Positioning

Microphones must be placed where things sound warmest. Positioning is an important as tuning, as Horowitz knew when he placed the famous screw in the floor of the Carnegie Hall stage, where his piano always sat, and where many other pianists as well place their own pianos. Moving a piano by as little as a quarter of an inch can turn a tinny treble brilliant, and a boxy bass round, so it is important to find the best possible slant of the piano before any tuning begins. Square rooms, flat ceilings, soft and hard surfaces, windows, all change the way each string bounces, thus the sound.

    The economic need to have larger halls to accommodate larger audiences has led to the common experience of music for most people being extremely far away from the actual event.

    The emergence of stereo and, recently, home theater flies in the face of the concert hall experience. Because of advances in technology, sound has the potential to become intimate again, hearkening back to the days of Chopin and Liszt, when people were moved by their proximity to beauty, where singers could concentrate not on volume but on tone, where violinists could slow down and savor the wash of tonalities, not speed up to cover up for the death of sound in large dry rooms. Economical halls make for economical sounds.