As the festival season gets under way, music-making forsakes its usual haunts in concert halls and migrates to all kinds of interesting places; tiny sea-side churches, huge cathedrals, stately homes, multi-story car-parks, beaches, open fields. It even pops up in a huge circular building that’s just right for scientific demonstrations and tennis matches, called the Royal Albert Hall.

This is not a source of joy to everyone. Classical music in particular has become so sophisticated that total acoustic clarity is for many people a necessity. The Royal Albert Hall doesn’t provide it, still less a car-park. But there’s a danger of getting too precious about this. Music ought to be robust enough to communicate across a variety of acoustics. In any case, getting hung up on the ‘ideal acoustic’ blinds us to the fact that the sound of a building is part of its personality. Strip away a distinct aural character from a building, and its character as a whole is inevitably compromised. Perhaps that’s why new concert halls strive so hard to make an architectural ‘statement’. The swanky glass and concrete swirls have to make up for the fact that the sound is perfectly anonymous.

New surroundings: Multi-Story Orchestra at Endeavour House Car Park, Ipswich Credit: Ambra Vernuccio

Our ancestors had a different take on the relationship between sound and space. They regarded the acoustic character of a space as something to be celebrated, rather than a fault to be rectified. Composers wrote music to suit certain kinds of spaces, just as they composed for specific performers. Gabrieli wrote with the acoustic of St. Mark’s Cathedral of Venice in mind.

Purcell wrote his Funeral Music for Queen Mary knowing that part of it would be performed in procession, in the street, part of it in Westminster Abbey.

The grand echo of a cathedral or the intimate echo of a ducal chamber was clearly part of the expressive fabric of the music. If you go back further, to primitive times, acoustics were even more important. There’s a mass of evidence to show that acoustic phenomena like echoes once aroused a superstitious awe. One American acoustic scientist, Dr Steven Waller, has spent decades exploring the connection between the spaces known to be sacred in ancient times, and their characteristic sound.

Inuksuit at East Neuk Festival, Cambo House walled garden, in July 2013

Waller has found that places with a particular kind of echo are often covered with ancient rock and cave paintings. In a paper presented last month to the Acoustical Society of America, he gave the example of a Native American tribe with a ‘migration myth’ involving acoustics. This tells how Masewa, the ‘Son of the Sun’, led his tribe across the New Mexico desert, testing each potential settlement area by calling out to test the echo. Just east of Acoma Pueblo the echo was perfect, and the tribe settled at that spot, marking their presence with 24,000 inscribed images in the rock-face.

We catch a faint echo of that naïve wonder at acoustical phenomena, whenever we visit a cave or the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral. In recent decades some composers have tried to revive that feeling in their own work, by composing music for a particular space. One of them is John Luther Adams, one of that tribe of rugged American individualists who insist on reinventing music from scratch. He’s just composed a piece for the East Neuk Festival in Scotland, entitled Across the Distance. It involves a whole crowd of horn players, who will begin playing at a particular spot in Cambo Gardens and then disperse, in a precisely calibrated pattern. Will it be music, as we normally understand it? Yes, to a degree. But the real point is to bring alive that thing we never feel when we’re sitting in a concert hall; the genius loci, or ‘spirit of place’. We’re always in search of that magical quality, but we only think of searching for it with our eyes. Composers like Adams remind us we need to use our ears too.

John Luther Adams’s Across the Distance can be heard at the East Neuk Festival, Fife, on July 5 (0131 473 2000) and at the Southbank Centre, London SE1 on August 23 (020 7960 4200).