PRUNKSAAL

The idea of being able to complete buildings by means of sound is a synesthetic one. The Gabrielli brothers took the opposite approach in their compositions for San Marco: for the Gabriellis, musical structure emerged from architecture in the late Baroque; for Reiter, sound becomes architecture. The four trombonists he employs to an electronic soundtrack in the State Hall describe spatial lines oriented to the hall's axes and side spaces, but transforming it from a static to a dynamic structure. The advantage of music over architecture is that of a temporal art over a spatial art. Equipped with this advantage, Reiter actually succeeds in fabricating buildings, or animating them in terms of media technology. Architectural animation, through the experience of moving sounds, no longer proves to be a privilege of computationally intensive 3-D programs, but a possible field of compositional activity. The sonic processes of Reiter’s composition evolve at a speed appropriate to the pace of a historical library environment. The composition moves "largo," one is never caught off guard, very gently introduced to changing spatial dispositions. As with reading in old folios, one reads the music thoughtfully, has enough free space to be distracted and seduced: to illustrations, material qualities in the books, to observation of the ceremonial hall, the performers in the music. In a way, Reiter's music luxuriously plays with time economy and streamlined expectations. The sounds do not snatch the listener away from the environment in which they develop, rather they fabricate the environment tonally and temporally.