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Hear how the acoustic resonance of the English Gothic-style Washington National Cathedral enhances the sound of medieval music

Hear how the acoustic resonance of the English Gothic-style Washington National Cathedral enhances the sound of medieval music

Learn how the acoustic resonance of the English Gothic-style Washington National Cathedral enhances the sound of medieval music.
Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
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Transcript

[SINGING] SPEAKER 1: We do concerts every year at the cathedral. I love doing it. It's one of-- along with Elizabeth theater, it's one of the great historic spaces in Washington. So we feel very lucky to be able to perform there. Because it's a Gothic cathedral, doing music from the Middle Ages feels particularly resonant in that space.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, it's true. And this year, of course, we're doing-- because it's not just a Gothic cathedral, but an English Gothic cathedral, we're doing English music from the 14th and 15th centuries. It's music that is very sonorous. Really just depends on that kind of sense of acoustical reverberation with purely tuned open chords. And it just rings and rings, and it really works well.

SPEAKER 1: It's really such a grand space.

[SINGING]