DEAD MEN'S MUSIC

Classical music survived the Great War. For another hundred years we have had music schools, conservatories and concert halls to perform and re-perform music written by people long since dead. Classical Architecture did not survive.


In a parallel between architecture and music there is often the design concept : the intellect sees the intention in the music even before hearing it, as one can see in an architect’s drawing. If never made they can retain their abstract beauty but when well made they can belittle the intellect.


Is the architect of today the composer, the main contractor the conductor and the best craftsmen the soloists? To build and rebuild the same design with different artisans? Perhaps in Sacred architecture - the Gothic cathedral or the Shinto temple but not the every day. In musical performance it is possible.
The music conceived before electricity is not thought to have had its day - a contribution from Bach was even sent off into space to display human culture - yet architecture has always been inextricably linked with its contemporary technology, so that studying Palladio is off the agenda.


Struggling to rebuild in the 1920s, there were too few of the craftsman left that brought us the cities of the late 19th century. The vector of industrialisation epitomised by the industrial war gave us reinforced concrete and the mean urbanized environment that Europeans now consider normal. Architects were no longer taught within a formal tradition while their musical friends still studied Bach.


It was said that all students at the Moscow conservatory studied piano before they took up their own instrument (even if it is the vocal chords). The parallel in architecture is to study an essential form of built environment that remains a reference, with subsequent counterpoint. The futility of such an idea in a democracy is that nobody can agree. Remembering that the architect is the composer, all we have now is pop music.