The Soul of the Hall

With its twining skeleton rising dramatically downtown, Walt Disney Concert Hall is taking shape at last. For years, drawings and models of Frank O. Gehry’s celebrated design have portended an architectural wonder for Los Angeles. Finally, all that promise has an imposing physical presence.

Even so, a concert hall is much more than real estate, structural steel and a burnished-wave exterior. Its true virtue is empty space-and the air that fills it. How well sound travels through that air will determine Disney Hall’s ultimate success.

And for that there is only trust in the mysterious, ambiguous science of acoustics. Scale models and computer simulations can demonstrate the motion of sound waves, yet relatively few modern concert halls have stunning sound. Virtual reality cannot replicate the visceral sensation of sitting in a space and hearing it resound with real, unamplified music.

Which is why Yasuhisa Toyota, chief concert-hall acoustician of the Japanese firm Nagata Acoustics, has recently moved to Los Angeles from Tokyo. He has been at work on Disney Hall for more than a decade. Theories have been elaborated, plans drawn, experiments undertaken. Now he must make sure his plans are followed precisely, that nothing comes along at the last minute to derail them.

‘The ceiling design has long been fixed, but not the holes for the lighting,” he says, citing but one example of a potential problem. We are looking at a cutaway mock-up of the Disney interior at Gehry’s office in Santa Monica. The 48-year-old acoustician-bearded, stylishly dressed, cheerful but intense-is concerned that the lights may suck up sound. He will compensate with three layers of glass, an acoustical seal, which will have to be applied just so.

“Very small things can affect the acoustics in a concert hall in a very big way,” he warns.

There are so many very small things in the design of Disney Hall, the most architecturally complex concert hall ever attempted, that Toyota’s ultimate assurance must wait until the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays its first rehearsal there in the summer of 2003. With a big laugh, Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s general manager, suggests that she will gladly treat a critic to a first-class plane ticket to Paris on the day of the first Disney Hall tryout-anything to keep the press away from that nervous moment.

In fact, the Philharmonic doesn’t appear overly worried about the sound of Disney Hall. Toyota is Japan’s leading acoustician. He came to renown in 1986 with his design for Suntory Hall, Tokyo’s premier concert space. His greatest achievement thus far is Sapporo Concert Hall, which opened in 1997 in the capital city of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

It is Kitara, as Sapporo has nicknamed its new hall (the made-up word, chosen by citywide competition, implies the name of a musical instrument), that has most successfully put Philharmonic officials’ minds at relative ease. It shares Disney’s acoustical design. Put the schematics for the interior of the two halls on top of one another and they reveal a close fit: the same general interior shape, seating layout and the theater’s footprint.

In November, a Philharmonic delegation that included Borda, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, stage manager Paul Geller and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky flew to Sapporo to experience Kitara for themselves. I went along to observe.

“This is it,” Borda whispered excitedly to Salonen upon being ushered into an orchestra rehearsal in the theater. “This is exactly Disney Hall!”

Kitara lacks Gehry’s architectural exuberance and the complications of his fantastical design. But the broad layout of its plain, pleasantly minimalist space is recognizable if you’ve seen the models of Disney Hall. Kitara’s curved birch walls exude airiness. There is no proscenium stage or balconies. The orchestra sits on risers almost at ground level, and islands of audience members surround the players in stepped-up tiers. Nearly every seat in the theater offers the sensation of direct contact with the musicians and the music.

The sound is utterly alive. Salonen describes it as clear yet very warm. “Usually in concert halls you have either clarity or the warmth-for both qualities to exist together is almost unique,” he says, offering his enthusiastic first impression. “If we manage to build a hall that sounds as good, we will be very, very happy.”

This response, widespread among musicians who have performed in Kitara (Simon Rattle, for example), pleases Toyota but does not lessen his concerns for Disney.

“There is always so much pressure when a concert hall opens,” he says, “but the fact that this one is such important architecture and so important for Los Angeles makes even more pressure.”

The original planners of Disney Hall wanted something radically different from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Completed in 1964 and meant to present everything from orchestral music to recitals, operas to spoken theater, the Chandler is one big acoustical compromise.

If you hear the Philharmonic there, you will have the distinct impression of being in one room while the orchestra plays next door. Listeners are more like eavesdroppers. The bass instruments are not distinct, and there almost seems to be a veil dropped over the sound.

In 1988, after Gehry’s design was selected for Disney Hall, the architect, Philharmonic general manager Ernest Fleischmann, and others involved in the project sampled the world’s most famous halls and settled on the Philharmonie in Berlin as an acoustical model. Created by architect Hans Sharoun and acoustician Lothar Cremer in 1963 for the Berlin Philharmonic, it did away with the traditional stage, balconies and box seats, and put the orchestra in the center of the audience. A listener feels in touch with the musicians, the path of music to ear seems more direct than in a conventional hall.

