The Monastery

The old salons were made of heavy plaster and cluttered with niches for statues, alcoves, paintings, drapes. This softened and broke up the sound pleasantly. The audience was small, so it didn't soak up too much of the music. Ceilings were often rounded and painted, not presenting any sharp angles to turn the sound harsh. When sound bounces too evenly, as it does in a rectangular room or off a low ceiling, sound waves cancel each other out.

    Think of a swimming pool, where one swimmer's wave hits another's and the result stops both waves. In a room too large, waves dissipate and the sound is distant. In a room too small, the waves are in turmoil, and the result is acoustic confusion. So the room has to be large enough, but not too large.

    This was fortunately the case with our otherwise haphazard recording environment. The floors were covered with old wood cut from long-gone mountain forests. They had a certain bounce, or sag, leading me to think they were suspended on beams over the inevitable three-foot-thick stone in evidence elsewhere, so, fortunately for us, sonic bounces were softened by the wood and diffused by the air before being flattened by the stone.

    Outside, unnamed mountains rose up in a complete circle around us, mantled in that deceptively impenetrable firn which looks from a distance like every child's dream of Christmas snow, but which became our worst nightmare.

    Sherpas, those transplanted Tibetan mountain people, floated soundlessly in and out of cold stone rooms. We never saw any monks. Perhaps the extreme elevation was only conducive to summer worship.

    The ceiling was arched antique wood, 26 feet at the highest point in the center. Our own bodies, the piano itself, the equipment, the thankas and prayer flags, broke up the sound somewhat, keeping it from being too harsh. A heavy wooden door let the room breathe: otherwise it would have been tight and airless, which translates into the same kind of tight sound.

    The smallness that produces greatness is the musician's room. It is where the artist lives, works, and listens. This is where tones come alive, and where musicians bring friends into their homes to show them something interesting. This is the potential of DVD, as it is with the Net, to bring the artist's private world into the listener's private world, to eliminate the middleman, in this case the sterility of the modern concert hall.

    In these small rooms silences speak, every nuance succeeds, there is closeness enough that voices leap out from behind the keys with their quirks preserved. No large crowds exist to induce tension, hostility, or the ego which often surfaces to guard the pianist against the panic he feels in large spaces. It is in such Dickensian settings that music moves us.

    So I hope that our efforts can introduce you into Brinkerhoff's living room, however bizarre, and provide you with an experience his friends might have, assuming such a man had friends.