Harris Fine Arts Center
BYU’s Harris Fine Arts Center has been training grounds for generations of LDS visual artists, designers, actors, filmmakers, animators, and musicians. Normally teeming with new students this time of year, the spacious, mid-century atrium of the brutalist building is now a ghost town. Former tenants have departed to temporary digs while awaiting construction of a new building, on the same site, to house the visual and theatrical arts. Only the School of Music remains, for one last semester. Once music has relocated to a new building on the eastern edge of campus, the HFAC will go permanently quiet.
Current arts majors at the university outnumber the entire BYU student body of 1964, when the HFAC opened. Engineering challenges abounded in the beloved building, but the acoustical problems for musicians were deemed the most dire, so planning for a new music building proceeded first. As associate dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communications, I’ve been part of the conversations.
During one meeting, my boss, Dean Ed Adams, excitedly asked, “Have you ever heard of ‘vineyard’ style halls?” I had. The architectural and acoustical wonder by Frank Gehry in Los Angeles, Disney Concert Hall, is the most famous American example. (Coincidentally, Gehry was a former pupil of the HFAC’s architect, William Pereira.) This concert hall design is called vineyard style because the seating surrounds the stage in sloping terraces, like a hillside vineyard. I had purchased a ticket to the LA Philharmonic a couple of years after the hall’s 2003 opening with two goals in mind: to see Gehry’s building and to indulge in a favorite pastime of lapsed percussionists such as myself: silently deriding actual working drummers.
I assumed, despite the building’s starchitect status, that my cheap seat in a rear corner terrace would catch nothing but the tubby sounds of the drums and low brass just over the railing. That would be the cost, I supposed, of placing the performers in the middle rather than enclosing them within the glowing rectangle at one end of a traditional “shoebox” hall. I just hoped ear’s loss would be eye’s gain, putting me close enough to discern, and silently ridicule, timpanist’s mallet selections.
At downbeat I set to my sniping: those heavy #5 sticks? He clearly should have chosen the nimbler #3s! But I soon abandoned this petty pastime because even though I was closer to the drums than the conductor was, the orchestra sounded fantastic. I heard everything, in clear, brilliant balance. The hall sculpted sound into a lively, lucid whole, no matter how cheap the seat. And with the players right there, my eyes helped my ears extract subtle aural details. That was my experience with vineyard halls. Still, there were no precedents for vineyard style university venues of the size and function we needed. But the more we considered it, the more it made sense to pursue this nontraditional route.
The new building will open in January 2023, and my hard hat and I can report that the feel of the yet-unfinished thousand-seat concert hall is already apparent. It’s spacious, but somehow nothing in it seems distant. The farthest seat is less than 30 feet from the stage. Concerts there will have a visceral, sweaty, strikingly human immediacy. This will transform the audience experience—particularly valuable for an educational institution. I can picture it: a busload of fieldtripping schoolkids surrounds the stage with such breathy proximity that they can see the buttons on the trumpets, just like the ones on their rented horns in Beginning Band. I imagine a performance with a grandpa listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass, transported not only by the music, but by his oboist granddaughter’s beaming face after she plays the gorgeous double reed trio. Personally, I can’t wait to watch Itzhak Perlman perform in February 2023--and more specifically, to watch my students watch Perlman.
Musicologist Christopher Small famously insisted that music is not just something we make but something we do, and that when we experience musicking we hear the complex contours of the human experience itself woven out of air. In our new hall, we’ll do, and see, and hear musicking up close.—Jeremy Grimshaw
