On January 11, I dragged my better half and her parents to a concert at the National Cathedral entitled, Music for the City of Light.

The program consisted of a mixture of choral and orchestral music from the second half of the seventeenth century by Lully and Charpentier. I was very excited to hear the music by Lully, because his name sounded very familiar; while I enjoyed his pieces, I know realize that I was thinking of the Spanish born philosopher usually known as Raymond Lully. This other Lully isn’t bad, though.

The music was beautiful. I particularly loved the sacred pieces.

But…

It all sounded like thin water because the National Cathedral is a terrible place of the kind of intimate music being performed. We’re talking purely acoustically. The sound that reached us (and we weren’t that far back) was very weak. I’m sorry, I’m not paying to hear concerts at the National Cathedral just so I can strain to hear it. That rich, full sound we associate with early Baroque music is lost and replaced by something much reedier in those acoustical conditions.

I had hoped to introduce my mother and father-in-law to some of my favorite kind of music and make a pitch for the richness of my culture’s musical canon. Instead, I wound boring them literally to sleep. But who can blame them? After all, it wasn’t like there were any loud noises to keep them awake.