Recitation room

“ We went in and found ourselves in a long, canvas room, with sloping seats and a small stage at one end lighted by oil lamps.
The place was dreadfully hot, and smelled strongly of humanity. Presently a bell rang; there was solemn music on a tinkling piano and a young actor, bare-faced and dressed in a white classical dress, took his place near the stage, beginning to recite in a clear, sympathetic voice. ”

“ The third floor has been planned to meet many more requirements than are usually considered in a theatre. Across the front runs a large rehearsal room, large enough to make a fine dance hall when occasion demands. ”

“ We reach it by a long winding way of pleasantly-lighted stairs and corridors, and find ourselves in a room incredibly small for a theatre—a mere little box of a place, not wider, I should judge, than sixteen feet, nor more than fifty feet deep, but so curiously and ingeniously arranged with seats in tiers upon an [pg 691] inclined plane that quite a numerous audience can find room within it. The "fauteuils d'orchestre," or orchestra-chairs, are the front row of benches, nearest the stage. ”

“ Everybody seems to know everybody else, and one general atmosphere of genial intercourse prevails throughout the room.
Let us change the scene to a classic concert of quite another kind. In a quiet West-end street, we are in a room of singular construction. It is in the form of a right-angled triangle; and at the right angle, upon a small dais, is placed the pianoforte and the desks, and so forth, for the performers. The latter are thus visible from all points; but about one-half the audience in each angle of the room is quite hidden from the other. ”

“ Last evening I played at the Casino mobile, in a very fine saloon, my concerto in the form of a scena, and a pot-pourri with pianoforte accompaniment. As the room is very favourable for music, both of these had a very sensible effect upon the audience. The remainder of the concert, consisting of symphonies and pièces d’harmonie, was not of importance. ”

“ The scene to be represented is a parlor furnished with sofa, chairs, carpet, pictures, table, and a melodeon, which is placed on the side of the stage. A sheet of music is resting on the rack, and a young lady is seated on the melodeon stool, body facing the audience, head turned to the back of the room, both hands raised, and eyes fixed on a young man, who is seated on the sofa in the background. Her body is slightly inclined from the young man, countenance expressing affright. She should be costumed in a showy silk dress. ”

“ A few books, well bound and with contents worthy of the binding, should lie on the parlor table, with a late magazine or so, for the entertainment of the waiting guest. There should be fresh flowers arranged in pretty bowls to add their impress of cheerfulness and beauty to the room.
In most American homes the parlor is also the music room. Since a piano should be chosen for quality rather than appearance, an instrument of any finish is allowable in a room, whatever its decorative scheme. ”

“ The room was small, triangular: a striped, reddish cotton carpet on the floor, a door with a brass handle, my bandbox open on a chair, a basin with soapy water, soiled towels, two dripping tallow-candles: in short, a dressing-room in a theatre. Outside, wheels, pulleys, pasteboard castles, trees, chairs, [Pg 15] more bony women, more chalk, more tulle. Monsieur in a greasy green dressing-gown odorous of tobacco, swearing at a boy with blear eyes,—a scene-shifter. The orchestra tuning beyond the foot-lights: how vilely the first violin slurred over that second passage! ”

“ The room is filled. Habitués, and knowing musical men on town, recognise each other, and congregate in groups, laughingly comparing notes upon the probabilities of what artists announced will make an appearance, and upon what apologies will be offered in lieu of those who don't. ”

“ There are, of course, other types of auditorium and platform than that of the theatre. Churches, lecture halls, and the chambers of legislative assemblies are planned with the same general end of making a person or persons at one part of the room audible and visible to many persons gathered in another part. ”

“ "Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where, with Thy Choir of Saints, for evermore
I shall be made Thy music, as I come
I tune my instrument here at the door,
And, what I must do then, think here before. ”

“ The difference between a small room and one seating several hundred is far greater than the average auditor realizes. If the mere rattling of silver and china will eclipse this vocal effort in speech I leave to your imagination what must transpire when the singer is called upon to dominate with one thread of song the tremendous onslaught of an orchestra and to rise triumphant above it in a theater so large that the faithful gatherers in the gallery tell me we all look like pigmies, and half the time are barely heard. ”

“ The dome is beautifully painted. Upon the scenery of the stage being removed, and temporary columns, and galleries raised; all of which can be effected in twenty-four hours, that part of the theatre presents a counterpart of the other, and the whole forms a most splendid oblong ball room, very deservedly considered to be the finest in Europe: it used to be illuminated by ten thousand wax lights. The concert rooms, and retiring apartments are also very beautiful. From the opera, we visited the chapel, which is very fine, and costly, in which there are many large, and valuable paintings. ”

“ Accordingly, they left the room of the cupids and garlands, traversed the vasty ballroom where the chandeliers, like two huge ear-rings, divided up the light into twinkling diamond and rainbow showers, entered the drawing-room of the dignified sixteenth-century chairs, which from the first had suffered an undeserved neglect, and passed thence into the familiar parlor of the multitudinous baubles and the grand piano and the portrait ”

“ In no other style is sympathy between performers and listeners so necessary, and for that reason Chamber music should always be heard in a small room with performers and listeners joined in angelic wedlock. Communities in which it flourishes under such conditions are musical. ”

“ In a church or a concert hall we hear a confused and terrifying mingling of sounds, and from time to time we note a change in the depth of tone but we are unable to distinguish the pitch of the chords. ”

“ In the yard a temporary platform—a few boards, it may be, set on barrel-heads [1] —could be erected for a stage; in the adjacent stables a dressing-room could be provided for the actors; the rabble—always the larger and2 more enthusiastic part of the audience—could be accommodated with standing-room about the stage; while the more aristocratic members of the audience could be comfortably seated in the galleries overhead. ”

