Portland Conservatory of Music

Abstract

Music and architecture are the two Arts that we come in contact with most in our lives. Through the mass media, music infiltrates our conscious and subconscious almost every waking hour: muzak, advertisement jingles, and even the Evening News has a theme song. The built environment surrounds us to an even greater extent in its fulfillment of the basic human need of shelter. It would seem then that music, literature, painting and drama as well, are superfulous to mankind's existence because their raison d'etre is not procreative in nature. But these Arts have flourished along with architecture; they are all integral pieces of what we consider culture. The thread that binds music and architecture must be deeper than a functional need, since caves and tepees provided shelter long before Architecture did and music supposedly has no functional purpose. To explore these links in the specific realms of music and architecture I asked three questions: Why? What? and How?