Lincoln Center and the Greatest Acoustic Failure of the 20th Century

In the aftermath of World War II, New York City wanted to built a new home for its orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and secure its place a cultural center of the world. In this episode, we talk to the Paul H. Scarbrough (Akustiks, LLC) about where these plans went awry and the multiple renovations over many decades to fix the hall. 

Read the associated article: Paul H. Scarbrough. (2023) “David Geffen Hall and the Evolution of Acoustics at Lincoln Center,” Acoustics Today 19(4). https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2023.19.4.41

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Intro/Outro Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

Transcript

Kat Setzer  00:06

Welcome to Across Acoustics, the official podcast of the Acoustical Society of America's publications office. On this podcast, we will highlight research from our four publications. I'm your host, Kat Setzer editorial associate for the ASA. 

Kat Setzer  00:24

Today's episode is going to focus on one of the most famous acoustic failures in the 20th century, which has to do with the design of the concert hall for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Lincoln Center. I'm talking to Paul Scarbrough, who wrote an article on this topic titled "David Geffen Hall and the evolution of acoustics at Lincoln Center," which appeared in the winter 2023 issue of Acoustics Today. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today, Paul, how are you? 

Paul Scarbrough  00:49

I'm doing well. Thank you. How about yourself?

Kat Setzer  00:51

I'm doing great. So first, tell us a bit about your research background.

Paul Scarbrough  00:54

So my research background really emanates from my work as a practicing acoustical consultant. So over the years, we've done a lot of studies of things like stage acoustics, pipe organ acoustics, and things like that, that have resulted in various presentations and papers at the Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Acoustics in the UK, the Audio Engineering Society, and other other "learned societies," as they call them. But most of that work emanates, of course, from our work as practicing acquisitions, which includes projects like the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville and, and of course, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.

Paul Scarbrough  01:31

Very cool. Acoustics in practice, love to hear about it. What made you interested in the Philharmonic Hall of Lincoln Center? 

Paul Scarbrough  01:33

Well, of course, living close to New York, it was always a place that you wanted to see things and hear things because Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic were always presenting interesting things. In addition to, of course, the other great concert hall in New York, which is Carnegie Hall. I grew up outside Philadelphia, so the academy of music and the Philadelphia Orchestra are my touchstone for acoustics and orchestral music. So when I moved to Connecticut, it was a natural leap to start going to listen to things at both Carnegie and what was then called Avery Fisher Hall. 

Kat Setzer  02:13

Okay, so let's get into some history. How did the Philharmonic Hall come into being?

Paul Scarbrough  02:18

So you have to remember that in the aftermath of World War II, you know, the United States was really kind of the last man standing, if you will. You know, Europe had been pretty much devastated by the war, and was still getting back onto its feet. The US was also trying to, you know, create a new way of organizing the world that would prevent conflicts like World War I and World War II from happening. And of course, the first step in that was the the creation of the United Nations, which John D. Rockefeller, III, and other city leaders had successfully navigated to have housed at New York City or within New York City, the famous UN headquarters that we know today. So they'd already established this kind of leadership position in the world with the United Nations. New York City was already the financial capital of the world. So in the 50s, Robert Wagner, the mayor of New York, and John D. Rockefeller, III, and Robert Moses sought to kind of cement that image of New York as the capital of the West, if you will, by making it a cultural capital as well. And Lincoln Center was that aim. So the idea was to create this campus of buildings on the Upper West Side that would house a new opera house for the Metropolitan Opera, a new concert hall for the Philharmonic, a new dance theater for the New York City Ballet. So that was really the genesis of the project was this, this attempt to cement New York's leadership across the board: finances, politics, world politics, and the cultural arts.

Kat Setzer  03:56

Very interesting. It's funny to think about New York City at a time when it wasn't a cultural center. 

Paul Scarbrough  04:02

Well, you have to remember that there was, at this time, you know, the United States still had something of an inferiority complex about certain aspects of its position in the world. You know, iwas clearly a military and political power, but it now wanted to demonstrate that it had the equal of the great European arts institutions, you know, dance, opera, music, it wanted to demonstrate that it was the equal of you know, the Berlin Philharmonic or the La Scala opera in Milan. They wanted to say we were on the world stage in a way that it had never quite been positioned before the war.

