A view of Jeanne Gang's Chicago skyscraper Aqua (Photo: Kacper Kozak on Unsplash)
“Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.” So wrote the famous German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Many other writers and thinkers over the centuries have recognized the link between the two art forms, such as their shared emphasis on form, structure, proportion, and harmony. As early as the first century BCE, Roman architect Vitruvius suggested that the tenets of music theory should inform architectural ratios and advised architects to obtain a liberal arts education that included the study of music.
Two millennia later, Frank Lloyd Wright would recognize the connection between music and architecture, going so far as to claim, “They are practically one.” Throughout his career, Wright would use musical terms to describe his commissions, calling Martin House in Buffalo, New York, “a domestic symphony.” He even encouraged his apprentices to develop their musical talents as part of his Taliesin Fellowship program. Wright himself grew up surrounded by music, as his father was a composer and music teacher. He often cited the influence of great composers on his work, writing in An Autobiography, “When I build, I often hear [Beethoven’s] music and, yes, when Beethoven made music I am sure he sometimes saw buildings like mine in character, whatever form they may have taken then.”
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (Photo: Kirk Thornton on Unsplash)
Just as architects like Wright have been inspired by music, so too have composers been inspired by architecture. Wright himself has inspired numerous musical odes, from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1970 song “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” to contemporary British composer Christopher Slaski’s Frank Lloyd Wright Suite, where each of the four movements is named for a different Wright building (“Fallingwater,” “Guggenheim NYC,” “Solar Hemicycle,” and “Wingspread”).
In this article, we’ll examine a few notable works inspired by great architecture, from the ancient to the modern, including some buildings right here in Chicago.
Notre Dame Cathedral
For 900 years, the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris has been an icon in European culture and history. The storied cathedral, whose first stone was laid in 1163, was also influential in the development of Western music. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the musicians at Notre Dame began to expand Gregorian chant into polyphonic music of greater complexity than ever heard before. Whereas earlier sacred vocal music had usually consisted of one voice intoning the chant with one added voice moving in counterpoint, composers of the “Notre Dame School” expanded this to three or even four voices.
“The chant settings associated with Notre Dame, in short, were as ambitious as the cathedral for which they were composed,” musicologist Richard Taruskin explains. “They took their stylistic bearings from existing polyphonic repertories but vastly outstripped their predecessors in every dimension—length, range, number of voices.” Their music began to sonically represent the unprecedentedly large interior space and soaring arches of the cathedral, aided by the reverberant acoustics of the stone structure.
A view of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (Photo: Rohan Reddy on Unsplash)
One of the major proponents of the Notre Dame School was Pérotin, whose “Viderunt Omnes” is a crowning example of early polyphony. The Gregorian chant, or tenor, becomes almost a drone as the note values of the chant are elongated. The three upper voices then decorate the slow-motion chant with melismatic embellishments, mirroring the delicate window tracery within the cathedral’s hulking stone walls. From a practical perspective, the acoustics of the building would help to sustain the drone when the tenor voice needed to breathe and blend the melodic lines into ethereal clouds of harmonies. In this way, not only did the architecture of Notre Dame influence the development of vocal compositional style, but also the music came to reflect the building’s design aesthetics.
Notre Dame has continued to inspire composers across the ages. The Gothic cathedral prompted Eric Satie’s Les Ogives, a set of four pieces for solo piano published in 1889. Specifically, he was inspired by the cathedral’s ogive (or ogee) arches, formed when two S curves intersect. In the second piece, “À Charles Levade,” one can hear both the majestic tolling of the bells and hints of plainchant, marking a more literal evocation of the great Parisian cathedral and the sounds heard within it than Pérotin’s polyphony.
The Alhambra
Another iconic piece of architecture that has inspired numerous composers is the Alhambra, the last and greatest Moorish palace, which lies above the city of Granada, Spain. The Moors began construction on the palace in 1238, and it served as the capital of the Moorish Empire until the Christian Reconquista in 1492. Emblematic of Arab-Andalusian culture, it contains examples of both Islamic and Spanish Renaissance architecture, as after the reconquest, King Charles V constructed a palace within the Islamic complex.
Detail of the Wine Gate at Alhambra
One of the most famous pieces of music inspired by the grand citadel is Recuerdos de la Alhambra (“Memories of the Alhambra”) by Francisco Tárrega. The Spanish composer and guitarist wrote it for a patron in the 1890s, describing it as a “humble poetic impression, made on my soul by the grandiose marvel of the Alhambra of Granada we both admire.” Like Satie’s Les Ogives, the work attempts to capture the sounds heard within the palace, with the constant tremolo technique evoking the gentle bubbling of the palace’s many fountains.
