Equation 2 Objective source broadening
4 The development of the concert hall
4.12 Return to precedents
Though many novel designs for concert halls have been tried, the rectangular or shoebox concert hall from the nineteenth century has remained a con-tinual point of reference. Halls of this form have continued to be built throughout the last 50 years, yet around the turn of the millennium the rectan-gular plan hall has become particularly popular.
The reasons for this have much to do with the changing nature of concert-going during 50 years.
The expectations of audiences have risen sharply, stimulated in part by the remarkable progress in the quality of recorded and broadcast sound. And concerts now have to compete with a wide range of entertainment possibilities available in modern cities. For musicians, modern travel exposes them to a broader range of performing environments and comparisons are inevitably made. The outcome is that the acoustics of new concert halls is critical not only for their reputation but also for their financial viability. Clients, hall managers and musicians have responded by becoming less willing to take risks.
The rectangular or more precisely parallel-sided hall has since around 1990 become the design of choice for many.
Two American consultants cite a further reason for the shift to parallel-sided halls (Scarbrough and Jaffe, 1999). Between the 1950s and ‘70s, acoustic consultancy in America had been dominated by the firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman. Their association with the unfortunate New York Philharmonic Hall had dented their reputation but not affected their status. However the response to their four major halls between 1980 and 1982 (see previous section) was to have a more serious impact:
The most unfortunate legacy of these [four] halls was to feed a growing perception among sym-phony orchestra conductors, musicians, manag-ers and audiences that the acoustical profession could not be counted upon to deliver results in new facilities. In parallel with this was a growing impression that only the traditional shoebox shape offered a viable model for new concert halls (despite the existence of more than a few
shoebox shaped halls whose acoustics range from merely mediocre to positively abysmal).
Of the rectangular halls built in the United States in the years between 1950 and 1980, many were designed by Cyril Harris. For his earlier large halls the design of Boston Symphony Hall was the stimulus. As in Boston, these halls have in each case a stage enclosure and three balconies that extend along the side walls (compared with two in Boston).
The concert hall in the Kennedy Center of 1971 in Washington DC holds 2759. Harris was famously called upon in 1976 to consult on Avery Fisher Hall, to replace the ill-fated New York Philharmonic Hall.
A recent example of his design was the 2500-seat Benaroya Hall for Seattle completed in 1998. In this last case the walls and ceiling have been heavily profiled compared with the lighter surface treat-ment of earlier halls by Harris (Harris, 2001).
In Europe the then East German authorities decided in 1986 to build a ‘new’ nineteenth-century rectangular concert hall in East Berlin. The hall even has classical columns and chandeliers as well as the surface decoration on the walls and ceiling char-acteristic of its precedents. The Konzerthaus (for-merly the Schauspielhaus) has a modest capacity of up to 1677 with one surprising feature: a flat rather than raked main floor (Beranek, 2004).
A modern interpretation of the rectangular hall was built in The Hague in 1987 (Metkemeijer et al., 1988). Known as the Dr Anton Philips Hall, this 1900-seat auditorium with a single balcony which wraps round all four walls is of interest as a low-budget solution. The ceiling is of concrete with the roof structure exposed below it. The walls are made of damped steel panels profiled to provide scatter-ing; the profiling consists of different-depth slots in both a vertical and horizontal direction.
A close copy of the Vienna Musikvereinssaal was chosen for the Seiji Ozawa Hall to complement the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood, Lenox, Massachusetts. This was opened in 1994 with Kirke-gaard Associates as acoustic consultants. Though the capacity of 1180 is modest, the rear wall of the hall can be completely opened to allow audience to listen on the lawn outside.
122 The development of the concert hall
Figure 4.44 Comparison to the same scale of long sections of (a) the Vienna Musikvereinssaal and (b) the McDer-mott Concert Hall in Dallas
While many designers have stuck closely to earlier precedents, two consultants have made developments to parallel-sided halls beyond the traditional shoebox proportions. Artec Consult-ants discarded their approach based on providing strong lateral reflections, which had generated highly moulded forms (section 4.11). The McDer-mott Concert Hall in Dallas of 1989 was the first of a continuing series of parallel-sided halls designed by Artec (Cavanaugh and Wilkes, 1999, p. 278).
To accommodate just over 2000 seats at a modern seating standard with a sufficiently large hall volume for reverberation purposes, it was real-ized that some dimension(s) would need to be
extended compared with the nineteenth-century shoebox halls. With the distance from the stage front to the furthest audience seat limited to 40 m, extending the hall length was not possible. Sub-stantially increasing the hall width on the other hand would be detrimental to lateral reflections.
This left the height, which was made significantly higher than in the nineteenth-century halls (Figure 4.44).