Kat Setzer  04:38

Yeah, wanted sort of to prove that it was the brains, not just the brawn, so to speak. 

Paul Scarbrough  04:44

Exactly, exactly.

Kat Setzer  04:46

What were the original plans for the hall, what went wrong with them in their execution, and then how did the performance hall end up sounding?

Paul Scarbrough  04:53

So Philharmonic Hall, which was the original name for the concert hall in Lincoln Center, was determined to be the first of the halls to be built in Lincoln Center, and the reason for that was that Carnegie Hall, which had been the longtime home of the New York Philharmonic, the owners had actually decided to tear the building down. They sold the development rights, or they were planning to sell the development rights. They were going to erect this fairly ugly, red-clad aluminum tower in place of it. And so the Philharmoonic was going to be homeless. So that was what led to the genesis of Phillharmonic Hall as the first building to be built. And they engaged Max Abramowitz, or actually, what I should say is that Wallace Harrison, who was the chair of the architectural board at Lincoln Center, designated his partner Max Abramowitz as the architect for Philharmonic Hall. Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic had also selected Leo Beranek,  the famous acoustician, to work alongside Max Abramowitz to design the hall. 

Paul Scarbrough  05:53

Now, Leo, you know, arguably became what many of us acknowledged was the dean of American acousticians. He was clearly the most experienced acoustician in the United States at that point in time, and he used the opportunity to design Philharmonic Hall to launch a landmark study of concert halls and opera houses around the world. And he published a book in 1962, called Music, Acoustics, and Architecture, which documented his study of 54 concert halls and opera houses around the world. And he used this research that he had done studying these various halls, talking with music critics, talking with conductors, talking to musicians, talking with audiences, to ground his thinking about acoustic design for concert halls, and used it alongside his experience of working on buildings like the Koussevitzky Music Shed out at Tanglewood as the basis for developing the designs for Philharmonic Hall. 

Paul Scarbrough  05:53

Now, of course, Leo's office was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right across the river from arguably the most famous symphonic concert hall in the United States at the time, Symphony Hall, widely regarded and acknowledged by musicians throughout the world, among the top three concert halls anywhere, you know, when you when you ask musicians to name their top three halls, they would invariably say Vienna, Amsterdam, and Boston.

Kat Setzer  07:17

Interesting.

Paul Scarbrough  07:18

So he was basing his designs on, you know, well-known, well-established ideas. And so the designs for Philharmonic Hall were pretty straight ahead: 2400-seat, shoebox concert hall. Leo had determined that much more than 2400 seats would force the cubic volume of the hall to rise too much to maintain the reverberant characteristics that we associate with good concert halls. And if you did that, you would then lose impact from the orchestra. The orchestra would no longer be able to generate that intense visceral impact on those big crescendo moments. And so that was the original design for the hall. 2400 seat, shoeback shape, canopy based on his ideas that had evolved at the Koussevitzky Music Shed out at Tanglewood. Some fairly straight ahead ideas with some modern twist to them in the canopy. 

Paul Scarbrough  08:14

That, of course is where all the trouble started: the seat count of the hall. When a site for Lincoln Center was first selected, it was actually a neighborhood called San Juan Hill. And the reason it was called San Juan Hill was that it was actually the center of the puertorriqueno community in New York City. And so where Robert Moses and Mayor Wagner thought of this area as a slum, the residents of that community thought of it as a vibrant, wonderful place to live, and they certainly didn't want to be displaced from their homes. Unfortunately, this was a time when those sorts of considerations kind of fell to the wayside. And so the city used its power of eminent domain, they condemned 16 acres of land on the Upper West Side, and moved all those residents out, evicted the residents and cleared the land for Lincoln Center. That was not without controversy. That certainly got reflected in the press at the time. 

Kat Setzer  09:15

Yeah, I can imagine. 

Paul Scarbrough  09:16

And so, of course, when the designs for the Philharmonic Hall were unveiled in May of 1959, and the press caught wind of the fact that the new hall would only seat 2400 seats, they seized on it right away, because of course, Carnegie Hall sat over 2800 people. So all of a sudden, this new Philharmonic Hall was only going to seat 2400 seats. Now Lincoln Center had been at pains to build an image for this new project that it was for the masses, that it was for the common person. John D. Rockefeller, even in his groundbreaking address ,talked about making the arts accessible to all... But the press saw it differently. They looked at the 2400 seats and said, "Ah, here's proof positive that Lincoln Center is nothing but a sop to the wealthy in New York City. Where before we could go listen to the Philharmonic, and you could hear it for but 50 cents in the cheap seats in Carnegie Hall. Today where there are going to be 400 fewer seats in the room. And we all know which seats are going to go away: the student rush tickets, the cheap seats." 

