The poet Goethe once told a friend:

“I’ve found a page among my papers where I describe architecture as ‘frozen music’. There’s something in that, you know. The state of mind produced by architecture is similar to the effect of music.”

Goethe was putting his finger on something even more important than he himself knew.

Two centuries later, Paul Scarbrough, the inspired creator of the amazing acoustic of our wonderful San Diego Symphony Orchestra’s new Jacobs Music Center, puts it this way: Music – and especially symphonic music - is made from a dialogue between the musicians and the room.

What does Paul mean? Too often in our lives today we experience music as something fixed, recorded, digitally preserved, and possible to replay in exactly the same way at the push of a button and an endless number of times. But that’s not what live music is. And especially not symphonic music.

Live music is not a dead object, but a living experience, fluid, always different, endlessly changing. A recording of a great musical performance is like a photograph of a great painting or a fabulous waterfall in the mountains. It’s beautiful, but it is not the same as the live experience. So, what happens when we hear live music in a great hall – or ‘room’, as Paul Scarbrough calls it?

The room is an almost magical construction: it’s made, on the one hand, of the air contained within it, which vibrates as we send sounds through it; and on the other, of the array of walls and surfaces which surround and contain that air, some flat, some curved, some porous, some hard, some soft.

When a musician plays a note, the vibrations of that note fly out in waves towards the surrounding surfaces and are then thrown back in an almost infinite variety of different ways. And on their way back these waves meet other waves and other vibrations coming in the opposite direction, and all these waves mix and combine in a thousand different ways. Like the gorgeous colors of a sunset or the shimmering of the ocean.

It’s like a pond. You throw a pebble into it and the ripples expand in every direction and meet other ripples coming in the opposite direction. And the combination of all these ripples is always changing and in motion, never fixed and never the same. It is a living thing.

A musician who throws a sound – an acoustic ‘pebble’ – into the beautiful vibrating space of a great room like the Jacobs Music Center can change that sound in an almost infinite number of ways. Not just by making it louder or softer, but by altering the colors and the textures, using their breath, their fingers and their ears. By using, in other words, their bodies and their imaginations (and maybe those two things are actually the same!).

And that’s just one musician.

Now take a symphony orchestra. Let’s say, 80 musicians or thereabouts. Each is throwing pebbles of sound into the air. Acoustic waves in the most dazzling combinations are flying about in every direction.

But orchestral musicians are doing a lot more than that, every second listening to one another, and changing – from moment to moment – what they do in order to combine in a thousand different ways with the endlessly kaleidoscopic waves being created in real time by their colleagues all around them.

So, listening to a symphony orchestra is like watching a vast flock of birds swirling through the sky. Or – as the Ancient Greeks thought we could actually do – hearing the stars and planets revolving in the cosmos.

That’s why every live performance of a piece of music is and should always be completely different and unique. In a hall like ours, you could hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony a hundred times and every time it would sound in a new way. And we, the listeners, would hear the ‘same music’ in a different way.

And that brings us to the most important element in a great hall: the audience.

Paul Scarbrough’s ‘dialogue’ is actually a ‘trialogue’, made up of the room and its vibrating air and surfaces; the musicians and the thousands of notes that they are playing; and the rest of us sitting in the audience and listening with our whole bodies. For, live music is nothing without an audience. And listening is never just a passive experience (‘letting the music wash over us’) but an active experience from every point of view. It starts with the imaginative creation by Paul Scarbrough and his team of this world-class new acoustic space in the Jacobs Music Center. It continues with the imaginative response of the musicians of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra as they play to the room and the room speaks back to them (you might call this a dance between the musicians and the hall). And then comes our imaginative physical and emotional response in the audience to this endlessly changing acoustic life flowing around us. From that come the joys we feel, the tears we shed, as we listen.

And this living and reciprocal play and movement of sound doesn’t even stop there. For as the musicians hear how we are listening, they will change the way they play in order to respond to us. And then the air and surfaces of the new hall will change to respond to them, in yet more ways that no one could have predicted.

Two and half thousand years ago, an Ancient Greek philosopher is supposed to have said:

“All things are in motion and nothing is at rest. You cannot step into the same river twice.”

— Gerard McBurney