The Dallas hall was soon followed by Birming-ham Symphony Hall in England, discussed in detail in section 5.14. The concert hall in the Lucerne Cul-tural and Congress Centre of 1998 also belongs to the same family of designs. Each of these halls has
The development of the concert hall 123 seating opposite the stage organized very much
in the manner of a traditional opera house with a curved balcony front to three or four balconies. The balconies continue along the side walls in narrow horizontal strips with no more than two rows of seating each. A novel feature of these halls is the inclusion of reverberation chambers; in the case of the Dallas hall the chamber has a volume of 7200 m3, 30 per cent of the auditorium volume. The inten-tion is that sound will enter the chamber, reverber-ate around it and leak back into the auditorium. In this way it can be expected to extend the terminal reverberation (section 2.8.1).
In Tokyo, Beranek with Takenaka R&D Institute acted as consultants for the 1632-seat Takemit-su Memorial Hall in Tokyo Opera City (Hidaka, Beranek et al., 2000). While the auditorium plan is very traditional and two horizontal balconies run round the hall, the ceiling is pyramid shaped with its peak at 28 m above the main floor (Figure 4.45).
The inside surface of the pyramid is highly scatter-ing includscatter-ing quadratic residue diffusers (QRD).
Who would have predicted that the concert hall form favoured around 1900 would again become so popular a century later? It is almost as if the science of acoustics has had nothing to offer the design of concert halls. Science has provided quantification of both the subjective experience of listening to music and the objective acoustic behaviour. In most important respects, we are now able to predict the performance of an auditorium before it is built using either scale or computer models. It seems as if 100 years’ experience has just brought us round in a circle.
There are acoustic consultants who consider that the parallel-sided hall is the only viable solution and that the science of acoustics beyond reverberation time still has little to offer. Many other consultants keep a more open mind. The alternatives to parallel-sided halls with good reputations include the lateral
Figure 4.45 Takemitsu Memorial Hall, Tokyo Opera City
124 The development of the concert hall
directed reflection sequence hall (section 4.10). This can offer exciting acoustics but has not been picked up by other designers following Marshall; successful design with this auditorium form is probably more demanding than other options.
The terraced concert hall has now been tried in several locations and if designed with care seems capable of offering acoustic conditions as good as any parallel-sided hall. Of recent examples, the 1997 Kitara Concert Hall in Sapporo, Japan, by Nagata Acoustics with 2000 seats is an interesting devel-opment of the terraced hall, in that it uses a lot of large convex surfaces (Beranek, 2004). Compared with parallel-sided halls, the terraced concert hall has benefits in performance terms: it can provide an exciting relationship between performers and audi-ence giving a strong sense of shared experiaudi-ence as opposed to the formality in shoebox halls of per-formers facing audience directly. It has two further advantages. The first is flexibility of design: design details can be modified for individual seating areas usually without repercussions for other seating. This is often not the case in parallel-sided halls, where if conditions for instance under a balcony overhang are unsatisfactory, increasing the height under the soffit is likely to have major effects elsewhere in the hall.
The second advantage of the terraced hall con-cerns seat numbers. The maximum seat capacity in parallel-sided halls is around 2200, whereas several successful concert halls of different forms have been built with larger capacities up to 3000 seats.
In this context, it is particularly interesting to note that, for the parallel-sided Lucerne concert hall, the Lucerne authorities were persuaded that it would be in their best interests to reduce the proposed seat count from 2000 to 1840 for acoustic reasons.
The smaller number was considered the ‘optimum figure for mass clarity’ (Ryan, 1998).
Rather than the broad-brush approach used here to compare the acoustic merits of different gross auditorium forms, the next chapter deals with 16 British concert halls in detail. The discussion will be based on both subjective test results from listen-ers who completed questionnaires and objective acoustic measurements.
References
General
Bagenal, H. and Wood, A. (1931) Planning for good acoustics, Methuen, London.
Barron, M. (1992) Precedents in concert hall form.
Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, 14, Part 2, 147–156.
Beranek, L.L. (1962) Music, acoustics and architecture, John Wiley, New York.
Beranek, L.L. (2004) Concert and opera houses:
Music, acoustics and architecture, 2nd edn, Springer, New York.
Forsyth, M. (1985) Buildings for music, Cambridge University Press, England and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Forsyth, M. (1987) Auditoria – designing for the performing arts, Mitchell, London.
References by section Section 4.2
Elkin, R. (1955) The old concert rooms of London, Edward Arnold, London.
Meyer, J. (1978) Raumakustik und Orchesterklang in den Konzertsälen Joseph Haydns. Acustica, 41, 145–162.