Paul Scarbrough  10:27

And so that kind of really created a ferment at Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic. And the boards met and they talked about it. And they decided that they needed to increase the seating capacity of the Philharmonic Hall. They called Max Abramowitz in. They told him to add at least 200 to 250 seats to the hall. And while I cannot confirm this, absolutely, I'm hoping at some point to get more access to the Lincoln Center archives and see if I can find something like this in the minutes of the board meeting, I suspect that what Max said is that fine, he could add those seats to the hall, but he would have to have some of the strictures that Leo had imposed on the design, the shoebox shape and the seat count, either to be loosed from those or released from those strictures so that he could make the changes that Lincoln Center was desiring. 

Paul Scarbrough  10:28

So a lot of the changes that Max made were made over Leo's objections: the seat count increase, but more so things that involved the shaping of the hall, the shoe box shape, began to evolve from a fairly rigid, straight, parallel sidewalls, to a more fan-shaped room, where the walls got wider as you got further away from the stage. And even more radical change occurred with the tiers, the side tiers in the original designs, Leo had mimicked the side tiers at Symphony Hall in Boston. So they were essentially horizontal or parallel to the floor, to a flat floor. Max took the side tiers and he made them droop. So the first tier actually connected to the main floor, the second tier to the first tier, and the third tier to the second tier. What that essentially meant is that sound emanating from the stage could no longer see the undersides of those tiers, so they could no longer contribute to the sense of immediacy and connection between the audience on the orchestra floor, and the musicians on stage. It was a really dramatic change, and one that had tremendous implications for the acoustics of the space.

Kat Setzer  12:39

Yeah, that... That sounds like quite a few bad decisions were made. 

Paul Scarbrough  12:44

Yeah. But to be fair, to be fair, I just want to emphasize, you know, these were all well-meaning people. They were not...

Kat Setzer  12:51

Right.

Paul Scarbrough  12:51

You know, they made a lot of these decisions out of a lack of complete appreciation for what they were doing. 

Kat Setzer  12:58

They were trying to make the music more accessible, too.

Paul Scarbrough  13:01

Right, exactly. Yeah, it was with good intentions that these decisions were made. 

Kat Setzer  13:06

That's fair. Okay. So once they realized that, oh, this is not sounding the way we had anticipated, Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic ended up setting up a committee to fix the problems. How did that turn out?

Paul Scarbrough  13:20

Well, first, they did give Leo an opportunity to study the hall, and Leo did over the course of the first several months conduct a series of studies in the hall and determined that the acoustical canopy over the stage was not creating, or not supporting the bass in the hall as effectively as it could, and if they resized them, if they made them larger, and they reorganized them, and infilled between some of them, that they could actually improve the bass response of the hall, which was one of the major criticisms that the hall fell victim to in its early months. But by the early part of 1963, Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic, you know, were understandably a little freaked out. And they thought, you know, before they went ahead with Leo's plan, which was costed out at about $60,000-- not a lot of money to us today, but back then, not an insignificant chunk of change. 

Paul Scarbrough  14:16

So, they decided to bring in this cadre of outside experts. They had Vern Knudsen, who was the respected former chancellor at UCLA, as the chairman of the committee, Paul Veneklasen, another Southern California acoustician, Heinrich Keilholz, who was a former tonmeister at Deutsche Grammophon, the famous recording company, and Manfred Schroeder, a very well known research acoustician at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Curiously aside from Vern and Paul, really, Paul, none of these folks were practicing acousticians in the sense of actively designing buildings on a regular basis. Vern had done something consulting on buildings over the years. Paul was actually a practicing acoustician, so he was involved in the design of buildings. So it was a curious group of people that they put together, but also a group that had a lot of acoustical expertise, although not necessarily always in concert hall design. 

