Chapter 6 returns to St Paul’s Cathedral, illustrating how a lack of regulation in acoustics led to an influx of speculative proposals to address the acoustics under the dome, and the beginnings of electro-acoustic intervention. This chapter is a snapshot of a time, just before the outbreak of World War II, when the field of architectural acoustics was changing rapidly and radically. New products were flooding the market, and consultancy was increasing. The necessity of acoustic consultancy was accepted, but it was not regulated. This provided very definite opportunities for marketing and speculation. Taking transience and opportunity as its theme, this chapter explores three buildings and their acoustic contributions in greater detail: Abbey Road Studios and contemporary ideas on the design of spaces for recording music; the opportunities posed by impermanence in Burnett, Lorne, and Tait’s concert hall for the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1935, and finally, the enduring question of how to understand the acoustic intricacies of St Paul’s Cathedral. Acoustic consultancy factored into each of these in the 1930s, and the approaches and experimentation embodied in each of these instances would have implications for acoustic work during and subsequent to World War II.

In 1941, in the midst of the Blitz, the director of Britain’s Building Research Station (BRS) received a letter from Basil Cameron, chair of the London Symphony Orchestral Society. London’s Queen’s Hall had been destroyed by an incendiary bomb just ten days earlier. Orchestral music was expected to relocate to the Royal Albert Hall, where the acoustics were known to be capricious. Cameron’s letter contained an impassioned plea to address the problematic acoustics as a matter of urgency in order to ‘ensure the continuance of orchestral music in London’. Significantly, the request was granted, despite the fact that government work related to the acoustics of buildings was officially in hiatus at the time, having been suspended for the duration of the war. Three further exceptions were permitted with respect to the wartime suspension of work in architectural acoustics – at St Paul’s Cathedral, Gloucester Cathedral, and the Royal Exchange – all on the grounds that the work was experimental and would meet a societal need. This chapter examines the social and cultural significance attached to those architectural ‘exceptions’. The recognition given to the acoustic condition was significant, and so too was the approach to intervening in that condition. While optimising resources and experimenting with what was available, mutability of the acoustic context was explored in all four buildings. This chapter takes these buildings as a lens through which to examine the conceptualisation of architecture as both a musical and a scientific instrument, and the broader implications of that approach for philosophies of design subsequent to the war.

The Prologue, focusing on 1951, opens with two high-profile acoustic experiments undertaken in London that year. The first – conducted at night in the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral – involved pistol fire from the pulpit and made the international news. The second was the inauguration and architectural ‘tuning’ of Royal Festival Hall that took place earlier that same year. Beginning with this architectural manifestation of acoustic experiments in the immediate post-war era, and their national as well as international reception, the Prologue establishes a context for exploring the path of development and intertwining of disciplines that led up to that point. It introduces some of the book’s core themes: articulating the concept of designing for musical tone that came most prominently to public attention in the design and inauguration of Royal Festival Hall; introducing the role of the press in catalysing acoustic work in architecture throughout the previous half-century; and aligning objective with subjective modes of design, as well as exploring how both formal and informal modes of enquiry pushed one another forward. Ultimately the Prologue establishes the book as a narrative of people and buildings.

By 1984, Ruefrex had reached what seemed like an insurmountable impasse. Martin J. Galvin was an Irish American lawyer and activist notable for his role in the formation and promotion of NORAID (the Irish Northern Aid Committee). The organisation became known for raising funds for the Provisional IRA and other nationalist groups during the Troubles. Although banned from Northern Ireland for espousing terrorism, Galvin entered the country in 1984, attending high-profile gatherings, flouting his presence to the security forces and providing Sinn Féin with a press coup. This flurry of activity provided the catalyst for Ruefrex to record and release a song that they had finished a year earlier. ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ tells the story of Jack Duggan, an Irish rebel and native of Castlemaine, County Kerry, who became a convict, then a bushranger in nineteenth-century Australia.

Cohen was first known as a poet, and on the basis of his first volume of poetry he was described as Canada’s leading poet. As the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen attests, he became a celebrity in Canada on the basis of his poetry even before he had recorded an album. He continued to publish poetry throughout his career, and the relationship of the poems to the lyrics is interesting and complicated. Cohen’s early poetry is more modernist, largely eschewing rhyme or regular rhythm, while his later poems are often similar to his lyrics. Poetry inhabits both novels in various ways. Lawrence Breavman enjoys a first name that nods to and withdraws Lawrentian possibilities, and the strategies of the poet are all over Beautiful Losers: repetition, anaphora, listing, grammatical and syntactical dislocation, a variety of forms, symbolism, making strange, surrealism. Sometimes, Cohen publishes his song lyrics as poems, sometimes verbatim, sometimes in a different form. Other poems are quite different from his songs set to music, yet he seems to have thought of his poems and lyrics collectively as “songs.”

The author relates how he booked his passage home on the Liverpool ferry after a painful resurrection of the band. Under the coke influence and in possession, he had somehow driven past the turn-off for the M56, and found himself on the wrong side of the Pennines. Thatcher’s government had just announced that the Harland and Wolff shipyard was to be privatised, and the IRA had just planted a booby-trap bomb on a school bus in an attempt to kill the driver, a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). The driver and some school children – one of them Arlene Foster who would go on to lead the Democratic Unionist Party and become First Minister in later years – were injured in the explosion. Ruefrex had reared up for a short while in anger and defiance, but they had been slowly bleeding out from the wound left by TC’s exit.