly re-
member being in 5th grade and starting to
study philosophy, that amazing thing where
thinking begins. I’m reminded of a house
I recently completed in Montecarmelo. It’s
on a hill and I knew that from the house
up there, you could have a sweeping view
of Madrid. But the day they finished the
second floor and I went upstairs for the
first time, I started to tear. How was it
possible that what I’d thought to be true
was in fact true?
BLH: Do you know that Maurice Ravel
himself, when rehearsing his Boléro, found
himself not able to recognize it? Some musi-
cians have perfect pitch, but others don’t.
In any case, with music you can imagine
things a certain way, but when you hear
it played by a solid symphonic orchestra,
it’s very different. In fact there are many
composers who listen to their works and
sometimes find themselves unable to per-
ceive them as theirs. It could be that they
“There’s so much beauty in
the idea that architecture,
like music, creates life with
every new building“