Still the choice was not simple. As well-liked as the Philharmonie generally is, its open scheme-called the “vineyard” design because the audience sits in vineyard-like terraces-has not caught on universally. There is no place for orchestra or conductor to hide, the immediacy of the sound exposes any defect (the Berlin Philharmonic of the ‘60s was led by the glamorous Herbert von Karajan and fine-tuned into an incomparable ensemble).

“Such a concert hall is like a lens that enlarges the differences between a good and a lesser orchestra,” Toyota explains. It also focuses on the audience-any whisper, cough or rustled candy wrapper has a noticeable presence as well-which could be a problem with a typically noisy American audience.

There is, of course, the age-old shoe-box shape, like Boston’s legendary Symphony Hall, which presents the orchestra formally, on a proscenium stage and at a remove that can be interpreted as elegant. But a shoe box works best if it is relatively small, less than 2,000 seats, which is not economically feasible for a large American orchestra with a multimillion-dollar budget. Nor does it offer radically new architectural possibilities.

The other option is a kind of hybrid vineyard design, like that of San Francisco’s Davies Hall, which allows for the audience to sit in the chorus seats behind the orchestra but retains balconies and boxes. However, it proved no acoustical marvel when it opened in 1980. Only after a substantial renovation, which tempered its overpowering glare, has it become acceptable.

What helped clinch the Philharmonic’s decision to go with the vineyard design was Suntory Hall, which had opened shortly before the Disney Hall research began. Working under Nagata Acoustics’ founder, Minoru Nagata (now retired), Toyota had fully embraced Cremer’s groundbreaking acous-tical plan, and he added refinements of his own to Suntory. He made great strides in solving the one significant drawback in Berlin, where the musicians say they have trouble hearing themselves on the stage (Kitara is a further improvement).

Suntory established Toyota as the leading advocate of the vineyard layout, and after consultations with Nagata, the Philharmonic decided that thrilling surround sound and an in-your-face relationship between players and audience was ultimately no vice. Besides, the number of seats penciled out and the expansive shape met the demands of the architect’s imagination.

Toyota likes a vineyard design for the sheer physical sensation of being a part of the sound.

“From my point of view,” he says, “the concert hall is a big instrument. The stage floor is forced to vibrate by the deep bass instruments, the cellos, basses, timpani, piano and so forth. So the floor of the concert hall actually becomes part of those instruments.”

He sees his job as constructing a floor that directly transfers the players’ vibrations to the audience’s ears. So it is as instrument builder as well as engineer that he has approached Disney Hall.

At his high-tech office in Tokyo, Toyota is every inch the theoretician. He escorts me to various computers, each with its own animated programs that show sound waves beamed and reflected in Gehryan space. To an untrained eye, they look like highly advanced forms of the computer games blasting away in the nearby Shinjuku pachinko parlors.

But when I sit inside the cutaway model of Disney Hall at Gehry’s Santa Monica office, with Toyota standing over me describing refinements and materials, he is the craftsman, fiddling with angles and slopes, materials and finishes, as a violin maker might.

He has lately asked for two substantial changes in the interior design. He needs an elevation in the rise of the tiers in front of the orchestra, and a small wall added behind the first section of seats. Toyota, who has a doctorate in acoustical engineering, played oboe in his college orchestra, and his musician’s ear has told him something that his earlier calculations did not.

From listening to Kitara, he now realizes that a sharper slope and an added wall will provide those sitting in the front seats with early reflections of the sound. This is always a problematic area in concert halls because sound tends to shoot immediately to the rear of the theater and then ricochet back.

Currently, Toyota is focusing on the issue of the Disney seats, which is the last of the major design decisions. The process, he says, is typical of his collaboration with Gehry. Where Toyota has specific requirements, the acoustician is unbending. In all other matters, he has an almost amused detachment.

For the seats, Toyota’s needs are limited to the materials. The cushions, he explains, must have the same absorption properties of the human body, so that the hall’s sound won’t vary depending on how many seats are filled. And the wood on the seat backs must be just the right hardness, to properly reflect sound. But he has no concern about their height, depth, width or shape. That’s for Gehry to decide.

The color doesn’t matter, does it? I ask jokingly.

“No,” he replies, laughing, and then says that anything is possible and maybe it could.

The red fabric on the samples in Gehry’s office might add to the hall’s warmth; if the seats were blue, people might perceive a cooler sound.

“Psycho-acoustics is a delicate issue, but it is important,” Toyota admits.

He points to the walls of the concert hall model. In Kitara, the light birch and simple curved lines help create a sense of openness that everyone notices. Will Disney Hall’s Douglas fir suggest something cozier, even though the two woods have the same acoustic properties?

