Concert Hall's Acoustical Marvels Stand the Test of Time

by Scott Cantrell / The Dallas Morning News (September 3, 2004)

It was blazing hot that September day in Dallas, 15 years ago, and hardly cooler that evening. But inside the brand-new Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, the air conditioning was apparently cranked down to the "Ultima Thule" setting. The high-heeled ladies of Dallas society tipped wide-eyed into the lobby swathed in furs.

This was Dallas at its over-the-top best, and so was I.M. Pei's new temple to classical music. Then the classical music critic of the Rochester, N.Y., Times-Union, I joined the inaugural throngs oohing and ahing over the lobby's vast expanses of glass and limestone, the concert hall's crisp grids of dark mahogany and glowing onyx sconces. This was glamour as only Dallas could have done it.

But what would it sound like?

Tastes in concert-hall sound are as individual as in barbecue. And as the inaugural week progressed the hall's adjustable acoustical features were being changed from one musical selection to the next. Initial reviews from a formidable posse of international music critics ranged from reserved to rapturous.

Immediately, though, this particular critic heard a voluptuousness associated with such venerable halls as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Vienna Musikverein and Boston's Symphony Hall, but largely missing from 20th-century facilities. There was ample clarity, but it was set within a rich wash of reverberation. The bass response, often flimsy in thin-walled modern halls, was awesome.

Between the opening and my 1999 move to The Dallas Morning News, I returned several times for concerts at the Meyerson. Fifteen years on, and with the experience of a lot of concert halls around the world, the Meyerson is still my favorite modern symphony hall and one of my favorites of any period. It's not a perfect hall - there's no such thing - but it's a fabulous one.

The newest major American concert hall, Los Angeles' Disney Hall, has an almost preternatural pinpoint clarity, but not much warmth. Philadelphia's Verizon Hall is strangely diffuse and uninvolving. Seattle's Benaroya Hall lacks warmth in the bass and lower midrange.

The Meyerson, by contrast, washes you in sound. I still marvel at the sonic sumptuousness, the way the sound can be felt moving in space. Release one of those big chords in a Bruckner symphony, and it disappears into the ceiling with a breathtaking "tail" of reverberation. The effect still sends chills down my back.

When the Meyerson was being designed, in the mid-'80s, the record of newer American concert halls hadn't been great. Acoustician Cyril Harris had gotten a good balance of clarity and spaciousness in Minneapolis' Orchestra Hall, but his design for the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington, D.C., produced only so-so sound.

Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, subsequently rebuilt to Mr. Harris' specifications and renamed Avery Fisher Hall, stubbornly refused to yield a warm, satisfying ambience. The acoustical firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, responsible for the original design of the New York hall, also did Houston's Jones Hall and San Francisco's Davies Hall, both of which managed to sound garish and unfocused all at once.

Dallas wanted something better. Turning its back on the then-dominant acoustical consultants, Dr. Harris and Christopher Jaffe, the Meyerson's design committees went with an outfit just beginning to be noticed in the field. In fact, Artec Consultants was then operating out of two of its principals' New York apartments.

We have Leonard David Stone, manager of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1993, to thank for promoting Russell Johnson as acoustical designer for the Meyerson Symphony Center.

As it turned out, Mr. Johnson and his colleagues did us proud. They proved that a modern concert hall could have the sonic richness of the great 19th- and early 20th-century halls, but also an unprecedented range of acoustical adjustability. The Meyerson dramatically raised the stakes of modern concert hall design.

Fans and boxes

Fan-shaped halls, promising to put more patrons closer to the stage, were all the rage for a while. But in such halls, such as Dallas' Fair Park Music Hall, the sound weakens rapidly beyond the first few rows of seats.

Amar Bose, the MIT professor and loudspeaker designer, pointed out that almost 90 percent of what we hear in a concert hall comes not directly from the stage but as echoes off side walls. Parallel walls reinforce sound; flaring walls dissipate it.