Section 4.3
Allen, W.A. (1969) Acoustics twenty years after the Festival Hall. Royal Institute of British Architects Journal, February, pp. 62–67.
Beranek, L.L. (1977) The notebooks of Wallace C. Sabine. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 61, 629–639.
Beranek, L.L. (1979) The acoustical design of Boston Symphony Hall. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 66, 1220–1221.
Beranek, L.L. (1988) Boston Symphony Hall:
an acoustician’s tour. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 36, 918–930.
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Clements, P.A. (1999) Reflections on an ideal:
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Elkin, R. (1944) Queen’s Hall, 1893–1941, Rider, London.
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Section 4.4
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Section 4.5
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Section 4.6
Bagenal, H. (1950) Concert halls. Royal Institute of British Architects Journal, January, 83–93.
Parkin, P.H., Allen, W.A., Purkis, H.J. and Scholes, W.E.
(1953) The acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall, London. Acustica, 3, 1–21.
Trevor-Jones, D. (2001) Hope Bagenal and the Royal Festival Hall. Acoustics Bulletin, 26, No. 3, 18–21.
Section 4.7
Damaske, P. (1967) Subjektive Untersuchungen von Schallfeldern. Acustica, 19, 199–213.
Kosten, C.W. and de Lange, P.A. (1965) The new Rotterdam Concert Hall – some aspects of the acoustic design. Proceedings of the 5th International Congress on Acoustics, Liège, Paper G43.
Kuttruff, H. (2000) Room Acoustics, 4th edn, Spon Press, London.
Meyer, E. and Kuttruff, H. (1959) Zur akustischen Gestaltung der neuerbauten Beethovenhalle in Bonn. Acustica, 9, 465–468.
Section 4.8
Beranek, L.L. (2008) Riding the waves: a life in sound, science and industry. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Beranek, L.L., Johnson, F.R., Schultz, T.J. and Watters, B.G. (1964) Acoustics of Philharmonic Hall, New York, during its first season. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 36, 1247–1262.
Bliven, B. (1976) Annals of architecture – a better sound. New Yorker, November 8, 51–135.
126 The development of the concert hall
Cremer, L. and Müller, H.A. (trans. T.J. Schultz) (1982) Principles and applications of room acoustics, Vol.
1, Applied Science, London.
Fantel, H. (1976). Back to square one for Avery Fisher Hall. High Fidelity, October.
Lanier, R.S. (1963) Acoustics – what happened at Philharmonic Hall? Architectural Forum, 119, December, 118–123.
Meyer, E. and Kuttruff, H. (1963) Reflexions-eigenschaften durchbrochener Decken.
Acustica, 13, 183–186.
Schroeder, M.R. (1984) Progress in architectural acoustics and artificial reverberation: Concert hall acoustics and number theory. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 32, 194–203.
Schroeder, M.R., Atal, B.S., Sessler, G.M. and West, J.E. (1966) Acoustical measurements in Philharmonic Hall (New York). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 40, 434–440.
Schultz, T.J. (1965) Acoustics of the concert hall.
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Section 4.9
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Section 4.10
Marshall, A.H. (1979a) Aspects of the acoustical design and properties of Christchurch Town Hall, New Zealand. Journal of Sound and Vibration, 62, 181–194.
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(1998) The Hong Kong Cultural Centre Halls – acoustical design and measurements.
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Section 4.11
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Cremer, L. (1986) Der Trapezterrassenraum.
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The development of the concert hall 127 Johnson, F.R. (1981) An answer to the enigma of
flexibility for music and theater. Architectural Record, mid-August, 68–73.
Johnson, R., Essert, R. and Walsh, J. (1986)
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Lord, P. and Templeton, D. (1986) The architecture of sound, Architectural Press, London.
Schmertz, M.F. and Jaffe, J.C. (1979) Denver’s Boettcher Concert Hall. Architectural Record, March, 99–110.
Schultz, T.J. (1986) Room acoustics in the design and use of large contemporary concert halls.
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Skoda, R. (1985) Neues Gewandhaus Leipzig, VEB Verlag fur Bauwesen, Berlin.
Talaske, R.H., Wetherill, E.A. and Cavanaugh, W.J.
(eds) (1982) Halls for music performance, two decades of experience: 1962–1982. American Institute of Physics, New York.
Tennhardt, H.-P. (1984) Modellmessverfahren für Balanceuntersuchungen bei Musikdarbietungen am Beispiel der Projektierung des Grossen Saales im Neuen Gewandhaus Leipzig. Acustica, 56, 126–135.
West, J.E. (1966) Possible subjective significance of the ratio of height to width in concert halls.
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Section 4.12
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Hidaka, T., Beranek, L.L., Masuda, S., Nishihara, N.
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