“Some Rooms Make You Whisper”: The Art of Isolation and the Racial Politics of Quiet in a Concert Hall Built for Jazz Tom Wetmore / Columbia University Abstract. This article ethnographically analyzes the unique acoustic properties of Rose Theater, a lavish 1,300-seat concert hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. Focusing on the hall’s remarkable quietness and acoustic isolation, I show how the sonic environment furthers Jazz at Lincoln Center’s aesthetic and ideological projects. By dramatically cutting off the sounds of jazz from the exterior world, thus excluding unwanted “noise,” Rose Theater’s acoustic design sonically refutes longstanding racist ideologies associating jazz with a noisy material essence. This analysis prompts new ways of interrogating how sound, space, and the built environment are entangled with difference and power. Keywords: sound studies, race, acoustics, jazz, space and place This article is about a very quiet room. A room where music is taken seriously. Where ideal listening is an earnest affair of intense concentration. Rose Theater is a 1,300-seat concert hall in New York City, the largest and most prestigious performance space in the lavish multiuse complex home to Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), an influential and well-funded cultural arts organization. I became intimately familiar with Rose Theater as part of three years of ethnographic fieldwork investigating architectural acoustics and sound system design in a range of jazz performance venues. What has struck me most about Rose Theater is its elaborate form of acoustic isolation that dramatically seals it off from the rest of the vibrating world, fostering a remarkably quiet aural experience. This extraordinary auditory quality, as I explore in this article, was purposefully tailored for very specific modes of musical performance—and equally particular modes of listening. Rose Theater is an especially productive site for this investigation not only because of the unique way it sounds but because of the distinctive ways its characteristics resonate with aesthetic and ideological ideals at the heart of the Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 26  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 organization’s mission. Powered by the indomitable energy of Wynton Marsalis, the celebrated trumpeter and composer, JALC has advocated a distinctive vision of jazz as a dignified African American art that should be recognized for its central role in the cultural life of the United States. Marrying artistic excellence to spiritual and ideological transcendence, especially for African Americans, JALC champions what Eric Porter calls “a vision that affirms the humanity of black people . . . [and] places them at the center of American experience” (2002:288). As the world’s most well-funded and influential jazz nonprofit, JALC has been discussed extensively in both popular and scholarly forums, but little attention has been paid to the actual sound of the organization as a physical entity—how JALC’s built environment conditions acoustical vibrations in ways that perform substantial aesthetic and ideological work (see, e.g., Wetmore 2024). A key aspect of JALC’s recruitment of the built environment into its musical and extramusical missions has been its stated goal to design all its performance spaces “specifically for the sound of jazz.”1 This fact is critical, for designing a room for the sound of jazz necessarily entails making corresponding assertions about what jazz is in the first place. Indeed, as I argue here and elsewhere (see Wetmore 2024), by designing spaces for the sound of jazz, JALC enacts claims about what jazz is. I thus emphasize, as no prior research has, how JALC’s institutional ideals about jazz are inscribed into the very physical matter that constitute JALC as an assemblage of material artifacts—and how, most basically, the rooms sound. In this article, the room’s stunning quietness serves as an occasion to creatively rethink the power of sound—musical or otherwise—to negotiate a range of social values and specifically new ways of thinking about racial feeling and politics. Most specifically, I demonstrate that by dramatically cutting off the sounds of jazz from the exterior world, thus excluding unwanted “noise”—a concept I scrutinize in both its sonic and social resonances—Rose Theater’s unique modes of acoustic isolation refute, in striking sonic form, longstanding racist ideologies that associate jazz with a noisy material essence. Among other things, the sound of the room resists common notions of jazz as being “genetically best-suited” for small clubs, long associated with various romantic tropes of subversion and racialized exoticism (G. E. Lewis 2008:349). The room’s acoustics are thus a powerful sonic element of JALC’s broader quest to carve out a space for jazz in a Euro-American art-world hierarchy that has long been unwelcoming to Black cultural production. While I commend JALC’s achievements as valuable interventions in the US racial imagination, I also find in them a more problematic gesture. Namely, by actively promoting a studious mode of attentive listening inspired by Eurocentric frameworks of high art, the acoustic space of Rose Theater becomes entangled with a Western concert culture intertwined with whiteness and indifferent to the many alternative spaces creative Black musicians have used to more effectively challenge the racial geographies of musical art worlds. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  27 In recent decades, ethnomusicologists and other scholars have vigorously engaged with questions of sound as a fundamental dimension of social practice in far more diverse modes than are usually conjured by the concept of music while contributing novel ways of understanding concepts of space and place as loci for refracting culture and identity.2 I build on these endeavors while focusing on professionally designed built environments, foregrounding assemblages of raw physical matter seldom considered impactful to expressive culture. By examining architectural acoustics as simultaneously meaningful, feelingful, and even political, my analysis provokes new ways of thinking about how sound, space, and “background” matter are articulated within questions of difference and power. But let us start with a more basic question: What does it feel like in Rose Theater? “Some Rooms Make You Whisper”: An Ethnographic Entry I breathe. Bathed in penetrating silence. And enveloping darkness. I stand alone on the deep black stage, gazing out upon a house at rest. I hear no talking. I feel no human bodies. The swarms of nonhuman bodies that usually hum, clash, scratch, and buzz around me—the machines, artifacts, tools of all types—lie still, lifeless. My body is paralyzed by a preconscious anxiety at stirring the restful scene. What should have been a routine day of bustling fieldwork emerged as a surreal moment of muted solitude. Where is everybody? ——— Figure 1: Rose Theater, view from the stage. Photo by the author. