The 50 years age and beyond

During the symposium “Vision on philosophy in architecture” in Rotterdam, a musician played a musical intermezzo on a grand piano. Afterwards he came to me to talk about music. Since architecture and music, as an art, have in common the fact that both arts are created, I pushed the conversation to the comparison of architects and composers. So I told him that almost all good architects produce their well balanced architecture from the age of fifty years on. It takes such a long time to handle all the different aspects of creation in a balanced way. Young architects tend to focus on one aspect and many years later, when fashion has changed, find their own buildings outdated. He told me that in music this was also true for many composers. Then he said that there are some exceptions, like Mozart. It was his teacher Reinbert de Leeuw who told him that Mozart was already young a very old man, not to say that he was born old. What is meant is that some of the creators among us seem to have undergone an acceleration process of absorbing the many aspects of creation.

Composers know that each partition of music they create will be “executed” by musicians, over and over. Music exists as a partition on paper which can be read by a musician. The music played by musicians can be registered and reproduced. Traditionally architects create by a set of drawings and a set of texts, which can be both read by the collaborators of the building companies who actually build the unique building. The word unique implicates that the object of art is build only once and not being produced in a quantity, it also implicates that it is an object not like any other in its architectural expression.

Who said that architecture is frozen music?