Earlier this fall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced it had hired a second firm to help improve the sound at the renovated Orchestra Hall. That move reignited an ongoing, often heated discussion among three Chicago Tribune critics, who among them have been attending shows at Orchestra Hall for more than 95 seasons. In varying degrees, they were unhappy with what they heard at concerts by the CSO and visiting performers since the hall was retooled in 1997.
It wasn’t usually the musicians they were complaining about, it was how Orchestra Hall now made them sound.
Why does this matter?
Orchestra Hall, it can be easily argued, is the heart of cultural Chicago, home not only to the CSO, which carries the city’s reputation with it around the world, but also is the stage where artists come to perform and take their experiences with them.
Essentially, a performance hall is like a stereo system. As the old Memorex TV commercials suggested, good sound reproduction has a tremendous impact on our listening experience. In a hall, the surfaces, distances, plumbing and electronics all come together to affect and project sounds like our amplifier and speakers do at home (where the shape, size and furniture in our listening rooms influence sounds).
Good sound is highly personal, as demonstrated by the dozens and dozens of choices of stereo systems in every price range. When we hear a great orchestra in a hall that diminishes sound, we may leave thinking we heard a good performance, but wonder why it wasn’t great. Critics, who also experience these subtle but important deficiencies, can help us understand why.
In the discussions here, which also include CSO officials, sound consultants and performers, we tried to find out why the sound at Orchestra Hall has gotten worse since the 1997 renovation. Exactly how bad and why was at the core of our conversations, ones that we share with you in this special report.
— Scott L. Powers, Entertainment Editor
It was obvious to me in the first week: Orchestra Hall, a once-great music room that had given Chicago sublime performances by everyone from pianist Arthur Rubinstein to trumpeter Miles Davis, had been damaged — badly.
For a price tag of more than $110 million, the folks who run the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had disfigured the acoustics (as well as the visual aesthetics) of a listening room that nobly had served symphonic audiences since 1904 and jazz listeners since the second decade of the 20th Century.
Though Orchestra Hall apologists argued that after the 1997 renovation the place had become the listening room it “wanted to be all along,” as acoustician R. Lawrence Kirkegaard told the Tribune in ’97, in fact Kirkegaard and others have been trying to undo the damage ever since — to varying degrees of success.
Meanwhile, the edifice that CSO Association President Henry Fogel and his board renamed Symphony Center ought to be rechristened “Fogel’s Folly.”
“I attended a series of jazz concerts at Orchestra Hall a year or two ago, and I was so disgusted with the sound that I haven’t come back,” said acoustician Jim Brown, whose Audio Systems Group designs the sound at the Jazz Showcase, Chicago’s top jazz room.
And though there’s no question that Symphony Center executives and acousticians have worked hard to improve matters since the refurbishment (with mixed results), they’re dealing with a possibly intractable problem that they could have anticipated.
In essence, they’re trying to make a single concert room work equally well for unamplified symphonic music and amplified jazz, blues, gospel and pop. Moreover, this piling on of musical functions was part of their justification for the costly renovation.
“Symphony Center will serve Chicago with a much greater and more diverse scope of activities than is possible in a concert hall built seven years after the death of Brahms,” Fogel told the Tribune in 1997, before the reopening. “The orchestra now has a facility we believe will resonate with all of Chicago.”
Or, as CSO music director Daniel Barenboim put it in the orchestra’s program book that season, “With the opening of Symphony Center, we now have the multifaceted facility to make music — all kinds of music — accessible to everyone.”
It’s all a blur
Yet the specific acoustical changes that Fogel, Barenboim and friends intended for the benefit of the CSO not only marred the orchestra’s sound in the new hall but rendered the amplified events garishly over-reverberant. In 30 years of regularly attending classical and non-classical performances in Orchestra Hall, this listener never has encountered such atrociously blurred musicmaking as in post-renovation Orchestra Hall performances by Irakere, Joe Lovano, Ray Drummond and Cassandra Wilson, among many others.
“The jazz and other amplified music that is presented in Orchestra Hall was a consideration for us, and we took it seriously,” said acoustician Kirkegaard, whose Chicago-based Kirkegaard & Associates designed the sound for the renovated hall.
“We had included in our design — and it still is in our design — sound absorption devices to be installed, so that Orchestra Hall would be sound-system friendly,” added Kirkegaard, pointing to the sound systems that touring jazz, blues and other bands typically use.
“But everyone [in Symphony Center management] was trying to save every thousand dollars, so these devices have not been installed. They should be.
