Acoustic Lessons from the Renovated Town Hall (And a New String Quartet to Show it Off)

The May 5 concert at Town Hall provided some very good news for classical music in Seattle. With the excellent Ehnes Quartet, the town may now have a resident string quartet, which we have lacked since the Philadelphia String Quartet at UW (1966-84). The newly renovated Town Hall Seattle revealed excellent acoustics for live performance of music. That means we now have three such venues (Nordstrom, Meany, and Town Hall). Count your blessings and cross fingers that quality musical groups will fill these venues.

Town Hall, a converted Christian Science Church on First Hill, is an acoustically warm, resonant hall, but it badly needed some help [Full disclosure: I am the founder of Town Hall and a former director). Wier Harman, the executive director of Town Hall, hired the outstanding acoustical firm of Jaffe-Holden, and tests revealed the large auditorium was bass-heavy.

That problem was corrected in the recent renovation by constructing a “bass-trap” just behind the organ screen fronting the stage. A bass trap is a large thin membrane that like a drumhead absorbs bass. The second problem was sound coming from the lower level performance area and lobby and seeping through the single-pane painted-glass windows. A new HVAC system solved the internal sound bleed, and the restored windows are both brighter and double-paned. The Sunday afternoon performance, free of street noise, could support lovely, very soft passages.

The third problem was that the sound from musicians “went everywhere,” particularly up in the dome and flattened arches of the ceiling. That meant that the sound was uneven, had “hot spots,” and lacked focus. This was solved by creating a large, curved canopy over the stage, which pushed the sound to the sides of the hall, shielded some music from rising to the Mixmaster dome, and pushed the sound right into the audience more quickly.

The sound from the Ehnes Quartet that day was lovely, rich, burnished, full of overtones and character. My seat was stage left, near the south wall so I could hear the reflections of the side wall. It was just about perfect, putting Town Hall up there with some of the greatest acoustic halls I know (Jordan Hall in Boston and Wigmore Hall in London). Wow!

It was a fulfillment of my dream in starting Town Hall in 1999, which was meant to be a hall for chamber music, early music, small orchestras, vocal music, and recitals. Some of the founder organizations have foundered (notably Seattle Camerata, the Northwest Chamber Orchestra, and Philharmonia Northwest). Early Music Guild, another founding group, now plays concerts at Town Hall and other venues. Town Hall was meant to be a common mid-sized hall for such groups at a time when few affordable, available halls served this market.

Town Hall’s remodeled sanctuary is quite wide, relying on the complex ceilings to add character and resonance, rather than the lateral reflections of a shoebox geometry. Jordan Hall is also wide, as is Meany Center for the Performing Arts, where I always sit in the balcony and close to a side wall. As for Nordstrom Recital Hall, which I find too “bright” and dry, farther back allows for more blend. In short, don’t sit dead-center, but head for the walls or the balcony or the back. 

An early acoustical adviser, Artec, sought to enlarge the concert chamber by building perforated ceilings that would allow the sound to pass upward, where it would be mixed and allowed to “fall like rain” on the ears below. (Too expensive and chancy.) So the respected acoustical firm of Jaffe Holden, who were consultants for the McCaw Opera House, came up with the canopy and bass-trap solution. Russ Cooper, the acoustical designer on the Town Hall project, praises the resulting sound as “lovely” and describes Town Hall as “pretty unique.”  Cooper says the best seats at Town Hall are close to the side walls or up front. 

Town Hall ran out of money in its $35 million renovation and so did not install the acoustical drapes to deaden amplified sound in front of the big glass windows. That will square the circle of designing a hall for acoustic music and amplified speech — two remote poles in sound quality (wet and dry, respectively).

The Ehnes Quartet played the wonderful program of three Razumovsky quartets, Beethoven’s Opus 59 — a set of three masterpieces that were completely original at the time (1806) and immensely influential afterward. James Ehnes, a leading violinist and artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music, leads the quartet and his playing is rock-solid and a little held-back. The result is that the other players (Amy Schwartz Moretti violin, Che-Yen Chen, viola, and Edward Arron, cello) can shine and polish particularly the inner voices (Moretti and Chan are old friends), and the cellist can relish his prominence. I found the performance particularly dramatic, as Beethoven lets one character after another enter and transform the scene.

Typically a quartet is dominated by the first violin (not here) or by the dramatic personalities of the individuals (as with the Emerson String Quartet). Instead the Ehnes Quartet reminded me of the burnished, inward gleam of great European quartets like the Guarneri.

The Ehnes ensemble is also unusual in that they do not play and rehearse year-round as a quartet. Ehnes has a busy schedule as a soloist, and the other players teach and play chamber music. There is some sacrifice in precision and exquisite tuning, but a gain in freshness and openness. The Ehnes Quartet is now established as a touring quartet, and the Seattle concert of the three Beethoven quartets was on tour from San Diego to Seattle to Detroit.

Ehnes lives in Florida, but he recently bought a home in Magnolia, so he has become a fixture in musical Seattle. My hope is that the Ehnes Quartet and other players in the Seattle Chamber Music Society will come to think of Town Hall as their second home after Nordstrom/Benaroya. They played this concert to an almost-full hall and an audience rapt with attention and hugely enthusiastic at what they were hearing — musically and acoustically.