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 28  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 Minutes earlier: an entirely different sensorium. The midday sun—near blinding, even with sunglasses—danced off passing cars and the imposing glass exterior of the Time Warner Center.3 The light shimmered on the small steel plaque reading “Jazz at Lincoln Center Stage Door” on West 60th Street, between Columbus Avenue and Broadway. This was the first wall I encountered on my brief journey to the material and symbolic center of the JALC world. Pulling back the door exposed an unglamorous, dimly lit tunnel leading toward another, less ponderous door. It opened into a cave-like antechamber slightly smaller than a one-car garage. In this liminal space between the exterior cityscape and the inner sanctum of Rose Theater lived a security station and a pair of brushed steel elevators. I nodded at the security guard, who barely looked up. Earlier in my fieldwork, I might have been asked for my ID or had my name checked against a list of approved visitors, but such formalities had long faded away. For the past couple months, I had been following the same work schedule as the Rose Theater audio crew—usually upward of eighty hours per week, and sometimes many more. I was now a daily presence. Making my way to the elevator, an antiseptic fluorescence accompanied me to the fifth floor. The brightness only increased as I traversed a network of backstage hallways, taking me past dressing rooms, staff offices, and walls adorned with press clippings, posters, call sheets, and safety notices—not to mention Wynton Marsalis’s luxe artistic director’s suite. The hallway opened up into a spacious area in front of the building’s massive freight elevator. Normally bustling with activity, for whatever reason, it didn’t strike me as unusual that the area was entirely deserted. Figure 2: JALC facility exterior, Time Warner Center. Photo by the author. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  29 The Rose Theater stage door was heavy and thick, one of only a handful of portals between two carefully segregated sensorial worlds. The first was an exterior world of elevators and hallways and offices and bright synthetic light, not to mention, just a little further away, the city outside and thus the rest of the world. The second was a much smaller, much more controlled, interior domain enclosing JALC’s material and symbolic nucleus: Rose Theater. Before passing through the door, I was in the first world. Here, the floor that suspended my feet five flights above the street, and another handful of flights above a bustling subway hub, was rigidly articulated within a vast material network of rigid objects—and the quivering gases flowing between them. Girders, stairways, elevators, subway lines, the Columbus Circle mall—between any of these objects, one could trace a direct chain of solid artifacts to the floor beneath my feet. Any vibration in this network of solid matter might trace its way to any other place in this assemblage. The same would not be true on the other side of this door. To the designers of Rose Theater, these networks of vibrating objects presented several difficulties. They were concerned, for instance, that the clangor of passing subway trains or the mechanical racket of elevators might impinge on the listening experience. Of course, one would have to listen closely to perceive any such sounds, especially in the hallway where I was presently standing. Here, any number of ambient sounds—the hum of the lights, the delicate hiss of air conditioning—would mask the subtler, more distant trembling from the farther corners of the network. But on the other side of the door, the environment would be entirely different. For JALC’s distinctive approach to presenting live jazz requires the utmost acoustic isolation; the slightest trespass of exterior sounds might well disturb the “pure and clean” sonic environment JALC wanted to cultivate (D. Hosney, pers. comm., December 19, 2016). The jazz within these walls must be cut off from all outside noise. Rose Theater is what is called a “box in a box.” A rare feat of architectural audacity, the entire theater is enclosed within a roughly box-shaped structure vibrationally autonomous from the rest of its surrounding architecture (see figure 3). From the top, suspension cables stabilize this chamber, while the bulk of its mass rests upon a set of mighty rubber pads that dissipate acoustical energy. Along all six sides of the box runs a gap of at least four inches of air, separating it from the rest of the building. The result is that the rigid network of solid materials connecting my feet on the hallway floor to the city outside and subway lines below is wholly detached from the performance space itself. As I opened the door and walked in, I stepped over a strip of flat steel concealing the four inches of air separating Rose Theater from the rest of the world. Because such a gap surrounds the entire theater, everyone who enters, from any entrance, must walk over a similar gap. I took another step, and the door closed behind me, thus completing my entry into the box. I’d expected to Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Figure 3: Rose Theater’s “Box-in-aBox” construction and its articulation with its material surroundings. Illustration adapted by the author from original provided by Ralph Viñoly Associates. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  31 find the lights on, revealing the expanse of the theater—the dark curtains; the worktables and boxes; the electrical cabling running along the backstage walls; the soft sheen of the matte black backstage floors. Walking onto the stage and looking out into the house, I would normally see wood-paneled balconies, floors, seats, and walls. There would be chatter and the sounds of human labor: metal scraping and clanging on the floor, boxes scratching across the stage, motorized ladders lifting stagehands to tweak a light or loudspeaker. But there was none of this. Virtually no sound at all—and barely any light. Not even enough to discern the mustard yellow of the seat cushions or the mahogany brown of the floors and balconies. No one was there. At that moment, it struck me: In the flurry of late nights and early mornings, I had lost track of the schedule. Or perhaps the schedule had changed last minute, and no one told me about it. Whatever the reason, I was the only one who’d shown up that day. Feeling the tinge of transgression, I didn’t wish to linger, but I allowed myself a few minutes to immerse myself in the otherworldly silence and ineffable isolation from the outside world. I had arrived where I started this narrative: dark, silent, and alone. ——— The hush was deeply affecting, its starkness intensified by the scratches and squeaks of my sneaker-clad feet against the dull black floor of the bare stage. Against the silence and isolation of the room, these subtle sounds of bodily motion took on new life. Closer, more immediate, present. With striking clarity, I heard the subtle reverberant responses of the room whispering back at me, my feet, and the floor. With such thorough detachment from the sounds and sights of the outside world, the room felt unmistakably isolating and isolated. In this piercing darkness, accompanied only by the minute whispers of my own footsteps and their reverberant afterlife, I found myself in a different world from the blaring brightness and clamor of the city streets that now seemed so far away. What is more, the room made me quiet. One of the theater’s designers had told me a principal goal was to provide musicians with a “blank canvas” of silence (C. Darland, pers. comm., March 20, 2019), but I had rarely stopped to feel it. It made me attentive, and not only to the subtle rustlings of my own body, but the spectral whispers and movements of the bodies I vaguely sensed, or even more vaguely feared, might be sensing my presence. While I was literally on a stage, I would have felt the same anywhere in the room—as if my whole body were on display. Wynton Marsalis, whose acoustic preferences had an overwhelming influence on all of JALC’s performance spaces, once told me: “Some rooms make you shout, some rooms make you whisper” (pers. comm., April 13, 2019). I certainly knew which kind of room this was. