Book Review: ‘The Shape of Music’ Showcases Architect Warren Schwartz’s Concert-Inspired Designs 

By Laurence Vittes | From the September-October issue of Strings Magazine

This sumptuous combination of an artist’s sketchbook and an architectural design statement features work by Warren Schwartz, lead architect for the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge and Tanglewood House. He drew these designs over a period of 30 years during live concerts, mostly at Boston Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. For everyone who has wondered whether it’s OK to sketch or take notes during a concert (as long as it’s discreet), The Shape of Music will be your inspiration.

In fact, the photographs of the buildings that resulted from Schwartz’s sketching take second place to the impact of Schwartz’s sketches when married to the evocative pages from program books on which he made the drawings—a classical music equivalent of graffiti. A Shostakovich violin concerto inspires a hovering 37-story apartment building; Martha Argerich playing Prokofiev with Charles Dutoit conducting evokes a surrealistic fantasy. Richard Strauss’ Macbeth flowed through Schwartz’s unrealized design for the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota. In his drawing during a trio concert, each of the players has their own architectural shape.

“My question always,” Schwartz says to me over Zoom, “is where do buildings come from? I had been fascinated by the drawings Frank Lloyd Wright had made while listening to music, probably recordings. He called them ‘musical compositions,’ which I thought was a nice allision of ideas. It was during my freshman year at Cornell, and I wondered if I could listen to music and see buildings in my head. I tried it over the time I was in school for four or five years. And then I met my wife, Sheila Fiekowsky, who’s a violinist in the Boston Symphony, and I started to make these little tiny drawings with a 25-cent ballpoint pen, an inch by an inch, listening to the music and remembering Cornell. And that’s how it started.

“As the sketches grew in size,” Schwartz adds, “I gave myself the freedom to make marks on the pages wherever it felt best. Mostly they were on the pages with lots of print and a portrait of a composer. These pages were the most fertile places to visualize the music.

“All that the music demanded,” Schwartz says, “was that I listen.”