Building a sound

As the Carnival Center nears completion, now begins the delicate task
of fine-tuning the acoustics.

by Lawrence A. Johnson / South Florida Sun-Sentinel
August 17, 2006

The opening of the $450 million Carnival Center for the Performing Arts this fall -- even with all the attendant glitz, hype and self-congratulatory excess that will no doubt accompany it -- marks the most significant development on South Florida's cultural landscape in decades.

While the architectural significance of Cesar Pelli's design is already proving a source of lively private debate, it is the sound quality of the center's music venues that will be the most crucial issue for local concertgoers. And no one is more important to the success of the Carnival Center's halls than acoustical wizard Russell Johnson.

Johnson, 82, is the grand old man of theater and concert hall acoustical design. Palm Beach County concertgoers are familiar with his work through the Kravis Center, regarded as the finest concert room in the tri-county region.

But Johnson and his Artec firm can also claim credit for some of the most acclaimed and sonically glorious halls across the globe. Among his triumphs are the Morton H. Meyerson Center in Dallas, Symphony Hall in Birmingham, England, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Sibelius Concert Hall in Lahti, Finland, and the Culture and Congress Center in Lucerne, Switzerland. So remarkable is the Lucerne hall that several years ago during a recital by Cecilia Bartoli, the Italian mezzo-soprano turned to sing an encore to the audience seated behind the stage and even with her back turned every word was absolutely crystal-clear.

THE STARTING POINT
This week will mark the critical first step in the crucial work of "setting" the hall's sound. On Thursday the Cleveland Orchestra and music director Franz Welser-Möst will arrive for several days of acoustic and sound tests. The sessions will culminate Sunday morning with an "event" -- no one is calling it a concert -- for well-heeled donors who have ponied up $250 apiece for the opportunity to hear the first semi-public performance of music in the new Knight Concert Hall.

"This will be the start of the process," said Tateo Nakajima, an Artec managing director who will be leading the tuning of the Miami halls. "We'll be able to hear a great orchestra and we're privileged to have the Cleveland Orchestra. "We're going to really be able to get a sense of the room."

Much has happened in the three decades since the plan was first announced. The Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the original resident ensembles, fell by the wayside in 2003, a victim of overambitious artistic plans and underambitious fund-raising. And the New World Symphony gracefully sashayed away from its commitment as a regular resident group, playing a token three concerts -- albeit two with heavy-hitting guests Renée Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma.

Still, the Carnival Center will finally provide a long-awaited home for three of South Florida's leading fine arts organizations. The Ziff Ballet Opera House, will be shared by Florida Grand Opera and Miami City Ballet, as well as touring musicals such as Adam Guettel's A Light in the Piazza, which will inaugurate the venue Sept. 26. The Knight Concert Hall, will become the much-needed Miami base for the Concert Association of Florida as well as hosting the majority of pop, jazz and world music artists presented by the center itself.

A recent walk through the halls with Johnson and Nakajima revealed a riotous profusion of electrical cords, piping, and wires with the polytonal clash of drilling, hammering and assorted construction-site clamor as the race to finish the halls on time reaches its frantic final stage. The two men make a complementary team: the veteran, slightly frail acoustical pioneer who moves and speaks with thoughtful deliberation and his pony-tailed young Canadian colleague who has all the brash confidence of a conductor, which is in fact what he used to be.

BACK TO BASICS
Johnson's work in the Carnival Center reflects his revolutionary approach to acoustical design, which combines technical sophistication and flexibility with a kind of "back to basics" approach.

In the 19th century, the great concert halls of Europe were built almost primarily for symphony orchestras. The classic shape, a relatively small, shoebox-like room, offered the truest and most natural space for music to project throughout the hall.

All that began to change after World War 1 when the trend arose for venues that could serve not only as an auditorium for the local classical ensemble, but also make do for musical theater, choral societies, lectures, etc. Thus, was born the "performing arts center" -- vast 3,000- to 4,000-seat halls that changed the entire function and concept of the traditional concert space.

"Every community wanted to put all of its performing arts in one space," Johnson said. "That's how you got the all-purpose room. And because it was thought of as the forum, where everything happened in that community, they then thought that the seat count had to be absolutely mammoth."

Such auditoriums continued for decades, until the 1950s and '60s. With air travel increasingly common, wealthy arts patrons who traveled more frequently to Europe were struck by the superior sound in the older, smaller European halls, Johnson said. That began the gradual preference for halls that, if not always physically smaller, possessed the warmer, more burnished sound produced by them.

By the late 1950s, the pendulum began to swing back from building 3,500-seat monsters, and Johnson was in the forefront. Still, with seating demand and the higher revenue streams produced by large capacities, the push for smaller halls would be a difficult one.

"I saw that the campaign would take decades and decades," said Johnson. "So I started to try to think of ways to have in one space a big room sound that could also sound intimate. That's really what generated all of my moves toward the various kind of adjustability."

