In a message dated 2/27/2005 12:50:23 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: There is a chapel inside the Palace of Queluz, 5 km from Lisboa, with a sort of upper chamber with a beautiful baroque hole with a golden grid, as far as I remember . Musicians used to play upstairs and the royals sat below the hole. Scarlatti played there and the chapel was open for the Mass to the people of the village ( I can't see how, because it's quite small, but the notes I read there said so, maybe they just left the door towards the yard open). They also used to celebrate royal marriages there, if my memory about what I read is not mistaken. Of course it's quite difficult to find this chapel mentioned on a tourist guide, they just mention the gardens, Versailles-like and the "mirror room". Should you adventure there, just sit and listen, that's what I did, and the music seemed to be still there. You come to the chapel through a small corridor, considering the palace, and this baroque feast is in front of your eyes. There are also some big windows above, which open on the corridor (and on the yard), as far as I remember, so that the music was probably brought to the nearby room as from a resonance chanber ( is my English correct?) . The room must be like a big instrument itself . And for the Middle Ages, there is a 13th C. castle in the eastern part of Germany in Neuberg in Sachsen with a similar configuration. Musicians playing in the chapel can be heard through a grid in the floor of a circular room above (or the other way around). I heard a solo concert performed by Crawford Young there several years ago, a magical experience in candlelight at midnight.
The opening chapter of the book called Music and Silence by Rose Tremaine fictitiously describes a similar situation in the court of Denmark in the early 17th C. Kenneth Be -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