“I have little doubt that it’s only tens of thousands of dollars, because the places for doing the installation are there. We’re just waiting for the word to do this.”
The missing links
Specifically, Kirkegaard refers to “banners,” or fiberglass boards, which he suggested for installation above the Orchestra Hall ceiling — out of sight of audience members but nonetheless capable of absorbing sound in an auditorium too reverberant for jazz. Before the 1997 renovation, when Orchestra Hall was a “drier,” or less resonant, room, jazz ensembles had little difficulty performing amplified music.
Since the renovation, however, acousticians have battled not only the flawed characteristics of the newly redesigned hall but also the additional sound coming out of monitors that jazz and pop musicians typically place onstage, so that they can hear each other. From the first amplified concerts played in Orchestra Hall since the renovation, it was obvious that large vocal-instrumental ensembles were producing so much sound that was projected in so many different directions that listeners heard an unseemly muddle at worst, an unflattering echo at best.
It’s important to note, however, that the redesigned hall is not the only problem. It’s compounded by the sound technicians for the touring jazz and pop bands, their experience in large amphitheaters leaving them unprepared for the particular acoustical demands of a symphonic auditorium.
“We have a lot of sound system operators who grew up in rock ‘n’ roll and either lost their hearing or simply have no sensitivity to these issues or very much taste in judgment,” Kirkegaard said.
Different requirements
Moreover, jazz — which Symphony Center management now considers second only to classical in the venue’s musical priorities — has intrinsically different sonic properties and acoustical requirements than symphonic music. If orchestral scores demand a blending of chords played by several instruments, for example, jazz requires utter crispness and clarity of detail among reed, brass and rhythm instruments.
“In most of the concert halls where we play, the tail of the echo is just too long for us,” said trumpeter-bandleader Wynton Marsalis, whose Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra regularly plays in symphonic auditoriums.
The disappointing acoustics of these rooms for jazz purposes persuaded Marsalis to demand a different sound for the auditoriums of Jazz at Lincoln Center, a new complex being built for the organization on Columbus Circle, in Manhattan.
“We want to get in our new Rose Hall [of Jazz at Lincoln Center] the type of golden sound that orchestras have in the best concert halls,” added Marsalis, referring to the warm, radiant tone that great orchestras convey in superior halls.
“But in halls where you get that golden sound, you also have this real long tail of the echo. That keeps you from hearing the very high and very low frequencies that are important in jazz, like when the cymbal and bass are going, which is practically all of the time. We don’t want that echo.
“But we’ve found that in concert halls where you don’t have that tail of the echo, you also don’t have that golden sound.”
Far from perfect
Whether or not Jazz at Lincoln Center attains its acoustical goal remains to be heard, but Orchestra Hall is far from anyone’s ideal. Though Symphony Center staffers have made some progress in controlling reverberation during jazz events by hanging drapes along the walls backing the stage, the results have been adequate, at best, with none of the “golden sound” or plushness of timbre that Marsalis speaks of.
“I think we’ve made a lot of improvement from some of the concerts we had in the early days after the renovation,” said Jim Fahey, Symphony Center’s director of jazz and special programming.
“I’ve seen [jazz] artists come here to their sound checks [before performances] and be a little bit concerned about the space, given its `live’ nature,” added Fahey, coining a euphemism for “over-reverberant.” “But I’ve heard countless artists come off the stage and be blown away by the sound that they got in a full house. The patrons seem to be very happy with it, and we don’t get complaints about the sound.”
Faint praise, indeed, for a hall that underwent a $110 million renovation. Fahey acknowledged, however, that if a new round of acoustical fine-tuning is made to help improve the sound for the CSO, he and his colleagues will have to go back to the drawing board to figure out how those changes impact amplified sound.
Holding out hope
Symphony Center thus remains, at best, a work in progress. Just last month, this listener heard several singers and orchestra performing music of Richard Rodgers during the Chicago Humanities Festival’s opening concert, and the sound proved every bit as bad as in the days immediately following the 1997 renovation.
Add to this the other fruits of the renovation — including the nearly useless corridor running from Michigan Avenue to Wabash Avenue and the clashing architectural styles of the stage and seating areas — and you wonder if there weren’t better ways to spend $110 million.
“I thought Orchestra Hall was fine the way it was,” said Jazz Showcase owner Joe Segal.
So did I.
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– An over-reverberance frequently plagues large ensembles.
– The lack of top-notch sound exists even when ensembles were not over-amplified.
– There is a wild inconsistency in sound quality from one jazz or pop event to the next.