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 32  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 “The Great American Noise”: Jazz, Race, and the Politics of Silence My dramatic aural experience evidences the painstaking care that was invested in assuring total sonic isolation of Rose Theater from the rest of the JALC complex and the complex from the rest of the building—and the building from the city beyond. The room’s designers emphasized that “every aspect of [JALC] has been designed to control intrusive noise” (Marsalis and Fierce 2004; emphasis added), creating “a silent atmosphere that maximizes the clarity and richness of sound, provides ease of concentration and communication between performers and allows for the greatest audible dynamic range of sound” (Doria 2005:49). Doug Hosney, JALC vice president in charge of the whole facility, described the lengths designers went to shield unwanted noise sources—from mechanical building noise to elevators to subway lines below—as a quest to eliminate “potential conflicts with pure listening” (pers. comm., December 19, 2016). We find in these words, and the material formations they describe, both a system of sonic values and a theory of listening. Silence, mediated by architectural isolation, affords “pure listening,” where putatively universal aesthetic ideals of “clarity and richness,” “concentration and communication,” and great “dynamic range” are shielded from the threat of “intrusive noise.” In the pages that follow, I explore this cluster of concepts through the lens of race, showing how acoustics and architecture contribute new ways of creatively interrogating the role of sound, music, and listening in structuring human difference. This discussion will be oriented around two unstable axes: (1) “noise,” and a few related tropes threading through racialized ideologies of Black sound and sounding, and (2) Western ideas of art (equally racialized, but covertly so), its autonomy from human social action, and culturally specific regimes of sober, concentrated listening. Such an approach requires a nuanced concept of noise, one intersecting the sonic, epistemological, and racial. Like Jennifer Stoever, I find noise useful as a “shifting analytic that renders certain sounds—and the bodies that produce and consume them—as other” (2016:13). In this sense, noise suggests disorder, irrationality, primitivity—a host of unwanted and often feared potential disruptions to the more controlled and reasoned domains of modernity and liberal humanist subjectivity (Attali 1985; Novak 2015; James 2019; cf. Moten 2003). Sonic or otherwise, noise corrupts purity and order—at least as those concepts are constructed within the ostensibly “unmarked” Western perspective (white, male, heterosexual, etc.). Noise is thus overrepresented in racially marked human subjects, groups, and epistemologies (Stoever 2016; Stoever-Ackerman 2010; Cheng 2018; Burnim and Maultsby 2015; Crawley 2017; Rose 1994; Radano 2000, 2003, 2016; Radano and Bohlman 2000). Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  33 In the tangle of ideologies so crucial in constructing Black music as a category, we find noise not only as a mediator of racial otherness but a powerful source of cultural distinctiveness, aesthetic beauty, and political force. In Fred Moten’s rendering, an “irreducible materiality” (2003:12) marks Black (radical) performance with a “material trace” (18) of both the torture of slavery and the foundational “scene of objection” (1) where Black sound’s irrepressible “freedom drive” (20) erupts through the scream, shriek, or cry of resistance. This defiant materiality “challeng[es] the reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional musical form” (6) and thus disrupts Western modernity’s systems of liberal rationality, individual subjectivity, commodity exchange, and linguistic signification. In music, one place one might find such sounds “in the cracks” of Western music—the grunts, the growls, the “grain” of the voice (Barthes 2012; Floyd 1995). “Noise” is one of the many terms Moten uses to describe the resistant impulses of Black sonic performance, but the term certainly does not exhaust his wide-ranging intervention. What is key for the current argument is Moten’s proposal of a Black radical aesthetic in which discordance, incomprehensibility, instability, “wildness,” and “cacophony” (Harney and Moten 2013)—and a range of other notions hardwired into the Western racist imagination—are mobilized as vital modes of distinctiveness and opposition. In jazz, noise has undergirded a racist logic of sonic and bodily otherness that has clung to the music since its very beginnings. As Emily Thompson (2002) states: “At the foundation of debates over the musical and cultural value of jazz was an assumption of a fundamental dichotomy between music and noise. Music was legitimate sound and noise was not. Music was harmonious, regular, and orderly; noise was discordant, irregular, and disorderly” (132). Indeed, sonic metaphors of noisiness and cacophony, intertwined with perverse fantasies about Black bodies as physically and sexually excessive—and intellectually inferior— were crucial to the reactionary outrage jazz inspired in many white US Americans. Whites concocted fears over racialized notions of infection, degeneracy, and moral plague, in which the “noisy” sound of jazz itself carried along with it an indelible racial essence (Ogren 1989; Merriam 2006; Lopes 2002; cf. Europe 2015; Hurston 1995). “A Low Noise in a Low Dive”: Basements, Clubs, and the Racial Imagination Spaces of jazz performance have been particularly subject to racial marking.4 A signal example is found in the 1918 editorial “Jass and Jassism” published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune—the “official record of the city’s jazz white establishment” (Rich 2018). The piece revolves around an extended architectural metaphor linking sound, race, and space: a “house of muses” composed Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 34  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 of discrete physical chambers for different types of music and sound. On the top levels are the two upper “mansions”: (1) the “great assembly hall of melody,” which has the greatest number of seats and is home to popular “tunes,” and (2) “the inner sanctuaries of harmony,” hosting “all the truly great music.” Lurking below we find not a mansion but an “apartment . . . down in the basement, a kind of servants’ hall of rhythm.” This subterranean space is suffused with sounds deemed racially and morally inferior, especially jazz. In this chamber dwell those most devoted to the cult of the displaced accent . . . a brotherhood of those who, devoid of harmonic and even of melodic instinct, love to fairly wallow in noise. On certain natures sound loud and meaningless has an exciting, almost an intoxicating effect, like crude colors and strong perfumes, the sight of flesh or the sadic pleasure in blood. To such as these the jass music is a delight, and a dance to the unstable bray of the sackbut gives a sensual delight. (Times-Picayune 1918) By evoking perceived animalistic exhortations and crazed “sensual delight” as the hallmarks of a racially debased “cult of the displaced accent” holed away underground, this editorial exemplifies some of the most long-running stereotypes of jazz, race, and space. Basement or not, spaces of jazz performance have been permeated with signifiers of disordered, sensual, or primitive sound. These “spaces of otherness” (Radano and Bohlman 2000) have long evoked allure, trepidation, sexuality, and a range of other seductions and indignations for whites and others (Heap 2009; Burke 2008). Historically, this phenomenon is most iconically represented by the exoticization of small clubs in urban centers such as New Orleans, Chicago, and New York in the first half of the twentieth century—especially “red light” or “vice” districts populated largely by people of color (Ogren 1989:56–86; Heap 2009; Peretti 2007; D. L. Lewis 1997; Kenney 1993).5 These and other romanticized spaces and tropes prompted Paul Whiteman and Mary McBride to refer to jazz in the 1920s as “a low noise in a low dive” (1926:15) and “the great American noise” (17). In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the rise of certain