Paul Scarbrough  15:19

So initially, Leo and this committee seem to be working pretty well together. They reviewed his recommendations. They didn't overtly disagree with them, apparently, initially. And by May of 63, Leo was feeling pretty good that they were going to support his recommendations and that that summer, they would implement them, and all would be right with the world come September. 

Paul Scarbrough  15:43

Unfortunately, over the following four or five weeks, from the beginning of May to the beginning of June, something happened and the committee decided to take a different course, and Max Abramowitz felt like he needed to follow the lead of the committee rather than Leo. So he announces to Leo that he's decided to adopt the committee's recommendations, which are really quite radically different from Leo's. Instead of focusing attention on the size of the reflectors, they talk about doing things like extending them to reach closer to the upstage wall of the stage, and adding some infill panels in certain places to make canopy perform more appropriately. Then they recommended some changes in the auditorium. Chief among them were reshaping the balcony faces so that they no longer directed strong reflections back towards the stage, and then adding sound absorbing materials to the upper rear walls of the second tier and the third tier in the hall, which was a really curious recommendation. I mean, it would reduce some apparently sharp echoes back to the stage or sharp reflections back to the stage, but it also would have reduced the resonance of what was already perceived to be a pretty dry concert hall. So that recommendation didn't make a lot of sense in the context of current thinking about concert hall design. But as it turned out, you know, they decided to move ahead with that. And Leo was rightly concerned that they were moving in the wrong direction. And so he summarily resigned from the project in September of 1963, and had really nothing further to do with the building from that moment forward.

Kat Setzer  17:35

Oh, my goodness, this is more drama than I'm used to in an ASA publication. Okay, so Leo left the team. What did the remaining committee members end up doing to fix the concert hall? You sort of outlined these a little bit already? And how did it turn out? 

Paul Scarbrough  17:48

So they implemented those initial recommendations. And, you know, they got a kind of mixed reception to them. And it's clear in reading minutes from the building committee of the time that the various members of the committee each had kind of subtley different ideas about how to move things forward, and they started lobbying for their ideas in the committee. But for whatever reason, Heinrich Keilholz rose to the top in terms of the ideas that were put forward. I'm not sure why. There's... The minutes do not make it clear why the others sort of set their own agendas or ideas aside in favor of Keilholz's. But eventually, by '65 he's been entrusted by Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic to carry on ongoing work to remediate the perceived problems in the room. 

Kat Setzer  18:43

But he's not an acoustician. Right? You were saying he's not actually really an acoustician?

Paul Scarbrough  18:49

No, that's the curious thing. He was a tonmeister, which is basically, you know, a recording engineer, a very sophisticated recording engineer, one who had done extraordinary work for Deutsche grammophon. And his primary supporter in the United States was George Szell, the famous conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. George Szell had tremendous respect for and admiration for Keilholz and had  strongly recommended him to Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic. But Keilholz, by his own admission, said that he knew very little about architectural acoustics, because that was not his background. And, interestingly, that does play a role in some of his recommendations ultimately moving in, if not the wrong direction, at least not being fully in the right direction. 

Paul Scarbrough  19:42

What he does over the years is he first reclad the walls of the hall and adds these diffusion panels to try and scatter the sound emanating from the sidewalls and distribute it more evenly throughout the room. Not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but his final change happens in 1969, and he decides to remove Leo Beranek's array of hexagonal acoustic canopy panels over the auditorium and the stage. He decided to just take it out completely and replace it with a step wooden ceiling. Again, in and of itself, not necessarily a bad thing, but the way he executes the wood ceiling is a problem. 

Kat Setzer  20:20

Oh...

Paul Scarbrough  20:20

Because he actually makes the wood, the thickness of the wood in the ceiling is only an inch thick. 

Kat Setzer  20:27

Oooo.

Paul Scarbrough  20:28

And we today know that that makes for a very effective absorber of bass frequency sound. In a concert hall, we would typically, particularly on an expanse that large, want that surface to weigh upwards of somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds per face square foot, to make sure that it adequately supported the bass frequencies, which would mean mounting the wood... you know, having a thickness of wood that would be upwards of three to four inches, you know, to get up in the 10 pound-per-face-square-foot ballpark, and then backing it up with a substantial steel frame so that it was very stiff and massive to support the bass energy in the room.

Kat Setzer  21:14

Interesting, interesting. Okay, so after all of that, they decided to change the hall again in 1976, which is what, seven years later? What did they do?

