Performances & Recordings

Cappella Romana performed two Icons of Sound concerts at Stanford University: in 2013 and 2016.

They also performed in Icons of Sound virtual Hagia Sophia at the Ritz Carlton, San Francisco, in 2014, and a series of concerts as part of the Maker Magazine Pop-Up Concerts 2018 & 2019, and a 2019 concert in Portland, Oregon, in celebration of the Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia album.

Stanford Live’s 2016 concert announcement: Icons of Sound: Hagia Sophia Reimagined
https://live.stanford.edu/calendar/november-2016/icons-sound-hagia-sophia-reimagined
Fri, Nov 4, 2016 • 7:30pm. Take a virtual journey to Hagia Sophia, Constantinople’s Great Church, when the renowned choir Cappella Romana returns to the Bing to continue its collaboration with Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and its Art and Art History department.

 

Below, a video and program notes from the 2013 Stanford Live performance in the Bing Concert Hall:

From California to Constantinople, February 6, 2013:
Icons of Sound: Cappella Romana in a Virtual Hagia SophiaProkeimenon

Sunday Prokeimenon in Mode 1. MS Patmos 221 (ca. 1162-1179)

Cappella Romana, with researchers from the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Art & Art History Department at Stanford University

(program notes)

Tonight we will experiment with digital technology in the second half of Cappella Romana’s concert in order to transform the Bing Hall into the reverberant soundscape of Hagia Sophia (532-537), which defined the medieval spiritual experience and man’s embeddedness in the world.

We live in a culture that values dry, direct, and efficient sound. This aesthetic predisposition emerged during the Machine Age (1900-1933) and it transformed our relationship to sound. Before, speech or chanting reverberating in resonant ancient stone interiors made individual words unclear. The electroacoustic signal, stripped of ambient noise, and piped into dry and inert rooms, by contrast, allowed individual words to be heard with clarity and directness.

Modern acoustics started with the building of Boston’s Symphony Hall (1900). In the process, the physicist Wallace Sabine discovered a formula for predicting the reverberation of a space. This is the length of time a sound produced in an interior continues to reflect off surfaces until it gradually decays into inaudibility. Sabine’s formula established a relation between materials and interior volume. This discovery ushered in the development of acoustics as science and the engineering of new synthetic building materials. Both advances allowed the reverberation of any interior to be manipulated and adjusted for the particular function of a space.

As the aesthetics of the modern dry and efficient sound permeated the city, it shaped the expectation of concert hall acoustics from an average reverberation time of 4 seconds to around 2 seconds. In treating reverberation as noise, modern technology severed the relationship between sound and space. By contrast, in the pre-modern world the acoustics of the space was the direct product of the natural materials. The marble interior of Hagia Sophia was 70 meters long, while in height it reached 56 meters at the apex of the great dome. The vast chamber and its reflective surfaces of marble and gold resulted in unprecedented acoustics of over ten seconds reverberation time.

As a museum Hagia Sophia today has lost its voice, no performances could take place in it. Using new digital technology developed at CCRMA, the second portion of Cappella Romana’s concert at Bing aims to recreate sound of what singing in Hagia Sophia must have been like. Each singer caries a microphone that records the sound transforming it into a digital signal, which is then imprinted with the reverberant response of Hagia Sophia.

What you hear as a “wet sound” is the product of a digitally produced signal transmitted through loudspeakers placed strategically to create an enveloping soundfield. This digital signal may shock you with the way it revitalizes voice, transforming its content into a chiaroscuro of indistinct but immersive sound. For the Byzantines, this sonic experience was associated with the water: the waves of the sea.

–– Jonathan Abel, consulting professor at CCRMA & Bissera Pentcheva, professor of Art & Art History Department, Stanford University