Sound Good to You? The Art of Acoustics

The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2003

Approaching the undulating roof of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, where workmen were attaching the final stainless-steel panels as late winter snows melted, it is immediately clear that it covers no ordinary collegiate auditorium. Although Bard, about 125 miles north of New York City, is a small undergraduate institution, its president, Leon Boststein, has big plans for what he clearly hopes will be an architectural and acoustical landmark—a Salzburg on the Hudson. "It's for teaching," he says, "but we'll be able to attract audiences for performers of national and international distinction."

The curving roof panels are the signature of architect Frank Gehry, who Botstein hired to design the center. It houses a black-box theater and an elegant main hall, finished in stonelike concrete and peach-tinted fir. On the main stage that day, Botstein (also a conductor) implored 80 musicians of the American Symphony Orchestra to throttle back their playing for a space much smaller (only 900 seats) and acoustically brighter than the problem-plagued Avery Fisher Hall (2,700 seats) they were used to. In the nearly empty hall, Yasuhisa Toyota, designer of the hall's acoustics, listened to make sure certain calculated gambles had paid off.

Toyota and Gehry recognize that critics will see the Bard center as a warmup to the long-awaited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which will open in October. "If Bard gets bad reviews, or players can't hear themselves, it sets the bar for Los Angeles even higher," explained Gehry. He is haunted by the experience of the Kimmel Center, a two-hall complex built for the renowned Philadelphia Orchestra. This spectacular collaboration of architect Rafael Viñoly and star acoustician Russell Johnson, of Artec, opened in late 2001 before its elaborate acoustic-tuning devices were fully operating. Critics proffered few raves and a couple of strongly negative reviews. Although several now pronounce the hall vastly improved, initial impressions, especially if they are bad, can linger for years, whether or not deserved.

Bard and Los Angeles are especially important to Toyota and his company, Nagata Acoustics. His reputation rests largely on two halls in Japan: Suntory, finished in 1986 (which got him hired by Los Angeles) and Sapporo Kitara, completed in 1997. He's been engaged to work on halls in Finland, Denmark, and China, and has the delicate task of figuring out how to fix the flawed acoustics of the famed Sydney Opera house without substantially altering its landmark architecture. He's a candidate to rework Avery Fisher.

Orchestral music, dance, and opera may matter less to a broad American public than they used to, but building a performing-arts facility remains an alluring if Sisyphean task. Fundraising, design, and construction can take as long as 15 years, which creates many opportunities for public controversy (though public-dollar contributions usually make up no more than a third of the total) and private mischief. The Los Angeles project was supposed to be built with Lillian Disney's 1989 $50-million gift—an unrealistic expectation given that the Meyerson Symphony Center, completed the same year in Dallas, cost $82 million. As costs escalated, contributions slowed, making it look like Gehry, nearing the pinnacle of worldwide acclaim, could not get a major project built in his hometown. The checks started flowing again only after the Guggenheim Bilbao museum opened to cheers. Disney Hall will ultimately cost $272 million.

After a number of famous acoustical flops in the 1960s (such as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, and Lincoln Centers' New York State Theater (now Avery Fisher Hall), architects have shaped recent halls to the configurations that worked for the great auditoriums built before 1900—and the acoustical designer has been firmly in charge. Toyota, by contrast, is unusually open-minded. He explains: "We don't think in terms of an identifying layout,"—like the classic "shoebox" shape of Boston's much-loved Symphony Hall. "We try to support the architect so that he can design freely." Gehry formed Bard's main auditorium as a conventional horseshoe, but it is multipurpose—a notoriously problem-plagued concept. The stage configuration and sound criteria that are perfect for opera—or dance, or theater—may compromise listening for symphonic music.

To reflect sound evenly to musicians and audience alike Bard's wood-faced stage shell for the orchestra is nearly as heavy and dense as the concrete enclosure of the hall, even though its sections are mounted on wheeled trucks for easy removal. "the shell and the hall must work as one box," said Mr. Toyota. The volume is also unusually large for the number of seats to develop the full and enveloping sound of a large orchestra. Messrs. Toyota and Botstein are both pleased, but it is audiences and critics who will offer the definitive verdict.