Paul Scarbrough  21:25

So that was a really major reconstruction of the hall. The renovations that happened between 1962 and 1969, kind of incremental, and while if you looked at a picture of the hall in 62 and 69 you would see a radically different hall in terms of the visual aesthetics, the basic shape of the room remained the same. And you would say, oh, yeah, it's changed a lot, but  not so much as to be radically different. 

Paul Scarbrough  21:53

In 1976, they gutted the hall, they literally stripped out everything you saw inside the auditorium back to the structural frame, and they built a new shoebox-shaped concert hall within the structural envelope of the old auditorium. This project was led by Cyril Harris, the acoustician from Columbia University in New York. And he had been known for his designs for the Kennedy Center concert hall in Washington, DC, which opened in '71, and the Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which had opened just two years earlier, in 1974. He had been the first choice of the Philharmonic to design the renovations to the hall, and he initially turned them down. He did not think that Lincoln Center or the Philharmonic would give him the kind of clean canvas that he needed to really rectify the acoustics. But the chairman of the board of the Philharmonic, invaled upon him further and said, "How can you deny New Yorkers the benefits of your expertise? This is a project for all New Yorkers, and you can't deny them, you know, the benefits of what you've learned and what you've produced in terms of concert hall designs in the last 25 years." 

Paul Scarbrough  23:24

So Cyril relents, he says, "Okay, I'll do it. But I have three conditions." The first condition was that Lincoln Center would give him as much space in the building, as he deemed necessary to create a good acoustic for the hall. So if he needed to expand beyond the envelope of the old room, he could do it. The second condition that he laid on the project was that in the event that there was any dispute between the architect and the acoustician, his decision would rule the day.

Kat Setzer  23:56

Wise, after the previous issues. 

Paul Scarbrough  23:59

Yeah, that's, that's a pretty good one. And then the third one was, he said, "I want you to name Philip Johnson as the architect for the project." He had been working with Johnson on the new National Performing Arts Center in Mumbai, India, and he felt like he could work effectively with Johnson. It's probably the first and only time that an acoustician has made this choice of an architect on a project. I mean, I can tell you, I have never selected the architect for a project.

Kat Setzer  24:36

A little backwards. Yeah. 

Paul Scarbrough  24:38

Yeah. Well, it's not a story backwards, but certainly unusual. 

Kat Setzer  24:42

Yeah. 

Paul Scarbrough  24:43

So that's how the team came about. The extraordinary thing about the project was that it was constructed between May of 1976 and November of 1976. 

Kat Setzer  24:56

Oh, wow.

Paul Scarbrough  24:57

So barely six months of time elapsed between completely gutting the interior of the old Philharmonic Hall and the reopening of the hall as Avery Fisher Hall in November of 1976. 

Kat Setzer  25:10

When do renovations ever go that quickly?

Paul Scarbrough  25:13

It was extraordinary. If you really want to hear about how that process worked, the article I can recommend to you is Bruce Bliven, Jr's fabulous long form journalism piece on the creation of Avery Fisher Hall in the New Yorker. 

Kat Setzer  25:28

Oh, okay. 

Paul Scarbrough  25:28

It's a great piece in New Yorker's grand tradition of long-form journalism, and it documents the whole process.

Kat Setzer  25:36

Well, that's very cool. I'll check that out. Okay, so then you came into the picture in the 1990s. Why did Lincoln Center the Philharmonic want to update the stage at this point, and what did you find in your acoustical analysis?

Paul Scarbrough  25:48

So by the early 1990s, the Philharmonic musicians were rightly critical of the stage acoustics. They found it very difficult to hear one another and themselves on the stage. And they were having difficulty meeting, Kurt Masur's expectations, Kurt Masur was, you know, an incredibly talented conductor. And as their music director, he was really pushing the Philharmonic to new levels of artistic achievement. And the Philharmonic musicians began to increasingly feel like the hall was hampering their ability to meet those expectations. And so, the Philharmonic went to Lincoln Center and said, "You know, we'd really like to study the stage acoustics." Lincoln Center was understandably reticent just to open any discussion of the acoustics of Avery Fisher Hall because of, you know, the long history of acoustical issues in the building. And so, they reluctantly agreed to go ahead with some studies provided everybody agreed upfront, including Jaffe, Holden, Scarborough Acoustics, which was the firm I was working with at the time, that we were going to focus on the stage and only the stage; the auditorium was just fine the way it was. That was the charge for the study. 