strains of small-group swing and bebop became associated with new small-venue subcultures in which dancing and other modes of participatory physicality were deemphasized, sometimes because of limited floor space (Burke 2008:28). Such trends were often associated with ascendant discourses of artistic autonomy and attendant cultures of careful listening and appreciation. But while many bebop innovators embraced aspects of artistic modernism to assert a seriousness and value for their music, Western notions of aesthetic universalism only went so far. Indeed, bebop demonstrated a transgressive, experimental edge, in no small part undergirded by an oppositional Black political aesthetics, one whose musical characteristics were tied intimately with the type of performance spaces where it developed (see Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  35 Jones 1963; Lott 1988; Ramsey 2013; G. E. Lewis 1996). Whether in sequestered after-hours Harlem jam sessions or in more commercially lucrative (and whiter) midtown clubs on 52nd Street and elsewhere, bebop maintained a racialized otherness linked to—though not exhausted by—its “willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound” (Jones 1963:181). Embracing ideals of technical virtuosity and musical complexity (harmonic, rhythmic, and so forth), bebop seemed ideally suited for smaller spaces where attentive listening and subtle interactions could be fostered between tightly spaced bodies (DeVeaux 1989; Burke 2008). Thus, in small mid-century clubs, many located in brownstone basements, the trope of the Black male improvisor flourished as a literal “underground” hero. Yet with all its capacity for musical and social negotiation, bebop was also linked to “troubling primitivist notions of black masculinity” (Ramsey 2013:29). To many listeners—and especially white male musicians (Burke 2008)—the allure of Black male sounding refracted not only through the prism of Western aesthetic values but also through romantic tropes of outsider iconoclasm and Black masculine “hipness” (Monson 1995). Further, the rise of bebop reproduced the age-old gender-racist notion of the Black male as a “natural” creative hero, even if such discourses overlapped with Western-inflected tropes of the individual genius (Burke 2008; Monson 1995; Gioia 1989). “The Outlaw Thing” Wynton Marsalis has made a point of resisting many of the tropes of small club jazz. In a 2001 interview about JALC’s performance complex (still under construction at the time), he stated: “Who says [jazz] has to be played only in dark rooms filled with curls of cigarette smoke? Always on the margin. That outlaw thing. That’s a romantic, limiting fantasy. This is the greatest music ever produced in this country, made by the greatest musicians. You think it doesn’t deserve something first-class, like any other great art?” (Jacobson 2001). Indeed, though Marsalis has been on the record praising some smaller clubs (even the “shabbiest ones”6 ), he resists stereotypes that constrain jazz to any marginalized “proper” place. He holds a particular aversion to basements.7 For example, I once asked Marsalis about the acoustics of the Village Vanguard, certainly New York’s most iconic (and oldest) jazz club—which jazz critic Nat Hentoff once called “the closest we have to the Camelot of jazz rooms” (1980:2). I knew that during the facility’s design phase Marsalis led a field trip with key technicians to the club to get a feel for the room’s well-loved, famously low-reverb acoustics (W. Marsalis, pers. comm., April 13, 2019; C. Darland, pers. comm., March 20, 2019; E. Arenius, pers. comm., March 20, 2019; D. Doria, pers. comm., April 8, 2019). I also knew Marsalis had recorded numerous live albums at the club and held it in high esteem, both for its acoustics and its Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 36  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 symbolic position in jazz history. Yet his answer to my basic inquiry revealed an important ambivalence. “I don’t like necessarily dry clubs,” Marsalis told me. “The Vanguard is different. It’s its own space. Like, it’s legendary for its own reasons. And, yeah, it’s fantastic sound, but it’s very characteristic of it.” Here, the Vanguard is the exception that reinforces the rule: Marsalis has no particular love for low-reverb spaces, but the Vanguard’s sound deserves recognition because it is “characteristic of,” and thus discursively linked to, a physical site that is surely the most celebrated jazz venue still in operation. A primary sticking point, as it turned out, was Marsalis’s association of dry acoustics with basements. Marsalis’s strongly held opinions on jazz club aesthetics were preeminent in the design of Dizzy’s Club, the smallest of JALC’s three performance venues. Marsalis told me: “It’s [on the] fifth floor, above ground. It has to be live. It can’t simulate a basement or the thought that everything should be in a basement or some smoky club—some kind of romantic vision that this is what the club was in, that this is what jazz belongs in” (pers. comm., April 13, 2019). Here, sound mediates both aesthetics and ethics. To Marsalis, a “live” reverberant acoustic environment indexes physical and symbolic elevation, transcending essentialisms about where jazz “belongs.” Marsalis is particularly suspicious of acoustically dry environments for their semiotic links to the “romantic vision” of subterranean marginality, bound up in racialized fantasies of nonnormative Black masculinity—“the outlaw thing” that limits jazz, in Marsalis’s view, from attaining its rightful place in the rarefied realm of universal “art.” In contrast, a more reverberant sound signifies an elevation that lifts jazz above both its physical surroundings and their related networks of social meanings and structures.8 Similarly, Rose Theater’s extreme acoustic separation from outside sound firmly repudiates not only the basement club stereotype but an entire range of racial markers of noise and primitivity. The hall’s acoustic environment articulates jazz as a quasi-autonomous object of aesthetic appreciation, separated both from the sonic worlds beyond the theater’s walls and from primitivist notions of jazz as noisy disorder. Within these walls, a listener would be hard pressed to imagine the same sounds in a smaller venue, and even harder pressed to imagine the grainy fugitivity and fantastical racial primitivity associated with underground jazz clubs and the mythology surrounding them. Or, as Mark Laver puts it, JALC’s architecture attempts to “emancipate jazz from the basements of the American imaginary” and “cleanse it of its insalubrious history” (2014:52). At the same time, I do not mean to say that Rose Theater’s acoustic qualities preclude the kind of oppositional Black material performance discussed above (nor does it preclude racist stereotyping). That is, Black music’s “rawer materials” (Jones 1963) are not excluded from the spaces of performance I discuss—at least not entirely. Marsalis and other performers at JALC regularly Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  37 deploy grunts, screeches, hollers, growls, and any number of other “extramusical” techniques long associated with Black musical expression (see, e.g., Floyd 1995). It is impossible not to acknowledge the clear shared genealogy these and other techniques share with Moten’s Black radical aesthetic—even if the “radical” moniker is not something either Moten or Marsalis might ascribe to the music most often performed at JALC. Moreover, JALC promotes master tropes like blues and swing specifically for their Black cultural specificity, and while these tropes are largely deployed as models of elegance and distinctiveness—as well as assertions of unacknowledged Black cultural values in the mainstream of US culture—they are purposefully presented within a serene environment redolent of quite contrasting