“The material of the walls affects not only the way an audience hears music,” Toyota says, “but even more important, it can affect the way a musician plays.”

Physics dictates the necessary hardness of the wall covering. Any material that fits the specs will do, including concrete of the right formula and texture.

But tell that to a musician.

“The musicians must be comfortable,” Toyota continues, “and they instinctively think that wood is an acoustical material and concrete is not. So they will likely play differently if they sense that they are not in what looks to them like a friendly acoustical environment.”

Toyota returns to the subject of the all-important stage floor, the place where a direct connection is made with the musicians. It is critical that it be made of a very soft and pliant wood. For Kitara, he specified a rare Japanese wood, hinoki, which is too expensive to export for Disney. Here, he has searched out a pine that has almost the same sonic properties.

Gehry’s elaborate design seems as though it would present Toyota with his greatest challenges. What about, say, the organ pipes that jut forward in a chaotic tangle, is that good or bad? Pipes absorb low frequencies, Toyota explains, and their shapes must be compensated for in any hall with an organ. Their unusual placement in Disney Hall, however, is not important.

In fact, Toyota claims to be happiest when working with a rule-breaking architect. He points with particular pride to his collaboration on the Kyoto Concert Hall with Arata Isozaki, the same risk-taking Japanese architect who designed the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

‘If it looks good, it is always good for me,” is Toyota’s motto.

It’s an attitude that has won over Gehry, who admits that it has not always been easy to accommodate acoustical needs.

“For me, for the rest of my life, I want to work with him,” the architect told an audience at a recent press conference for the concert hall. He has already brought Toyota in on another, smaller concert hall he is designing for Bard College in New York.

Still, Disney has not exactly been smooth sailing for Toyota. “I don’t like to use the term compromise,” Toyota says of some of the things he has been forced to accept in Disney.

One sticking point is a small balcony, which will give the hall some extra seats. Although Disney has a footprint that is slightly smaller than Kitara, and the same distance between the stage and rear seats, it will have 2,273 seats, whereas Kitara has just 2,008. And the last row of seats underneath that balcony presents special problems.

In a concert hall, if you can see the ceiling, which is where most of the sound is initially reflected, you are in a good position to hear. Because the ceiling won’t be visible from the seats in that rear row, Toyota is mulling adjustments that will deliver a maximum amount of direct sound there.

To solve these kinds of problems, Toyota relies on physical data about the exact way sound waves will move in this space. At his request, a detailed model of the Disney interior, to a one-tenth scale, was constructed for acoustical tests (it is on public display outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion). In it, he placed small microphones throughout the seating areas and experimented with test tones 10 times higher than the frequencies produced by orchestral music.

Other acoustical tests have been taking place in public without the public necessarily being aware of them. Toyota designed the orchestra’s risers for Disney Hall several years ago; they were built and the Philharmonic now uses them in the Chandler Pavilion. Risers, it turns out, can also make a big difference.

At a recital in Suntory Hall in Tokyo that I attended with Toyota in November, he complained at intermission that cellist Mischa Maisky and pianist Martha Argerich weren’t being heard to their best advantage, because they were playing on an empty stage. For the second half, the hall’s risers, which reflect sound for a soloist, were installed behind them, and, sure enough, there was more sonic impact. Backstage afterward, Argerich agreed with Toyota that the risers had helped.

But then Toyota cautioned that acoustical science alone might not fully explain what was at work. Concerts always sound different after intermission, he pointed out, once the musicians have settled in and the audience’s ears have become acclimated.

For the next year and a half, Toyota will be a regular presence at the Disney Hall construction site. As the interior begins to take shape, he will be continually checking drawings, making tests-some of which are intuitive, like tapping everything in sight-and making adjustments.

Once rehearsals begin, his fiddling will go into high gear. He is leaving some things, such as the final position of an adjustable wall behind the stage, until opening night. And even then the hall will not be finished.

Toyota says that most adjustments can be made within a couple of weeks of the hall’s completion. But some materials can take three, four or even five years to completely settle.

On opening night in Sapporo, 31/2 years ago, Toyota reports that Kitara sounded just as it does today. But that was not the case for the Kyoto Concert Hall, which opened in 1994. He describes it as “dead” that first night-the sound lacking presence-even though the data from the physical measurements and tests indicated that it should have been fine.

Not knowing what to do, Toyota did nothing. Three months later, he claims, the hall sounded just as he had always hoped it would.

Why?

“I have no idea,” Toyota answers. “If I knew the answer, I could make a Stradivarius. But with all our computers, all our knowledge, we cannot make even one Stradivarius. And if you consider a concert hall a very big instrument, it is much more complicated than a violin, much more difficult to make and much more difficult to understand.

“It is all those unknown factors that make it such a challenge but also so interesting. And with so many risks.”

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.