Paul Scarbrough  25:49

So we decided that we would do a series of experiments where we move the orchestra out onto a stage extension, we added some lower canopy panels over the stage, and we added some diffusing elements around the stage to try and test the different scenarios. And we did a series of tests where we tested each one of these things, adding them kind of one at a time, so that we had everything from the stage and its existing configuration at that time, to moving the orchestra out onto this stage extension to adding the canopy panels to adding the diffusion panels. And because we knew it was challenging to get good, reliable data from musicians judging these changes on the fly with paper surveys, we were able to convince them that the right way to do the testing would be to put binaural dummy heads in the orchestra. We had three of them scattered around the stage, and one in the auditorium as a control. And then we could actually do comparative examples, the same segments of pieces of music under different scenarios, and ask them to judge things like rhythmic ensemble and ability to hear the different voices in the orchestra, harshness or brittleness, and things like that. And we presented these samples, you know, we did, it was your typical kind of like eye doctor experience: A, B. A better or B bette? B better or A better? You know, back and forth. We tested, we tried to within the constraints of time that we could reasonably expect from these musicians, we tried to be as rigorous as possible in presenting samples in different order and asking them to judge them on different characteristics. Those tests reveal some pretty striking preferences in favor of moving the orchestra downstage onto the stage extension, the canopy panels in place, and the diffusion panels in place. And so that's what our report recommended was, they look at a renovation scheme that incorporated all of these elements to one degree or another. 

Paul Scarbrough  29:22

Unfortunately, our control dummy head out in the house also revealed some pretty significant room acoustic deficiencies in the auditorium itself. Chief among them being the low bass response in the room, the reverberation time and the strength of the reverberation at low frequencies 250 hertz and below was striking compared to the strength and the length of reverberation at 500 hertz and above, and that could be very well correlated with ongoing concerns about the poor wuality of bass in the concert hall at Avery Fisher. So, as professionals we felt, you know, our integrity demanded that we report this result, even though the charge had been not to talk about the acoustics of the hall. The last thing I wanted was to be associated with doing renovations to the stage and have people write about it afterwards saying, "Well, the hall still sounds XYZ." You know? So so we put that in the report that didn't make us very popular with certain people at Lincoln Center. So eventually, when they decided to move forward with some stage renovations, they engaged a different consultant to reexamine our results, do their own studies and implement a program of changes to the stage, which is what you saw happen in 1993, under the ages of Russell Johnson and his firm Artech, in New York City, and that was when they added the big diffusers to the sidewalls with the glass plates that extended out, the canopy that was a mixture of vertical glass plates and horizontal wood-clad frames. Very complicated, very visually, kind of busy, if you will. And when I talked to musicians who been at the Philharmonic at that time, most of the responses were."Eh. Yeah. It was a little better." But not the kind of ringing endorsement for acoustics that I think people were hoping for.

Kat Setzer  31:30

Yeah. Yeah. Seems like there's a lot of second guessing that happens in the process of renovating this concert hall. 

Paul Scarbrough  31:36

Yeah, I think that's, that's probably true. 

Kat Setzer  31:39

Yeah. So in the early 2000s, even more renovations were planned. But then the Philharmonic announced that they would leave Lincoln Center to perform at Carnegie Hall. Why'd they say that? 

Paul Scarbrough  31:50

Well, I think, you know, you'd probably have to ask them for all the detailed reasons. But you know, the, one of the things that I think is particularly important in music, and acoustics, is something we refer to as musical memory. And when I talk about musical memory, what I mean is the characteristic sound that one associates with a specific orchestra in a specific concert space. And so for me growing up, that was the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Academy of Music, which was really an opera house It was modeled on La Scala in Milan. And so it was not a very reverberant space, but it was a very present and immediate space. And so the orchestra in Philadelphia under Stokowski and later Ormondy evolved this kind of legato playing style with the strings that they used to refer to as the Philadelphia sound. And what they did was, they literally adapted their playing, to create a sense of resonance in a hall that didn't have natural resonance of its own. Likewise, in Cleveland, where I've done work over the years, that's a very, very responsive hall. And so it demands a very, very nuanced touch, to make it sound really wonderful. And so the Cleveland Orchestra developed this chamber music quality to the way they approach their playing, really listening very, very intently to each other. And as a result, that has become reflected in the sound that we associated with the Cleveland Orchestra. 

