A Sound Redesign

For many years, USC music students and faculty members have been performing in a campus facility that most have charitably termed an unsatisfactory acoustical environment: the Allan Hancock Auditorium on Childs Way.

Those days are over, thanks to a $1-million donation by Martha Newman Ragland in memory of her first husband, legendary film composer Alfred Newman. This Friday, the redesigned and entirely rebuilt northwest corner of the historic Hancock Foundation building will be formally dedicated and renamed the Alfred Newman Recital Hall.

USC School of Music Dean Larry Livingston views the project in metaphorical terms: “Think about what Alfred Newman did with his life. Someone says to him, ‘We’ve got a movie and we’d like to have you write the music.’ The movie is a finished piece, awaiting the music to give it passion, an emotional heart and center. For us, the school is the film and the hall is the long-awaited emotional center for completing that equation.”

Newman won nine Academy Awards, more than any composer in Hollywood history. His music adorned such classics as “Wuthering Heights,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “How Green Was My Valley,” “All About Eve,” “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “How the West Was Won.” He was equally at home adapting Broadway musicals for film, including “South Pacific,” “The King and I” and “Camelot.”

His connection with USC is direct if less well-known. The school marching band has been playing “Conquest”--the march that heralds the entrance of Traveler, the school’s equine mascot, and which serves as a rousing victory song--at every USC football game since the early ‘50s. Newman wrote it for the 1947 film “Captain From Castile” and was instrumental in giving it to the school.

The composer’s papers were donated to USC shortly after his death in 1970. Two of his sons attended the university: David has a master’s from USC, and Thomas spent two years there before transferring to Yale. Both are now Oscar-nominated film composers. The Viklarbo Chamber Ensemble--co-founded by Alfred’s daughter Maria, a composer of concert music--was ensemble-in-residence at USC for five years.

In 1989, Ragland decided to give $1 million to USC. “I wanted to do something for Alfred’s memory,” she said last week. The notion of renovating Hancock arose in a meeting with Livingston and School of Music director of development Peggy Schmid, and the decision to proceed was made in 1996.

By the time construction began in May 1998, the original donation had ballooned to $1.6 million through investments, and an additional $500,000 grant from the Adams-Mastrovich Family Foundation provided the school with the $2.1 million needed to complete the renovations. (The entrance has been renamed the Mary Adams Balmat Memorial Lobby.)

It was a complex design and engineering challenge, according to project director Susan O’Connell of the Santa Monica office of architectural and design firm SMP-SHG. The sonic factor was so crucial that acoustical experts had to be consulted at every turn; theater consultants were necessary in redesigning the seating layout and lighting; and because the building’s museum is on the federal Historic Register, the redesign of the 3,800-square-foot hall had to be in keeping with the rest of the Hancock Foundation building.

“At the beginning of the process, we thought a lot of the existing fabric was going to stay and we would add to it,” O’Connell said. “It was only as we got deeper into the design with the acoustical engineers and the consultants that we realized we were going to be demolishing just about everything and starting over.”

Built in 1940, Hancock Auditorium was designed to serve as much as a lecture hall as a site for musical performance. O’Connell recalled attending architecture lectures there while she was a student at USC.

Sound-wise, Livingston said, the room “was extremely dead. Acoustical tile, which was all over, made it a very dry venue. And the first crime of acoustics is to build parallel long walls, which allow long-standing, low-frequency waves to accumulate. You had both a dry and very uneven acoustical environment here.”

The room underwent an aesthetic face lift, including removal of the acoustical tile, a decade ago. “The perverse result of that,” Livingston said, “was to take a very dead, uneven hall and sustain the bad part--the uneven acoustical response--but now make it very live.” Loud sound makers, such as jazz bands, no longer liked the room; softer ones, such as performers of early music, found it friendlier.

“It lacked warmth, and while it was quite reverberant, the reverberance had a clattery quality that harmed clarity and wasn’t a very pleasant sound,” explained Joseph Myers of Kirkegaard & Associates, the Downers Grove, Ill.-based consulting firm that did an extensive study of the room’s acoustics.

The acousticians came out, listened, talked to users of the room and examined the facility at length. They determined, Myers said, “that the very flat, angled surfaces made of thin plaster were absorbing low-frequency sound, and were allowing high-frequency sound to rattle around in the room without much diffusion.”

Solutions to the problem involved the geometry of the room, building materials and construction methods. A key moment, O’Connell said, was when Myers told her to “think of a cave with very irregular walls and very hard surfaces, then pulling drapes over those when you need to.” The result, she added, is that “there’s not a straight surface in here. Everything is at a different angle.”

The old plaster atop the poured-in-place concrete walls was torn down and replaced with dense multiple layers of drywall and plaster, reinforced with steel framing. Retractable curtains on the side and back walls now offer acoustical flexibility.

“You can fine-tune the room very nicely by bringing out the curtains for a brass group or taking them into the pockets for a string quartet,” Myers said. “There’s a nice amount of variability built into the hall which--for a recital hall in a music school, where you’re going to hear all kinds of different groups and solo instruments playing everything from Palestrina to Philip Glass--is absolutely essential.”

The stage was enlarged, and accommodates up to 40 musicians; the old squeaky, rattling seats were replaced (the hall now holds 294); diffusers and reflectors were added throughout; air-conditioning was installed; and an acoustically isolated greenroom was created adjacent to the stage. Construction was completed in November.

Morten Lauridsen, chair of the composition department and in his 32nd year as a member of the USC faculty, recalled that the first public performance of his own music was in the old Hancock Auditorium in 1964. “Acoustically, it was unflattering to virtually any kind of performance,” he said.

Visiting the renovated hall recently, however, he reported, “I was sitting in the back row, listening to a string quartet, and it was almost as if I had earphones on. Every note came through clear as a bell.”

Newman Hall will host more than 200 performances a year--nearly half of all the recitals, auditions and other musical events on campus. But USC officials think of it in broader terms. “Certainly the specific, academic goals were first, but we don’t see this as limited to that,” Livingston said. “We are part of the extended downtown corridor. We see this as a professional, world-class presenting environment, a contribution to Los Angeles.”

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Friday night’s opening of the Alfred Newman Recital Hall is by invitation only. The first public concert will be Feb. 9, the initial offering in the School of Music’s New Music Masters series, “USC Faculty and Friends in Recital,” John Perry, solo piano, 8 p.m. $4-$7. (213) 740-3229.