aesthetic value systems. I will return to this crucial irony below. “The Blank Canvas”: Jazz, the Concert Hall, and (White) Listening Rose Theater’s acoustic segregation not only mediates JALC’s vision of what jazz is not—a disordered and racialized “noisy” sound—but also what jazz is: a Western-style high art demanding attentive listening. In this section, I outline historical and epistemological connections with Western ways of thinking about music and its sites of performance while placing JALC’s efforts in a wider history of concert hall jazz. Many observers of the classical world have found that concert halls have played an important role in physically and symbolically disconnecting musical performances from their surroundings and positing the music itself as an object to be appreciated and evaluated with disinterested contemplation (Small 1998; Thompson 2002; Blesser and Salter 2007; Cressman 2016; J. H. Johnson 1995; Schafer 1994). Consider Lydia Goehr’s (1992) exploration of the concept of the musical “work” in European classical music. This ontology, which ascended around 1800, distinguishes idealized works from their social, bodily performance, a distinction linked to particular modes and contexts of reception: Like performers and conductors, audiences were asked to be literally and metaphorically silent, so that the truth or beauty of the work could be heard in itself. But such attention was possible only if music was performed in the appropriate physical setting. For how could one listen attentively and in silence if there were distracting elements all around? Performances had not only to become foreground affairs, but they also had to be cut off completely from all extra-musical activities. It was with these sorts of ideas in mind that concert halls started to be erected as monuments and establishments devoted to the performance of musical works. . . . In these buildings, as well as in the private “museums” or societies, audiences began to learn how to listen not just to music but to each musical work for its own sake. . . . The general desire for a quieter, more considerate, and more attentive audience was part and Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 38  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 parcel of the growing respect for a new and “civilized” musical event. (Goehr 1992, 237–238; emphasis mine) R. Murray Schafer similarly proposes the concert hall as a “container of silence” that makes “concentrated listening possible, just as the art gallery encouraged focused and selective viewing” (1994:117; see also Cressman 2016; J. H. Johnson 1995; Small 1998; Kaye 2012).9 The ontology of musical works, as well as broader Western notions of autonomous musical aesthetics, coevolved with corresponding modes of appreciation and new material spaces to facilitate and encode these new expectations. The quiet isolation of Rose Hall demands polite attention. And when the house lights go down, the stage lights go up, and the band walks out on stage, there is no doubt where all attention is meant to be directed. Though one of the principal goals of the room’s designers was to encourage sounded interaction between performers and audience members (see Wetmore 2024), the prevailing ambiance that a patron encounters in Rose Theater is saturated with silence and ceremony, providing a distinct feeling of Western art-world formality. Like a symphony hall or the opera house, Rose Hall is a place to take music seriously. It is not a place for talking, or smoking, or drinking, or any other extracurricular activities. In Marsalis’s words, the room itself, and its sound, says, “This is important. It’s not an afterthought. It’s not, ‘This basement happens to sound good—let’s go there and smoke and talk over it’” (pers. comm., April 13, 2019). Of course, this ceremonial feeling is conditioned not only by sound. The elegant material surroundings that one sees, touches, and even smells all contribute to Marsalis’s vision, cited earlier, that jazz “deserve[s] something first-class, like any other great art” (Jacobson 2001). The place looks and feels just as expensive as its $130-plus million price tag.10 But on concert night, it is sound that most powerfully conveys the sense of leaving the outside world behind, of focusing on music as a serious and autonomous experience. When the lights go down, any stray chatter is immediately hushed. And when the music is playing, the audience remains stolidly seated and silent. I have observed it many times. Head sound engineer David Gibson has seen it many more times, perhaps more than anyone, during his nineteen-year relationship with JALC. We once discussed a very atypical concert with considerable crowd participation: DG: All the head bopping and in-seat dancing going on in that show [an atypical concert]—it was very unusual here. TW: Really? DG: Yeah. I don’t see that here. You won’t—you will not see that here. You’re going to see a large number of older patrons sitting very, uh, respectfully in their seats listening to music. I doubt that you will see head bopping. If you do, you won’t see anybody rocking to the music. It’s much more like a class. (D. Gibson, pers. comm., April 4, 2019) Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  39 Indeed, as pianist Fred Hersch told me, “When you’re at Jazz at Lincoln Center, as soon as you’re in the room, you know that you’re going to a concert” (pers. comm., September 29, 2017). Hersch is specifically referencing a Western classical tradition of attentive formality and contrasting it with the more informal environment of smaller venues and clubs. As Christopher Small writes about the classical world, “Concert audiences pride themselves on their good manners, on knowing their place and keeping quiet” (1998:27). JALC audiences behave similarly, generally dressing well, never talking during the music, and nearly always waiting patiently to clap or vocalize until after solos or between tunes. Quite rarely, an especially impassioned patron might vocalize or clap mid-solo when a particular moment grabs their attention. While this is common and often expected in smaller venues, such expressions feel out of place in Rose, not least because they occur infrequently and rarely inspire others to join in. Most important, the quiet of the room, and the polite hush of one’s fellow patrons, amplifies the potential social awkwardness of making any sound, thus subtly heightening the social repercussions for anyone who might breech the unwritten code mandating silent attention. Though the room’s “blank canvas” can and does afford the occasional moment of striking interpersonal interaction—vocalizations, bodily movement, and so forth—it far more frequently results in a quiet, museum-like atmosphere redolent of Goehr’s ideal atmosphere for appreciating “works” of fine art. Still, if one’s desire is to hear big band jazz in an environment that allows one to clearly hear musical details like harmonic voicings, rhythm section interplay, interplay of lines between voices and sections, or all the notes and nuances of a solo (which is rarely a given in live performance)—and to do it in a big room—it’s hard to imagine a better environment than Rose.11 The important point is not only that this material environment encourages a Western art posture of attentive listening but that it changes the musical sounds themselves to be more in line with Western art values. The sounds that enter the listeners’ ears are different in this room than any other, tailored to particular aesthetic and ethical judgments about the salience of certain musical characteristics and the normative approach to recognizing and appreciating them. In this silent, serious room, the music is heard—and thus becomes—a detailed and “sophisticated” expression to be adjudicated on the same universal standards as Western “masterworks,” with all the social prestige that comes along with