Kat Setzer  33:25

Interesting.

Paul Scarbrough  33:26

 So I think part of the decision to move to Carnegie Hall was trying to restore that musical memory that had long been associated with the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. Because that was the musical memory for New Yorkers. Now, by the time the early 2000s, comes around, it's... that musical memory is 40 years old. It's a musical memory I didn't have because I was born in 1961. But there were still people around that would have recalled the glory days of the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. So I think that was part of the driving force behind moving back to the hall.

Kat Setzer  34:02

 Okay, so then they didn't end up moving. Why not? 

Paul Scarbrough  34:05

Well, as it turned out, it was more complicated than either institution really considered when they first announced that they would do it. You know, by the early 2000s, it had been 40 years since Carnegie Hall had had a resident orchestra. They didn't have the institutional memory for what a resident orchestra meant, which means, you know, rehearsal on Tuesday morning, rehearsals on Wednesday morning and Wednesday afternoon, dress rehearsal on Thursday morning, performance on Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, maybe Sunday afternoon, maybe Tuesday night, the following week. And then the whole process starts all over again. You know, with an orchestra at the caliber of the New York Philharmonic, it also means that they're essentially performing virtually every weekend from September, late September through the end of May or early June, right? So all the a great weekend dates, which are the dates you want to schedule all the wonderful touring orchestras from around the world, you know, are occupied by your principal residents. So, Carnegie quickly realized that they would have to start curtailing their presenting program of international orchestras and soloists. they would probably have to restrict the outside rentals of the hall, so groups that for years that presented themselves at Carnegie Hall, simply by renting its auditorium would be told, "I'm sorry, we don't have any dates for you," you know And understandably, I think they were right to recognize that the backlash from that would be severe from the performing arts community, who would no longer be allowed to rent Carnegie Hall for those things. So I think all those things sort of started combining to make both parties realize as attractive as this might be to do, it's really not feasible in the 21st century. So Lincoln Center, or I mean, Philarmonic made the announcement that the deal was dead, and that they would be staying at Lincoln Center.

Kat Setzer  36:09

Okay. I mean, I guess that all makes sense. So in your article, you say, "Third time's the charm." What changes were made in the last round of renovations? And how did they impact the acoustics of the hall?

Paul Scarbrough  36:19

So we were able to make some really striking changes to the room. First of all, Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic both made acoustics the top priority in this renovation. They made sure we understood that we had their total backing, and that if it came down to an issue of acoustics versus something else, we needed to just raise the red flag, and they would make the appropriate decision. So there were some key decisions that were made early on in the planning process, to lay the groundwork for success and the new hall. The first was the reduction of seating capacity. The two institutions agreed to reduce the seat count from 2738, to in the neighborhood of 2200 for Philharmonic presentations. So you know, a 538, more or less seat loss in the hall. 

Kat Setzer  37:14

Oh, wow. That's even fewer seats than what Leo had originally suggested when it was originally being designed.

Paul Scarbrough  37:20

Yes. And that was a function of establishing the right relationship between the cubic volume that could be enclosed within the room, given the structural frame of the building, and the number of seats. And then also the other thing, you know, things have evolved since 1962, in terms of accessibility for people with mobility impairments, code issues for egress, and things like that. And all those things make halls less efficient to seat than was possible in 1962. 

Kat Setzer  37:54

Got it? That makes sense. 

Paul Scarbrough  37:55

So that was decision number one. Second decision was to pull the orchestra away from the back wall of the stage a with a downstage about 25 feet into the auditorium, and then to wrap a band of seats around the sides and to the rear of the stage so that the musicians would now be closer to a larger percentage of the audience, and would be more a part of the room itself, the auditorium itself, as opposed to being on a stage that was sort of separated, at least visually, from the auditorium by that gold proscenium arch that you may have remembered at Avery Fisher Hall before the renovation. So those were the two first big moves. 

