Classical music critic

Is classical music like a museum? If not, it should be. Museums, in general, are doing a great job at showcasing art of the past and present in interesting ways — something most concert halls, locked into their traditions, are only beginning to try.

However: When it comes to presenting music, museums aren't necessarily ahead of the curve. Yes, it's great that they do it — and they do it a lot. Most of Washington's major museums present concerts, from the diminutive Kreeger Museum, which fills its central exhibition space with chairs for a small chamber music festival every year in June, to the National Gallery, where the foliage and statuary of the West Garden Court, despite its distorting echoes and uncomfortable folding chairs, often conspire to make events feel delightful.

And yet most museum concert halls lack such charm. The visual-arts audience has historically been quite open and receptive to new music: John Cage and other avant-garde 20th-century masters often found their most attentive early audiences not in concert halls, but in art galleries. But many of the halls that museums build, which double as seminar and lecture spaces, have the visual flair of hotel conference rooms: beige and wood veneer, with comfortable movie-theater seating, all projecting a sense of the anodyne — the least creative space in the museum. It's up to performers to infuse the Baird Auditorium at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (530 seats), or the McEvoy Auditorium (346 seats) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery — pleasant and functional as those spaces are — with the spark of art-making.

[Music at the African American Museum: first, define “African American music.”]

So where are the best places to hear music in an art museum? Is it in a gallery, appreciating the juxtaposition of the visual and the aural, whether or not the two have anything to do with each other? The hitch here is that the spaces where art is displayed aren't generally designed for performance. Hearing music in a gallery, perched on a folding chair or standing by the wall, is neither as comfortable nor as acoustically satisfying as hearing it in a dedicated hall. Still, some of the most stimulating performances do take place here, in front of the art. The Great Noise Ensemble's enthusiastic and ambitious performance of Louis Andriessen's "De Materie" in the lobby of the National Gallery's East Wing some years ago was given an extra jolt through taking place under the huge Calder mobile, which began to move, shiveringly, as the body heat of the audience rose beneath its metal planes. (The Metropolitan Museum in New York has been extremely creative in finding different ways to use its gallery spaces for live performance.)



There are other ways to create this kind of juxtaposition. In the wood-paneled Music Room of the Phillips Collection, built for private salons rather than the crowds of 150 that squeeze into tight rows of folding chairs for its Sunday afternoon concerts, the curators rotate the art on the walls so that you may be looking at a Bonnard or a Daumier, a Lawrence or a Dutch genre painting while listening to an equally wide-ranging array of music. (The hall is being renovated; concerts are being held at the Cosmos Club until it reopens in early 2018.) And at the Smithsonian Museum of American History's Taubman Hall of Music (166 seats), designed by Ewing Cole and opened in 2015, performances are framed against a view of the Washington Monument out the windows behind the stage — a view of American history that's in keeping with both the museum's mandate and the aspirations of the timeless (usually not American) music performed before it.



Yet how important, after all, are the aesthetics of an auditorium? Is it better to be kept on edge and alert, or to be comfortable? If the latter, then the vote should go to the auditorium in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, whose sharply raked seats (capacity: 500) convey the ambiance of a lecture hall but offer lots of padding and abundant leg room. In this temple to conventionality, I saw an orchestra play Yves Klein's "Symphonie Monoton-Silence," which consisted of a D-major chord playing for 20 minutes followed by 20 minutes of silence. The audience stayed rapt and attentive throughout — much more focused, one observer later remarked, than fans of art music in many dedicated concert halls. You could chalk it up to museums being better at reaching audiences who are interested in this kind of thing. Or you could chalk it up to pure creature comfort.