such a status. Jazz in the Concert Hall: A Sounded History The JALC activities I have recounted are certainly not the first attempts deploy the symbolic prestige of the concert hall to elevate jazz as a Western-style art. In 1912, for example, James Reese Europe led an all-Black 125-piece orchestra at Carnegie Hall for a “Concert of Negro Music,” which Harlem Renaissance Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 40  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 luminary Alain Locke described as a “formal coming-out party” (1936:68) for an “embryonic” (70) form of jazz. More oft cited is Paul Whiteman’s 1924 concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall, “An Experiment in Modern Music.” The show framed the white bandleader’s brand of “sweet” or “symphonic” jazz as the culmination of a musical (and racial) evolution from primitive noise to sophisticated art. Some hailed the concert, played by white musicians, as “dignifying and legitimizing jazz,” often doing so by deploying racialized sonic metaphors. For example, observers noted that the concert hall provided “freedom from the animalistic” (Ogren 1989:158) sounds associated with the “primitive,” “discordant jazz” (Ernst 2015) they associated with Black musicians. The walls of the concert hall reinforced racist ideologies linking a range of unwanted sounds to racially marked bodies while mobilizing tropes of segregation and sanctuary to amplify the between “Black” and “white” sounds. Thus, Whiteman’s concert was hailed as reaffirming the dignity of professional white musicians specifically by erecting a distinct contrast to what one 1920s observer described as “vulgar, noisy, blatant cacophony produced by Negroes at cabarets or vaudeville shows” (in Lopes 2002:86). According to this thinking, the concert hall, as much for its sonic characteristics as its symbolic associations, would bring decency, order, and civilization, while the disordered sounds in less formal spaces remained racially othered. But this does not mean Whiteman’s concert featured the kind of attentive, quiet listening associated with the classical concert practice. The same goes for the vast majority of jazz performances in concert halls throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In these years, performances included a smattering of one-off “experiments” and educational theme nights (like Whiteman’s), as well as industry showcases, galas, jazz magazine “all-star” events, and, most financially fruitful, “jam sessions” featuring well-known musicians. While these events played on the social prestige of well-known concert halls, they rarely embraced the forms of classical listening ideals found in Rose Theater. Even Benny Goodman’s famous debut at Carnegie Hall in 1938, hailed often as a “coming of age” for jazz (Gioia 2011:142), was marked with “dancing in the aisles” (in Gioia 2011) and a boisterous audience that “clapped along with the music, cheered every solo, and gave Benny an ovation” (Charters and Kunstadt 1981:270; see also Tackley 2012). Similarly, the distinctly self-conscious “From Spirituals to Swing” concert produced by John Hammond at Carnegie Hall embraced a “from margins to center” (Ramsey 2013:42) narrative to frame Black music’s arrival at respectability. But the performance was loud—and conspicuously participatory. One review stated: “A good time was had by all—except, perhaps, by the manager of the hall, who might have been wondering whether the walls would come tumbling down” (Taubman 1938). A more formal atmosphere came with Duke Ellington’s 1943 debut at Carnegie Hall, which included Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  41 long-form compositions and a more attentive audience in the classical sense. Though Ellington would go on to perform at Carnegie Hall more than twenty times in his career, such relatively formal jazz performances would remain the exception to the rule throughout the 1940s and beyond. Though dancing and participatory vocality were commonplace, Christi Jay Wells (2023) outlines the wide-ranging importance of quiet, contemplative, and corporeally motionless “choreographies of listening” in a range of performance contexts, especially in the interwar years. Wells notes how African American jazz audiences in particular have long been especially “mindful of the intersection between seated listening and the projection of rigor and dignity” (4), understanding that “by sitting down, listening intently, and responding appropriately with limited movement” during jazz performances, they could “acquire embodied cultural capital by performing the physical rhetoric through which seated audiences communicate respect, dignity, intelligence, and sophistication” (6–7). High-art listening settings became increasingly common by the 1950s and into the 1960s, driven by robust postwar efforts to solidify jazz’s high-art status. In this period, no single jazz artist or group better exemplified the intersection of musical style, respectability, and the sound of the concert hall more than the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ). The MJQ not only made a point out of affiliating with classical aesthetics but also actively associated the sonic environment of the concert hall with certain kinds of prestige and respect—and a range of attendant financial and other benefits. Spurning what they deemed to be the distractingly noisy environment of the average jazz club, MJQ members, led by pianist John Lewis, found the classical concert hall to inspire the quiet, attentive listening environment they felt their music required—and they tailored their music for such an environment (Klotz 2016, 2018). Kelsey Klotz writes that John Lewis specifically fashioned the group’s composition and performance style for an especially disciplined kind of “structural listening” in order to “facilitate the MJQ’s entry into the stereotypically white space of the concert hall” (2016:31). Klotz writes, “By physically placing the quartet’s music within a concert hall setting, Lewis could more easily achieve a focus on listening, stripped of distraction and positioned within a space reserved for compositions of high musical and social value” (2018:39). The MJQ was certainly not the only group that had become dissatisfied with the acoustics and auditory cultures of jazz clubs (see Lopes 2002:217–244). In the 1950s and 1960s, waves of musician collectives and other jazz organizations arranged performances in concert halls and other art-world spaces (art galleries, lofts, etc.). And, on the more commercial and institutional ends of the spectrum, these years saw the flourishing of jazz festivals catering to upperclass whites, like the famous Newport series that began in 1954, as well as the rising acceptance of jazz in universities, both as a network of performance Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 42  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 venues and source of new fans. Especially in the 1960s and beyond, improvising musicians (especially Black experimentalists with sometimes-ambivalent relationships with “jazz” as a genre) carved out an increasingly diverse network of alternative performance spaces that challenged the ideological centrality of both the nightclub and the concert hall (G. E. Lewis 2008:325–388, 2004). Some of the most famous new sites included the 1960s and 1970s “loft” spaces in musicians’ homes and art galleries as well as other venues like coffee houses, cafes, bars, outdoor spaces, and alternative festivals (Piekut 2009; Heller 2017; Currie 2012; Porter 2002:191–239). Yet despite the variety of sites where these musics have been played, the concert hall has remained a privileged site of social prestige. On Black Geographies and Jazz’s “Proper Place” Though the history recounted above shows that jazz has long been performed in concert halls, what strikes me is how many of these events, even in the 