Although Claude Debussy only ever visited Spain on a day trip, the country still captured his imagination and inspired numerous works. Spanish composer Manuel de Falla once sent Debussy a postcard of La Puerta del Vino (the Wine Gate), the Alhambra’s main entrance. One of the oldest constructions at the palace, the gate was built during the reign of Sultan Muhammad III (1302–1309). Debussy’s Alhambra-inspired piano miniature, “La Puerta del Vino,” appears in his second book of Préludes (1913). It is based on the rhythm of the habanera and imitates flamenco-style singing and guitar playing in the piano’s right hand. Debussy’s use of the Phrygian mode, commonly associated with both flamenco and Arabic music, also helps capture the palace’s unique confluence of cultures and architectural styles.
Casa Batlló
Music can enhance one’s experience of architecture. The curators at Casa Batlló in Barcelona recognized this when they commissioned British composer Dani Howard to compose a soundtrack to accompany their self-guided audio tour in 2020. Casa Batlló was designed in 1904 by Catalan modernist architect Antoni Gaudí, best known for designing the Sagrada Família. Heavily inspired by nature, Casa Batlló contains few straight lines but rather flowing stonework and irregular windows and tracery. During her visits, Howard said she was struck by the building’s references to the ocean. “The curves, and almost slow-motion-like elements…were shapes and movements that influenced the music in those spaces,” she said in an interview with GetYourGuide. “The mosaics were also incredibly influential for me; the combination of the shapes and colors, and the improvisatory feel to the way in which they were put together, was something I tried to capture in the music.”
A view of Antoni Gaudí's Casa Battló
Just as Gaudí harnessed natural light to create an immersive and ever-changing atmosphere in his building, so does the soundtrack create a multisensory experience for the visitor. Howard’s soundtrack contains 27 pieces of music, one for each of the vastly different rooms in the house. In composing the piece, Howard identified three main themes the building explores—water, air, and light—and developed musical ideas based on them, uniting the work with an overarching “Gaudí theme.” Thus, the music not only reflects the ethos of the building but also puts visitors in the mind of the revolutionary architect.
Chicago Buildings
With buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Sullivan dotting the city, Chicago is known as an architectural paradise. Chicago’s skyline isn’t just beautiful to behold—it has inspired musical compositions as well. In conjunction with Open House Chicago, Access Contemporary Music (ACM) has commissioned numerous works based on Chicago architecture, which you can read more about in our article from 2018. ACM expanded this idea with Songs of Buildings and Moods, a series for PBS that examines the link between architecture and music with musical commissions inspired by culturally and architecturally significant spaces across the country. Specifically, the series aims to explore how architecture and music both have the power to create certain moods, even without our awareness.
Driehaus Museum Exterior (Photo: Alexander Vertikoff, © The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, 2014)
Take, for example, Seth Boustead’s The Marble Palace, which seeks to capture the magical experience of walking into River North’s Richard H. Driehaus Museum. Boustead could have evoked the array of art styles housed in the richly furnished mansion. Instead, he looks to Samuel Nickerson’s intent to create a fire-proof sanctuary after the Great Chicago Fire had destroyed his original residence. The anxious violin tremolos capture Nickerson’s fear of fire, while the bass clarinet mirrors the dark atmosphere of the space.
In 2013, the Chicago Sinfonietta, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, launched “City-Scapes,” an initiative to commission new musical works inspired by Chicago architecture. One of these works was Vivian Fung’s Aqua, inspired by Jeanne Gang’s 82-story skyscraper of the same name. The building’s distinctive undulating façade is achieved through concrete floor slabs that jut out at different intervals, creating outdoor terraces where neighbors can socialize and sightlines between existing buildings and around corners to Chicago landmarks. Fung’s piece is structured in two parts based on the building’s juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical patterns. “Grand Wave No. 1 – Liquid Balconies” represents the horizontal ebbs and flows of the floor slabs, while “Grand Wave No. 2 – Vertical Pools” represents the vertical topography of pools, hills, and valleys that the horizontal patterns create.
If we agree with Goethe that architecture is frozen music, then we Chicagoans are fortunate to have so much music around us. So, next time you’re walking around the city, or wherever you find yourself, be sure to look up—and listen!