Dr. Harris and Mr. Johnson became strong advocates for a return to the shoebox shape of the great 19th- and early 20th-century halls. Mr. Johnson went further to argue for heavy masonry walls that absorb as little sound as possible. And, defying a longstanding trend to make concert halls as big as possible - with 2,500 seats and more - Mr. Johnson argued that sonics deteriorated rapidly above a 2,000-seat count.

Not without battles - grippingly recalled in Laurie Shulman's book The Meyerson Symphony Center: Building a Dream - Mr. Johnson mostly got his way. He even managed to talk the Meyerson planners into a complex, and costly, scheme of adjustable acoustical features.

The most obvious is the huge canopy suspended over the stage. Soon dubbed "the Starship Enterprise," it has four sections that can be separately raised, lowered and canted over a considerable range.

Hidden behind grilles above and to the sides of the stage and audience chamber are enormous concrete rooms that serve as supplementary reverberance chambers. Heavy concrete doors can be opened and closed in various configurations to add or subtract reverberation. Sound absorption can be added by drawing heavy velvet curtains over some side and rear walls - and over walls inside the reverberance chambers.

In almost limitless combinations, these mechanisms can vary the sound in the Meyerson from relatively "dry," for speech, to the rich reverberation of a stone-vaulted cathedral, which is ideal for organ and some choral music. Somewhere in between are settings best for orchestral music.

It took some years, and lots of experimentation, to find out what worked best. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the hall's main user, has settled on about five basic settings for different kinds of music, occasionally shifting the settings even during a concert.

The Meyerson isn't perfect. As in any hall with stacked balconies, the farther you get under overhangs, the drier and less involving the sound will be. The worst sound is at the back corners of the orchestra terrace.

In certain seats, you'll hear disconcerting echoes off side walls and balconies. The DSO seats its trumpets and trombones at the right rear of the stage, but if you sit on the right side of the hall your ears may tell you the brasses are on the left - because their sound is bouncing off the left walls. In some of Artec's subsequent halls, sound-diffusing surfaces have been used on side walls and balcony fronts to prevent this kind of sonic confusion.

Orchestra musicians complain that they have trouble hearing one another onstage. In newer concert halls, Artec and other acoustical consultants have experimented with various gewgaws above and at the side of stages to reflect more sound back to the musicians. DSO musicians also complain that they're too cramped onstage, and Artec is now trying to figure out how to carve out more room without compromising the sound.

And some listeners simply prefer more analytical acoustics than you normally get at the Meyerson. When the Cleveland Orchestra played here three years ago, Cleveland Plain Dealer critic Donald Rosenberg complained that the Meyerson sound was too murky and reverberant. But he's used to Cleveland's Severance Hall, which many listeners, this one included, find too dry.

Not the least of the Meyerson's contributions is helping make the DSO a better orchestra than it was. At the Music Hall, its previous home, the priority was just forcing the sound out into that vast sea of seats; nuance didn't count for much. At the Meyerson, the tiniest pianissimo sets the air aquiver.

With one of the world's greatest symphony halls here, it's a shame we don't get to hear other orchestras in it. At the least, the DSO and Houston Symphony Orchestra ought to do an annual switch. But touring orchestras have gotten formidably expensive, and Dallas has no major presenting organization to bring them here. It's also a disgrace that the hall's superb C.B. Fisk organ, one of the most exciting in the world, gets used so little.

The 20th century is littered with concert halls that don't work, and the Shulman book catalogs all the things that could have gone wrong here - and nearly did. But Dallas was lucky in the coterie of movers and shakers who shepherded the Meyerson Symphony Center into existence, including Mr. Meyerson himself, former SMU dean and DSO president Eugene Bonelli and the late Stanley Marcus.

These were smart, tough men and women who did their homework. Whatever mistakes they may have made, they refused to settle for anything less than what they believed was the best.
Fifteen years later, their best still sounds pretty fabulous.