Music Quote by Donal Henahan

“It will never be mistaken for a high school gymnasium or a meeting room in a Midwestern motel” is criticism by negative comparison: a swift, almost toss-off line that flatters its subject by naming the indignities it escapes. Henahan (a longtime classical music critic) is almost certainly talking about an acoustic space - a concert hall, an opera house, a cathedral of the arts - and he knows the reader can hear the difference instantly. The gym and the motel meeting room aren’t just places; they’re sonic insults. They conjure slapback echoes, deadened carpets, fluorescent lighting, stackable chairs, and the sense that whatever happens there is provisional, underfunded, and faintly apologetic.

The line works because it’s snobbish in a controlled, strategic way. It’s not merely praising beauty; it’s drawing a class map of American public space. “High school gymnasium” signals the earnest, civic multipurpose room where culture is an afterthought wedged between pep rallies. “Midwestern motel” adds a corporate, nowhere-land banality: conventions, sales seminars, the commodified version of gathering. Henahan doesn’t need to name “great architecture” or “fine acoustics” because he lets the reader supply the opposite of those dead zones.

There’s a wry cultural politics embedded here, too. The jab at the Midwest isn’t geography so much as shorthand for middlebrow sameness - the kind of room designed to be usable, not memorable. Henahan’s intent is to certify a space as serious, specific, and built for listening, by insisting it cannot be confused with the places America usually settles for.