“ But the procession has reached the theatre, in which already there are ladies seated, and in a few moments the building is filled with an audience to which any orator would be proud to speak. There is music as the audience rustles and murmurs into its place with eager expectation. ”

“ We formed our stage by removing all the bedding from the beds on one side of Chamber, and laying the bed-boards [4] on them for a floor. A cord was fastened [74] across the room a few feet from the wall, from which lengths of paper-hangings were suspended to give it some appearance of a room, and (the toys being removed) to give room for the actors to pass from one side to the other without being seen by the audience; in front of all a green drop, or rather draw-curtain, was suspended.
THE PLAY IN SEVENTH. ”

“ The acoustic properties of the theatre are extraordinarily good, a speaker in the orchestra being heard throughout the auditorium without raising his voice. The stage buildings are not preserved much above their foundations, and show signs of later repairs ”

“ In the modern theatre the word is applied to that part of the stage which is in front of the curtain and the orchestra, and sometimes to the whole front of the stage, including the curtain and the arch containing it, which separates the stage from the auditorium. ”

“ Act I, scene II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet↑ The music-room was another name for the parlor in a house or estate. Music was an integral part of Victorian life, and the music-room or parlor was most commonly used for entertainment purposes. ”

“ I. A POPULAR SONG IN THE MAKING A very large room—an entire floor, usually—is divided into a reception room, where vaudeville and cabaret performers are waiting their turns to rehearse, and half-a-dozen little rooms, each containing a piano. As the walls of these rooms are never very thick, and often are mere partitions running only two-thirds of the way to the ceiling, the discord of conflicting songs is sometimes appalling. Every once in a while some performer comes to the manager of the department and insists on being rehearsed by the writers of the latest song-hit themselves. ”

“ And so the oratorio goes on, the assemblage paying a grave and decorous attention to the music, and bearing themselves far more like a congregation than an audience. They are so devotedly rapt in the magnificent performance, that I expect every moment to hear the vast mass of them join in the choruses; and when, at the first bar of the sublime “Hallelujah Chorus,” the hearers all stand up, the singers in the orchestra seem to me like priests. In truth, I think that to hear an oratorio, chastens and purifies the mind, and that we go away from those grand performances wiser and better men. ”

“ Let us, if you will, go to a dimly lighted concert hall and sit with our heads bent over our scores while ladies and gentlemen, gloved and in evening dress, narrate and chant to us a tremendous drama, helped out by all the resources of modern delineative music, and we try to see the action with our mind's eye. ”

“ Along the end of the room is a spacious bar, supplied with all kinds of bad liquors, and in a sort of gallery, suspended under the ceiling, a female violinist tasks her talent and strength of muscle to minister to the excitement of play. ”

“ The footlights alone remained burning: flooding with a golden splendour the stage and the great yellow wall, and from the wall reflected upward and outward upon the auditorium; casting over the faces in the orchestra a soft golden twilight, and a still fainter golden light over the more remote hill-side of faces on the tiers—which rose through the golden dusk, and vanished at last in a darkness that still seemed to be a little softened by the faint suggestion of a golden haze. ”

“ We have seen that the orchestra, with its dancing chorus, stands for ritual, for the stage in which all were worshippers, all joined in a rite of practical intent. We further saw that the theatre, the place for the 142spectators, stood for art. In the orchestra all is life and dancing; the marble seats are the very symbol of rest, aloofness from action, contemplation. The seats for the spectators grow and grow in importance till at last they absorb, as it were, the whole spirit, and give their name theatre to the whole structure; action is swallowed up in contemplation. ”

“ Not only do we have to consider arias and passages from the great oratorios and operas as a part of the present-day repertoire, but the song of the "Lied" type has come to have a valuable significance in all concert work. Many songs intended for the chamber and the salon are now included in programs of concerts and recitals given in our largest auditoriums. Only a very few numbers are in themselves songs written for the concert hall. ”

“ The interior consists chiefly of a regularly-built room, designed specially for meetings and concerts, with an orchestra containing a fine organ. The hall seats upwards of 2000 persons, but when cleared of benches, as is the case at great political meetings, over 5000 may find standing room. ”

“ It rose, it swelled, it seemed to fill not only the great auditorium, but heaven itself. And still, above it all, we heard the voices of the angel choir, no longer breathing the soft, sweet melody, but bursting forth into pæans of triumphant praise. A flood of glory seemed to fill the place, and looking upward we beheld the great dome ablaze with golden light, and the angelic forms of the no longer invisible choir in its midst, with their heavenly harps and viols, and their faces only less radiant than that of Him in whose praise they sang. ”

“ The chorus in which that opera abounds gives the parterre frequent opportunities of joining in concert with the stage. This inclination of the audience to sing along with the actors so prevails with them that I have sometimes known the performer on the stage to do no more in a celebrated song than the clerk of a parish church, who serves only to raise the psalm, and is afterward drowned in the music of the congregation. Every actor that comes on the stage is a beau. ”

“ In performance, most of his works shrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure, the cathedral which is behind every living composition and manifests itself through it, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that it fades into the background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and gold thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tarnish in the gloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that moves and sways and rises and ebbs fitfully in the dim light. ”

“ The reader should practice in the room where the entertainment is to be given, at least enough to be sure of its acoustic properties and so secure the right pitch of voice,--height and size of room, as well as shape and furnishings, making a great difference.
The reading must be given in front of the closed curtain, that the manager may be having the stage prepared for each succeeding tableau, that it may be presented promptly when desired. ”