The curving wedge-shaped piers that give the outside of Disney Hall the look of a sprouting metallic cactus enclose an auditorium that strays far from the shoebox norm. The main seating level sweeps up from the stage in gently ascending tiers, ending with two shallow balconies. Rather than traditionally straight side walls with a few balconies tacked on, the sides swell outward, along and in front of the stage to accommodate additional tiers of seats, giving many patrons the orchestral equivalent of 50-yard-line views. Gehry describes the auditorium, with its billowing ceiling of wood slats, as "a sailing ship in a box, a barge for music that you step onto."

It is based on the Berlin Philharmonie, one of the few modern halls that consistently draws raves. (It was completed in 1963 by architect Hans Scharoun and acoustician Lothar Cremer.) The Philharmonie's dramatic arrangement of overlapping seating tiers (the so-called vineyard plan emulated by Gehry) puts listeners in a much more dynamic relationship to each other and to the performers. With a high percentage of seats surrounding the stage, everyone is far closer to the action, more like medical students peering into an operating theater than passive listeners gazing through a monumental proscenium.

The Los Angeles layout is actually less complex than its Berlin model—something of a surprise considering Gehry's usual tendency to push the outer limits of construction capability. "I assume that people find my designs strange, so I decided to give them a psychological handrail," he explains. So there are fewer tiers than in Berlin and the hall is faced largely in wood rather than the aesthetically austere plaster that dominates in Berlin. The fronts of the seating terraces diffuse sound, as does the careful draping of the ceiling panels. The wood is backed by heavy material, as at Bard, to support low frequencies. While some halls offer great clarity of sound, and others impressive warmth, Mr. Toyota's trademark—and his goal at Disney—is a hall that is warm without sacrificing clarity. A frequent concert-goer and self-described classical-music dilettante, Gehry respects the acoustician's role. "Dr. Toyota is very civil, very Japanese," he says. "He never criticized, but his hand was firmly on the tiller. He got everything he wanted."

With the all-important initial reviews in mind, Disney music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gehry, and Toyota are leaving little to chance. Gehry has walked the orchestra through the unfinished hall so that members will understand its design and get used to its aesthetic. Toyota urges visiting conductors to "try out" the hall using a one-tenth scale wooden model. The size of a lofty, amply proportioned living room, it was originally built to test the design's acoustical assumptions. (Michael Tilson Thomas, Zubin Mehta, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Valery Gergiev will guest conduct during the first season.) Early concerts will show off the hall's sound with traditional works like Mahler's "Resurrection" symphony and Haydn's The Creation, while new works by eight composers and Salonen himself will solidify the orchestra's commitment to the future.

Disney Hall leads a new generation of projects that are more daring, both architecturally and acoustically. The so-called Bilbao Effect is in part responsible. Dramatic, ingratiating architecture appears to attract donors and audiences alike.

Undeterred by the pitfall-laden path to performing-arts project success, Atlanta has paired the acclaimed Spanish architect/engineer Santiago Calatrava with the venerable Chicago-based acoustical firm of Kirkegaard Associates for a 2,000-seat orchestra hall to be completed in 2008. Moshe Safdie, an avatar of highly sculptural formmaking but a concert-hall neophyte, has been retained by Kansas City (with Artec) to design a massive three-hall complex. Construction began last year on the long delayed Performing Arts Center of Greater Miami, designed by theater expert Cesar Pelli and Artec. A Gehry-designed orchestra shell for a park in Chicago has broken ground. Nashville, bucking the star-architect trend, has commissioned a near reproduction of Vienna's famed Musikverein by David Schwarz, who used Carnegie Hall as a model for the admired Bass Performing Arts Center in Fort Worth. His acoustician is veteran Paul Scarbrough.

As difficult as the fundraising environment today seems, every recently constructed auditorium has survived civic doubt and arts-funding crises. The transcendent artistry of sound that is unamplified, unfiltered, unequalized and unedited seems still to inspire these enormous acts of faith.