Today the reason for building a hall with such sonic flexibility is not so much for different types of community events, but for the wide variety of music that have since arisen, classical and otherwise. "When the Musikvereinsaal was built, they were playing Haydn and Brahms," Nakajima said. "And today in one room we have to do everything from recitals all the way up to Mahler Eight."

THE FEATURES
The Ziff Ballet Opera House will boast some Johnson elements like the acoustic dome ceiling and multidirectional walls to reflect the sound to the far corners of the 2,400-seat- venue.

But it is the Knight Concert Hall that possesses the most adjustable features, which will allow it to accommodate not only the widest range of classical music from solo violin recital to large symphony orchestra but also the variegated forms of amplified pop and jazz.

The most visually striking element will be that celebrated Johnson trademark, the acoustical canopy or "flying saucer" above the stage. In addition to providing a sonic cushion that will allow musicians onstage to hear themselves better, the computer-operated canopy moves up and down to provide an adjustable shell based on what sort of music is being presented.

"On a simplistic level it changes the scale of the room based on the size of the ensemble," Nakajima said. "Whether you want a smaller room for a chamber ensemble or a larger room for an orchestra."

Even more remarkable is the 70-foot reverberation chamber that encircles three-quarters of the hall. The chamber is surrounded by pneumatically driven doors that can open or close to produce a variety of settings for various reverberations.

"It's all about conservation of sound energy," Nakajima added. "It's a big room, and there's a lot of absorption with 2,200 people sitting there and the orchestra's sound has to get out here with as much strength as possible."

Johnson's fascination with the art of acoustics was formed early on, by "the mystery of the theater itself." Growing up in Briar Creek, Pa., young Russell was fascinated by "the absolute difference between a theater space and a residence." He began making primitive recordings of symphonic transcriptions for wind band at 25 cents an hour and was soon designing theatrical scenery. Stationed in the Philippines during World War II, Johnson attended as many symphony concerts and theaters in Manila as he could.

At war's end, he went to the library and spent hours researching the world's finest theaters. "I started to go through books about how opera theaters and concert hall had developed and I never stopped," he said. Johnson was especially fascinated with the Cuvillies Theatre in Munich, which was completely dismantled, stored in a salt mine during the war, and then put back together. "That little room is just an absolutely marvelous work of architecture," Johnson said.

He honed his craft under the celebrated Edward C. Cole of Yale after the war and with his 16 years at Bolt, Beranek and Newman before opening his own firm in 1970. "I'm still learning," he said. "The field of design of the room and the acoustics -- it's a fantastically complicated situation."

ONGOING PROCESS
This week, the main goal will be to establish "a comfortable baseline" for the symphonic sound as produced by the Cleveland Orchestra, Nakajima said.

This "rough cut" will first entail a technical run-through to make sure all the elements are working properly. Then Johnson and Nakajima will huddle and, on the basis of those discussions, define a starting point.

The No. 1 priority is to ensure that the musicians can hear themselves onstage, which is itself fraught with inherent difficulties since it takes time for even the finest orchestral musicians to get acclimated to playing in a new hall.

"The orchestra can never hear themselves well enough -- according to them," said Nakajima, noting that it usually stems from hearing cues from other musicians in a different way. "Usually, at the first rehearsal, everyone's happy. Second rehearsal they start to say `I don't hear this, I don't hear that.' Tenth rehearsal, you don't hear anyone complain. The fact is they are hearing it, they just have to get used to it.

Both men repeatedly emphasize that snap judgments on the halls' sounds should be avoided and that only after an extended process of fine-tuning, utilizing all the adjustable elements, can one ensure the best possible results.

"You really have to hear more than one example of the same work by different people before you understand fully what is the musician and what is the hall," said Nakajima.

This fine-tuning is made more difficult by the fact that what was planned to be the Knight Concert Hall's main resident ensemble -- the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra -- no longer exists. "It will be more challenging because we won't have three rehearsals and two or three concerts every week by the same people," Nakajima said. "But we will have different orchestras coming through, and that should create a continuity of listening experience."

Johnson says while the possibilities of levels of adjustment are infinite, that's where the experience of his team comes to the fore. "We do a lot of our thinking by sitting and listening to the hall that we're in and talking to the people using it," he said. "And at the same time we're constantly reviewing in our heads six or seven other Artec rooms that are similar. So we can come up with appropriate combinations of adjustments rather quickly," said Johnson.

The array of sonic potentialities prove so enticing to some trigger-happy batonsmiths that a few get carried away with the adjustability to an absurd degree.

"Some conductors, without really thinking about what they're saying, will expect me or Tateo to do something with the room every time they think they hear something wrong with the orchestra," said Johnson. "Sometimes it's the fact that it's just not a good woodwind section. Or the first violinist isn't the greatest or the brass section has never been taught to be properly balanced."

The veteran acoustician likes to tell the story that occurred a few months after his Symphony Hall opened in Birmingham, England, where Kurt Masur was conducting a week of Beethoven.

"Masur came up to me and said, `Russ, the piccolo is much too loud,'" recalled Johnson. "And I just looked at him and I said, `Maestro, I can't help you there.'"