Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/35642

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Title
Architecture, music and the crowd in the Pink Floyd's The Wall
Author/Creator
Ostwald, Michael J.;  Chapman, Michael
Institution
The University of Newcastle. Faculty of Engineering & Built Environment, School of Architecture and Built Environment
Description
In 1979 the influential UK rock band Pink Floyd released their seminal album The Wall, accompanied, in the following years, by a lavish stage performance and animated movie that toured internationally. Publicity images for the tour show a series of masks of the faces of the four band members, hinting at a connection with ancient Greek theatre where the audience and performers intertwine seamlessly. Greek tragedy, as the ultimate synthesis between space and music, represented this spirit of connection where individuals dissolved into a collective that took solace in its communal grief. It was the capacity of music to transform individuals into a crowd that Richard Wagner tried to recreate in his epic operas at Bayreuth and the then 28-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche celebrated in his 1872 work The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. As students of architecture, the members of Pink Floyd used the tour to explore several important spatial relationships, most notably the chasm between the rock star and the fan that had become troubling for the band on recent tours. Demonstrating an awareness of the cultural dimensions of Greek tragedy, the Pink Floyd concert, rather than integrating the audience into the show, specifically refutes it, constructing throughout the concert an enormous wall between the band and the audience finally revealing only a small gap through which the lead singer could be seen. The culmination of the show was the destruction of the wall. This paper will look at the relationship between music, architecture and the crowd through Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The band used the intersection of architecture and music to challenge accepted notions of the individual and the collective and the spatial organization of the crowd. By parodying the demise of the Greek theatre or ancient amphitheatre, Pink Floyd critique a model of spatial organization, familiar primarily to the stadium rock concert or mainstream sporting event, where the audience is an observer rather than agent in the production of drama.
Relation
Architecture, Music, Acoustics. Architecture, Music, Acoustics Proceedings (Toronto, Canada 8-10 June, 2006) p. 1-17
Relation
http://www.ryerson.ca/amaconf/frames/home_frameset.html
Date
2006
Publisher
Ryerson Embodied Architecture Lab
Keyword(s)
Pink Floyd's The Wall;  music;  space;  architecture
Resource Type
conference paper
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/35642
Identifier
ISBN:189450349X
Reviewed
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Subject
"Architecture, music and the crowd in the Pink Floyd's The Wall"
 
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