Renovation of Music Hall Nearly Complete

The renovation of Cal State Northridge’s 28-year-old Music Recital Hall is nearly complete--again.

After putting the final touches in December, 1993, on a major reconstruction of the university’s former choral rehearsal hall, CSUN officials found they had to start over again when surveying the damage caused to the building by the Northridge earthquake.

But even though the January, 1994, temblor ruined about $350,000 in renovation repairs, the spirit of CSUN’s music department staff remained steady, CSUN officials said.

“It was a big nuisance,” said department Chairman Jerry Luedders of the setback. “But our concern was to remain focused on where we wanted to go as a department.

“We wanted to continue striving to run a first-class program.”

And so, with the purpose of improving the acoustics of the hall and making room for a larger concert audience, the entire building was gutted last summer.

Last-minute touches are now expected to be finished by April 22 when the university will hold an invitation-only “grand reopening” concert for faculty and university alumni.

“We took it all the way back to bare concrete and started up again with our original designs,” said Luedders. “The point of the whole project was to give our students a better environment for their recitals.

“Before we started renovation, events in the hall were acoustically abominable. The students often sought to play in churches or anywhere else instead.”

To mitigate that desire in its aspiring musicians, the department hired a Westlake Village-based acoustical consulting firm to work with the building’s architect in designing a concert setting conducive to the diverse range of student performances.

The primary result of that pairing can be found in a lush automatic “acoustical curtain” draped over the concrete walls of the entire auditorium.

With the flip of a switch, said department program director Rose Mathias, the cotton and velvet curtain will open and close to allow the right amount of sound needed during a particular recital to bounce off the hall walls.

“Every type of performance needs different acoustics,” said Mathias. “If you have a large jazz ensemble, you want the curtain to absorb a good deal of the sounds coming from the group.

“But if you have a solo clarinet recital, you need as much sound as possible to come off the walls so the audience can capture the subtleties of the performance.”

Additional improvements to the hall include the elimination of concrete risers on stage left over from the days when the building was used solely for choral rehearsals. With those risers gone, the construction of a new and more space-efficient stage was made possible.

With the smaller stage, audience capacity in the hall has increased from 180 to 200.

“It completes our objective,” Luedders said of the stage. “Now, with a larger audience section and a smaller (playing space), the acoustics in the room are beautifully proportioned.

“And, of course it never hurts to sell more tickets.”