As you can imagine, there was already an organ there, and the sound was reverber~ ant, though not as much as in the giant Gothic cathedrals. The music Bach wrote for such spaces sounded good in there; the space made the single instrument, the pipe organ, sound larger, and it also had the nice effect of softening any mistakes as he doodled up and down the scales, as was his wont. Modulating into different keys in the innovative way he did was risky business in these venues. Previously, composers for these rooms stayed in the same key, so they could be all washy and droney, and if the room sounded like an empty swim- ming pool, then it posed no problem. I recently went to a Balkan music festival in Brooklyn in a hall that was almost identical to the church pictured on the previous page. The brass bands were play- ing in the middle of the floor, and folks were dancing in circles around them. The sound was pretty reverberant—not ideal for the complicated rhythms of Balkan music, but then again, that music didn’t develop in rooms like the one I was in. In the late 1700s, Mozart would perform his compositions at events in his patrons’ palaces in grand but not gigantic rooms." At least initially, he didn’t write expecting his music to be heard in symphony halls, which is where it’s often performed today, but rather in these smaller, more intimate venues. Rooms like these would be filled with people whose bodies and elaborate dress would deaden the sound, and that, combined with the frilly decor and their modest size (when compared to cathedrals and even ordinary churches) meant that his similarly frilly music could be heard clearly in all its intricate detail. People could dance to it too. My guess is that in order to be heard above the dancing, clomping feet, and gossiping, one might have had to figure out how to