Paul Scarbrough  38:37

The third move was to take and reconstruct the side tiers of the hall. Because one of the things that Cyril Harris had done with Philip Johnson in 1976, was to step the side tiers as they came down towards the stage. And those steps were pretty significant in terms of their height; they were 14 inches for each step. What that meant was that there was significant shadowing of the underside of that soffit surface that impacted how much sound could reflect off the undersides of those surface and come back out to the center of the orchestra floor, to again create that sense of immediacy and impact and envelopment for listeners on the orchestra floor. So in order to do that, we had to completely reconstruct the sidewalls of the hall and the balcony structures because the balconies had actually been suspended from the roof with hidden vertical ties in the walls, and all that had to be ripped out so that we could resupport the new framing for the new side chairs. One of the side benefits of that was we were able to actually go back to the original curving geometry of the seating on the main floor and in the rear tiers of the hall. If you look at pictures from 1962, you'll see that the seating of the hall was actually arrayed on these very elegant sensuous curves, and in 1976, they had squared all that off. In the process, they had actually made the sight lines on the orchestra floor worse. And so we were able to strip all that away, restore the curving geometry of the original room and restore some of the sensuality that was part of Max Abramowitz's actually really quite beautiful architectural design for the room. So some aesthetic benefits as well as acoustic benefits. 

Kat Setzer  40:27

Yeah, so I feel like there are probably some morals to the story of Lincoln Center. What do you think are the key takeaways for folks designing concert halls, or even just enjoying them as an audience member?

Paul Scarbrough  40:37

I think some of the key takeaways are that intimacy matters. And so, you know, getting listeners close to the stage, making sure that the seat count stays reasonable, are probably two of the most critical decisions that an owner has to make when approaching a project like this. We now recognize that, you know, in the 60s and 70s, it wasn't uncommon for orchestras to build halls that were 2700 seats, 2800 seats, 2900 seats, even 3200 seats; we now know that that was a mistake. And so since the late 1980s, with Russell Johnson's designs for the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, it's been rare for a new concert hall to have much more than 2200 seats. So that there's kind of the, it's now well acknowledged that that's kind of the sweet spot for acoustics and, and capacity. 

Paul Scarbrough  41:34

In terms of listeners, I think it's so much about what you listen for in music. You know, people often ask me, "What's the best seat in the auditorium?" And I say, "I can tell you where I like to sit, but that's not necessarily where you're going to have the best experience." And I actually encourage people that are going to a new concert hall for the first season to buy seats in a whole bunch of different locations and experience the room from, you know, the orchestra floor and a side tier and a rear balcony and high up in the room and low down in the room, so that they learn how the acoustics vary in subtle ways, from seating location to seating location, and they begin to figure out what they most want to hear and see when they're at a performance. Because part of what you go to a performance is to see what's happening, you know, so the seats behind the stage, some people really love because not only is it a pretty incredible listening experience, but you also have the ability to watch the conductor communicating with the musicians in ways that you can't see from the other side-- the raised eyebrow or the, you know, the smile and the nod, you know, acknowledging that a player has just nailed a solo passage exactly the way they had rehearsed it. So when it comes to audience members, that's what I tell them, you know, figure out what sounds best to you. Don't rely on me or anybody else to tell you where to sit.

Kat Setzer  43:05

Alright, nice. Well, thank you so much for sharing this fascinating history with our listeners. It was funny hearing more about the like, I guess, human side of an acoustic endeavor, although I do feel bad for Leo Beranek and how much his ideas were shut down.

Paul Scarbrough  43:18

Well, the good thing about that is that Leo continued to be an important contributor to our field. He lived to be well past 100, passing away, I think in 2016. And right up till the end, he remained open to new acoustic ideas, was a thinker of his own, continuing to evolve his own thinking about acoustics. And he went on to a long and very successful career designing halls in many places, including quite a number in Japan. So he did not let that experience sour him for the rest of his career. He was very successful beyond that point in time.

Kat Setzer  43:56

That's very true. Yeah, we actually have a special issue of Acoustics Today that was totally dedicated to him and his impact on architectural acoustics and concert hall acoustics. But as I was saying, this discussion definitely gave me a new perspective on concert hall acoustics and how they can go very, very wrong. So thank you very, very much, and have a great day.

Paul Scarbrough  44:16

Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me to be with you today.

Kat Setzer  44:21

Thank you for tuning into Across Acoustics. If you would like to hear more interviews from our authors about their research, you subscribe and find us on your preferred podcast platform.