1950s, would best be described as “special jazz concerts” (Lopes 2002). These were specifically produced events distinct from the venue’s regular, institutionally sanctioned programming—usually as part of all-star touring packages, benefit concerts, or festivals. Promoters, booking agents, and collective organizations were essentially renters, and the musicians—like jazz itself—were temporary visitors. Jazz had gotten into the room, but it wasn’t a true member of the club. Since its beginnings as the Classical Jazz Series in 1987, JALC has represented an unrivaled investment of resources and elite institutional sanction, endowing jazz with a new kind of legitimacy qualitatively distinct from the special or one-off concert productions more common historically. Even more critical was the eventual opening of JALC’s current facility, which not only provided permanence and stability but also allowed for unprecedented attention to the manipulation of sound, mustering a massive budget for technology, design, architecture, and professional labor. Through sound, JALC and its physical spaces palpably alter how jazz is actually done, what it is, and where it might be said (and felt) to belong. (At least, that is, the styles of music JALC believes to be jazz.) By asserting a sonic place for jazz so decisively detached from the exterior physical world, acoustics are mobilized in a wider field of negotiations over space and race. One critical way this is done is in the denial, through an isolated, quiet sonic environment, of the “limiting fantasy” of the jazz club as the ultimate site of authentic jazz performance (Marsalis in Jacobson 2001). On this point, Marsalis and JALC might find an uneasy ally from an unlikely source. George Lewis, within a discussion of the 1970s Black experimental music scene, takes similar issue with how “for jazz-identified black musicians . . . the club . . . had been Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  43 heavily ideologized as the ideal, even the genetically best suited space for their music” (2008:349). For Lewis and other experimentalists, jazz clubs, in addition to being creatively inhibiting and difficult to book, “began to appear as a kind of unwanted surveillance of the black creative body” (350). Lewis’s evocation of the jazz club as a “genetically” mediated site of Black corporeal performance powerfully evokes race, racism, and their mediation by sound and space. Jazz clubs, in this view, come to constrain Black musicians both aesthetically and materially, imposing limiting, racially coded aesthetic frameworks that musicians are pressured to engage with while controlling one of the primary avenues for making a living (Heller 2017; Piekut 2009). To resist such racial ideologies by producing, finding, and dwelling in alternative spaces is a challenge to the racial stratification of space. Geographer Katherine McKittrick (2006) uses the concept of “black geographies” to explore how the power-infused construction of space and place articulates racial and other difference (gender is also key). She states: “The ‘where’ of black geographies and black subjectivity . . . is often aligned with spatial processes that apparently fall back on seemingly predetermined stabilities, such as boundaries, color-lines, ‘proper’ places, fixed and settled infrastructures and streets, oceanic containers” (xi). McKittrick reveals how naturalized “commonsensical narratives” (xv) articulate patterns of human spatial practice into durable and constraining codes of social difference. Here, “the placement of subaltern bodies deceptively hardens spatial binaries, in turn suggesting that some bodies belong, some bodies do not belong, and some bodies are out of place” (xv). Building on McKittrick and others, James Gordon Williams explores African American improvisation as “a practice of ‘living geography,’ a practice of sonically improvised space-making that contests and disrupts the marginalization that buttresses the falsely imagined neutral and transparent spaces we share” (2021:6). In some ways, JALC participates in this agenda. The use of sound isolation to stake out a sequestered space for a disembodied jazz-as-object is a consequential rebuke to the idea of jazz’s “predetermined sensibilities” and “fixed and settled” geographies. To so thoroughly separate outside sounds from the space of performance, thus creating a strikingly quiet “blank canvas,” underscores how thoroughly the jazz inside has been separated from outside associations with social noise and stereotyped sites of belonging.12 But I must stress how Rose Theater’s sound does more than challenge stereotypes about jazz’s proper place; it also affirmatively asserts a different—and in some ways limiting—place of belonging. Unlike the Black experimentalists who have opted for a wide diversity of alternative performance sites to challenge the art world’s racial geography, Marsalis and his cohort have placed disproportionate emphasis on one rather old—and rather problematic—sonic ideal: the European classical listening experience. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 44  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 The detached aesthetic discussed in this article, so dramatically materialized in steel and silence, is aligned with a range of naturalized assumptions articulated within ethnocentric classical music ideology. While a central aspect of this ideology is the universal nature of art as abstracted from human social relations, it is in fact reflective of a logic of whiteness that is anything but universal (see, e.g., Kajikawa 2019; Ewell 2020; Klotz 2023). Indeed, as I discussed earlier, JALC’s associations with studious, polite listening establishes jazz as a musical object contingent upon Western ideas about art, autonomy, and the rituals that go along with them. Like the MJQ example above, JALC sonically articulates jazz within material and discursive traditions at the heart of European art worlds and thus at the center of aesthetic regimes of whiteness. Moreover, this sonic environment not only recruits and emplaces jazz as a discursive or symbolic entity, it also conditions audience behavior—encouraging silence, stillness, and a range of other codes of decorum—as well as that of the staff and musicians. Indeed, with only a few exceptions, the sonic environment aligns with virtually the entire of network of actors and activities that orient JALC as an “art world” (Becker 1982). In an oft-cited 1996 article, George Lewis critiques how the Eurological concept of “experimental music” disavows the foundational influences of jazz and other Afrological improvised musics, noting how “coded qualifiers to the word ‘music,’” such as “art,” “concert,” and “serious,” are used “to delineate a racialized location of this tradition within the space of whiteness” (102). To Lewis, like many others, the art-music world poses as a field governed by universal aesthetic standards but remains trapped in its own partiality, incapable of seeing beyond its provincial Eurocentric horizons. A covert whiteness pervades this world, empowering white composers, journalists, musicians, and other cultural gatekeepers to feign impartiality while recognizing Afrological and other musics only to the extent they can be evaluated by Western criteria (cf. Jones 1967). Under the cover of “exnomination,” a discursive move by which whiteness is made to lurk unnamed and unrecognized (Fiske 2016; cf. Dyer 2017), the hegemonic machinery of racial difference elevates white contributions while “other” musics—especially those associated with and played by Black musicians—are consigned, explicitly or not, to the periphery (Lipsitz 2011). Of course, JALC’s project energetically opposes the marginalization of Black culture—and it certainly doesn’t consign Black music or musicians to the periphery. To the contrary, JALC has consistently championed Black cultural