Symphonic Movement Should The Spokane Symphony Move To The Fox Theater? Weighing The Advantages And Obstacles

(From For the Record, June 1, 2000): Rehearsals misstaed: The Spokane Symphony typically conducts three out of five rehearsals for its classics series concerts in the main Opera House auditorium. The number was misstated in an article in Sunday’s IN Life section.

As you may have heard, the Spokane Symphony made a bid on the Fox Theater earlier this month. If the deal goes through, the symphony will move most of its concerts out of the Opera House and into the Fox.

“What on earth for?” one longtime symphony subscriber asked. Many people love going to the Opera House for concerts. It’s spacious and comfortable, and the building makes a grand civic statement, inside and out.

So, “why move?” is a good question. There are several answers - some having to do with architecture, some having to do with acoustics, and some having to do with access.

The Fox, downtown at 1005 W. Sprague, has been highly praised as a prime example of “art deco” architecture. That’s the movement which produced the Empire State Building and other big-city landmarks, as well as a rash of movie houses built across the nation in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Architectural preservationists are keen to see the Fox saved from the wrecking ball. The theater has also attracted the interest of the Spokane Club, with some board members eyeing it as a target for demolition to make room for a parking garage for club members.

But it is the inside of the Fox that really interests the Spokane Symphony. And it is the inside that raises the most questions for the symphony’s audience and its musicians.

From the first concerts the orchestra gave in the Opera House in 1974, the acoustics of the place have been worrisome. Many in the 2,600-seat hall, with its wide, fan-shaped auditorium, feel remote from the performers and complain about the lack of “aliveness” in the orchestra’s sound.

Onstage, the musicians find it difficult to hear one another, making matters of exact ensemble and precise intonation difficult. This is made worse by the fact that the orchestra conducts only its final dress rehearsal in the main auditorium. Other rehearsals are in the Music Room, where the acoustics are worse - far worse, players say - than the Opera House stage.

The Fox, which originally seated 2,251, has a long, narrow design in the classic “shoe-box” configuration typical of many of the world’s great concert halls. But making the Fox into a concert hall is not just a matter of scouring 70 years of spilled pop off the floor, prying the gum off seat bottoms and moving the orchestra in.

Surprisingly, the most distant seats in the Fox are farther from the stage than the most distant seats in the Opera House. Still, as renowned acoustician Lawrence Kirkegaard puts it, “There is a big difference between a feeling of `distance’ and a feeling of `remoteness.’ ” The former puts you farther from the musicians; the latter puts you farther from the music.

In March, the symphony brought in Paul Scarbrough, a partner of the Connecticut firm of Jaffe Holden Scarbrough, to conduct an acoustical and architectural evaluation of the Fox. The symphony board has not released the Scarbrough report, but informal conversations and a luncheon talk he gave during his visit laid out some of the problems and possibilities.

The Fox was designed as a movie theater, not as a concert hall. Movie dialogue is most easily understood if the auditorium has a short reverberation period, if the sound is “dry.” That prevents boominess and echo.

Music, on the other hand, is far better served if the reverberation period is longer. That gives a “bloom” to the sound - the ring you hear in the air after an orchestra plays that loud, crisp chord that ends Mahler’s Second Symphony, for example. Acousticians describe the effect as “warm and enveloping.”

The sound in the Fox, as it stands now, lacks that bloom. Increasing the reverberation time could be improved by the addition of a stage shell that would help project the sound more forcefully into the auditorium. But given the other elements of the Fox’s construction, the acoustics would still be dry.

Another acoustical problem lies under the balcony in the Fox. It is long, overhanging more than half the rows of seats on the main floor. The farther back you sit under the balcony, the more muffled the sound becomes.

Scarbrough’s solution to both the resonance and balcony problems is thoroughly modern, but extremely controversial among musicians and finicky listeners.

He proposes “electronic architecture,” a complex system in which microphones near the stage pick up the sound of the orchestra. A computer-driven system then simulates the “ideal” sound by feeding parts of the acoustical spectrum to dozens of speakers concealed in the walls.

Such a system of electronic enhancement is used in many concert halls, both newly constructed and renovated spaces. The Silva Concert Hall in Eugene’s Hult Center was built with such a system in the 1980s. The renovations of Uihlein Hall in Milwaukee and the Circle Theater in Indianapolis both include electronic enhancement systems. New York’s State Theater added one last summer for New York City Opera.

The City Opera installation raised howls of objections that still haven’t died down. “Any way you slice it, it’s amplification,” wrote one irate subscriber in a letter to The New York Times.

But the Milwaukee installation in Uihlein Hall, a 2,200-seat auditorium roughly the same size as the Fox, has raised nary a complaint.

“I defy even acoustical purists to detect it if they didn’t know it was there,” says the Milwaukee Symphony’s Andrew Buelow. “It has been very successful for both orchestra players and audiences.”

Other topics that must be addressed if the symphony moves to the Fox include such mundane issues as increasing the number of toilets to such aesthetic questions as expanding the lobby space to comfortably accommodate pre-concert and intermission socializing.

Perhaps the most expensive aspect of any of the changes is expanding the stage and backstage area. The current stage will not comfortably accommodate a full-sized symphony, let alone the enlarged symphony and chorus that performed Mahler’s Second on the Opera House stage to close the 1999-2000 season two weeks ago.

The price tag adds up quickly. The asking price for the Fox is reputed to be slightly in excess of $1 million. Estimates of the cost of renovation vary wildly; depending on how extensive the work is, it could be as low as $5 or $6 million to as much as $15 to $18 million.

But it would be a solid investment in the symphony’s future, supporters say. The Spokane Symphony is already a very good orchestra (“far better than you deserve,” one visiting musician wryly observed). And it would only get better if it had its own home. Rehearsing and playing in the same place week after week - not possible now in the always-busy Opera House - would enable the musicians to know the hall better and hear each other better.

Many orchestras have become quite fine rehearsing and performing in the same concert hall, even if that hall is less than ideal acoustically. Musicians call it “playing the hall” as they play the music.

The Spokane Symphony performed concerts in the Fox from 1969 to 1974, before the Opera House was built. Even so, the orchestra did not make it home; the group rehearsed elsewhere. A permanent home at the Fox would not only provide the orchestra with rehearsal and performance space but with space for its offices as well.

And a 1,700-seat hall such as Paul Scarbrough proposes for the Fox would allow the symphony to not only play its own concerts there, but to host other groups that need something smaller than the Opera House but larger than the 740-seat Met.