leadership and, as Eric Porter (2002) puts it, “a vision that affirms the humanity of black people . . . [and] places them at the center of American experience” (288). Importantly, the organization takes its lead from the music—avowing a blues-heavy approach deeply invested in African American musical aesthetics.13 Emphasizing tropes of elegance and cooperation-through-conflict, concepts like Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 Wetmore: Some Rooms Make You Whisper  45 “swing” and the “blues” are framed not only as required musical attributes of a jazz aesthetic but also as master tropes for an ideal (African) American life of dignity and style. Jazz is not only a mode of sonic entertainment or aesthetic appreciation but “a survival technique” and “equipment for living” (Murray 1970:58). The stylization of life according to these musical and social values, refined into a distinctly Black American “art,” is what allows for a distinctly heroic ethos (e.g., Murray 1976; Marsalis 1986). And at every turn in my fieldwork, I have found ample confirmation of the sincerity with which those at JALC believe in and pursue these ideals.14 In this way, JALC may overlap with Williams’s ideal of “creat[ing] alternative spaces of affirmation in response to the historical relegation of Black people to placelessness” (2021:8). Indeed, within JALC’s walls, jazz—at least Marsalis’s kind of jazz—has a firmly established place, both physically and symbolically. And, when paired with a strong dedication to jazz as both a musical form and a stylized mode of social life, Rose may emerge as a place that “articulate[s] and affirm[s] Black sociality in an environment that is structurally hostile to Blackness” (18). But while Williams’s (2021) articulation of “Black musical space” is specifically opposed to the kind of “falsely imagined neutral and transparent spaces” that allow an unacknowledged whiteness to covertly pattern social life, my analysis has shown that this exact “objective” approach to space is what Rose Theater’s acoustic qualities largely provide. I do not wish to imply that the sonic characteristics I have discussed are all-pervasive, or that they undermine JALC’s vision of African American dignity and style. Marsalis and his cohort have created a concert hall in which an attentive listener can hear, in exquisite detail, elite musicians engaging deeply and sincerely with the aesthetics of swing and the blues. Within these expertly designed walls, audiences composed predominantly of wealthy Manhattanites can enjoy the resonances of a range of sonic gestures and impulses—“calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response devices . . . blue notes, bent notes, and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables, interjections and punctuations”—that are “the foundational elements of African-American music” (Floyd 1995:6). At JALC, we thus find a unique environment in which a range of sonic hallmarks of Black musical aesthetics intersect and overlap with a “pure,” “clean,” and quiet acoustic environment with a long ideological history as a mediator of white cultural values. And while I cannot help but conclude that the sonic regimes discussed here complicate jazz’s oppositional energy, it is remarkable that JALC has maintained the level of Black leadership it has, both in its artistic content and in its choice of leaders, in a US high-art landscape that is still overwhelmingly white. Yet I do call for deeper awareness of how such manipulations of sound serve as a prism of whiteness that conditions everything that goes on within the material box that is Rose Theater. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/69/1/25/2222960/25wetmore.pdf by Society for Ethnomusicology //Ethnomusicology user on 01 December 2025 46  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2025 Notes 1. These words, or close paraphrases of them, are reproduced in many journalistic accounts (e.g., Ratliff 2004; Marsalis and Fierce 2004; Doria 2005; Pareles 2004). Such language is also found in press releases and on the websites of the principal firms in the Sound of Jazz team (see, e.g., Walters-Storyk Design Group 2021; Rafael Viñoly Architects 2016). 2. Kimberly Hannon Teal’s (2021) Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History makes one of the most compelling cases for performance spaces themselves as shaping the way jazz music can be played and how its histories come to be defined. See also Carson and Doktor (2022). 3. In May 2021; later, this building was renamed Deutsche Bank Center. 4. See, e.g., Burke (2008); Hannon Teal (2021); Chapman (2018); Carson and Doktor (2021). 5. Iconic examples include speakeasies, “jooks,” nightclubs, “black and tans,” cabarets, and other nightlife haunts in urban neighborhoods like New Orleans’s “Storyville” (or, as it was more commonly called, “the District”; see Ogren 1989), Kansas City’s Eighteenth and Vine District (Driggs and Haddix 2005; Clifford-Napoleone 2018), Chicago’s Bronzeville (Kenney 1993; Heap 2009), and New York’s Harlem, though these four represent a tiny fraction of iconic jazz scenes in the United States (Berish 2018) and abroad (Bohlman and Plastino 2016; B. Johnson 2020). On 52nd Street as “whiter” than the Harlem scene, see Ramsey (2013:26) and Burke (2008). 6. Marsalis told Paul Berliner, for instance, “the shabbiest little room can be great . . . if the people, the vibes, the feeling, the love is there” (1994:452). 7. Marsalis, while expressing aversions to certain jazz club stereotypes, possesses intimate and expert awareness of the diverse array of clubs and ideas surrounding them, which have varied greatly across history and geography. I have conversed extensively with him about his experiences in various small venues, spanning from US coastal metropolises to locations across the United States, Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond. Marsalis also expertly mobilizes networks of signifiers that align jazz, and jazz clubs, with images of urbane sophistication and even elite consumerism. See, for example, Laver (2014, 2015) and Chapman (2018). 8. As numerous authors have discussed, various aspects of Western aural imagination have widely associated reverberation with transcendence from everyday social life and a general “sense of being in another world” (Blesser and Salter 2012:190; see Blesser and Salter 2007; Thompson 2002; Beranek 2004; Schafer 1994). Similar ideas are found in recorded music (primarily classical music; see Doyle 2005). 9. A common metaphor, relevant here, likens the concert hall, and its cultures of serious contemplation, to a museum. For example, Richard Taruskin, in his mammoth survey of Western music, remarks, “Great works of music, like great paintings, were displayed in specially designed public spaces. The concert hall, like the museum, became a ‘temple of art’ where people went not to be entertained, but to be uplifted” (2010:650). See also Kivy (1995); Alper (1991); Cressman (2016). 10. Most official estimates, and those published in the press, hover around $130 million (e.g., Ratliff 2004), though numerous interlocutors intimated that the figure ballooned much higher (and JALC didn’t want the real number known) (see, e.g., S. Berkow, pers. comm., February 26, 2019). 11. For an in-depth analysis of the ways that Rose Theater is designed to sound especially good for certain styles of jazz, see Wetmore (2024). 12. For more on the geography of race, see Gilmore (2002); Kobayashi and Peake (1994); Peake and Schein (2000). 13. In fact, JALC has been famously criticized, largely by white musicians and critics, for a perceived bias against whiteness, a reactionary argument that has been widely critiqued (e.g., Jackson 2012). 14. Such as in personal conversations with J. Uhl, January 20, 2019; R. Gibson, May 6, 2019; and S. Berkow, February 26, 2019. 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