UCSD's new Conrad Prebys Music Center

UPDATE: I added the photo after visiting this building. As with many things UCSD, they have some extraordinary resources and people and extraordinarily ugly architecture. I cannot believe somebody thought that a world class recital hall venue built in the 21st century should look like this, but then again, it was probably commissioned to match the prison-block concrete warmth of the rest of the campus' buildings. Oh, and the "boldly-colored" smaller theater mentioned below is a generous way of saying they picked hot neon orange for the seats.

SD Union-Tribune

In the zone
Performers will find a perfect place to play at UCSD's new Conrad Prebys Music Center
By Will Bowen

2:00 a.m. May 3, 2009

Hungarian-born graduate student Katalin Lukacs was one of the first musicians to play in the state-of-the-art small concert hall in the new $53 million Conrad Prebys Music Center at UCSD. Lukacs sat down at the grand piano, carefully opened her Liszt score, and began to play. She played for one hour straight, as if mesmerized – transfixed and transported to other dimensions by the rapturous quality of the sound in the hall.

Soon the public will have the same opportunity to experience an acoustical environment that UCSD hopes, in the words of Rand Steiger, the music department chair, “will develop a reputation as being one of the best small concert halls in the world.”

The 400-seat Prebys Concert Hall, which opens Friday, is the centerpiece of the new Conrad Prebys Music Center. It's named after the Point Loma developer and piano aficionado, who contributed $6 million to ensure that the music center's construction, which was facing possible shutdown due to state budget cuts, could finally be completed.

“So far as I am aware, there is no other dedicated music facility – for presentation, exploration and learning – anywhere in the world that can match the CPMC facilities,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and UCSD faculty member Roger Reynolds.

The Prebys Concert Hall is the brainchild of renowned acoustician Cyril Harris, who teamed up with his associate of 23 years, architect Mark Reddington of LMN Architects, based in Seattle, to produce a masterwork of acoustic design.

This is the last project and perhaps the crowning achievement of an illustrious career for the retiring Harris, who in June will turn 92. Harris, a legend in acoustics circles, has won numerous awards (including a 1997 Gold Medal from the Acoustical Society of America) and has authored many books (including the 1950 “Acoustical Designing in Architecture,” the bible of acoustical design).

Harris has been involved in the construction of more than 100 halls, among them the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego and the highly acclaimed Benaroya Hall in Seattle, upon which the UCSD concert hall is based. Some experts believe that with each project, Harris has gotten a little better. And his last one may be his best.Harris' assessment: “There is only one hall like it in the world.”

Architect Reddington listens to the needs of his clients rather than coming at them with an agenda. He disavows any stylistic labels, claims no heroes of architecture or buildings he trembles before. Rather, he is a man interested in building projects that serve people while minimally impacting the environment.

Reddington and Harris' design “demonstrates a mastery of basic principles, and elevates them by pushing their limits,” Steiger said. “This is possible only with the freedom for, respect for, even expectation for innovation. In a way, the concert hall is a physical manifestation of what this department has always stood for.”

The music center was constructed on the eastern part of the UCSD campus near the intersection of Russell Lane and Gilman Drive in what is known as the Arts District. Like its twin, the Theatre District, built around La Jolla Playhouse, it is part of UCSD's Neighborhoods Plan, meant to bring the feeling of community, warmth and a sense of belonging to a campus once known for its social alienation.

The new facility replaced the old single-story CRCA (Center for Research in Computing and the Arts) building. CRCA was fondly loved for its moldy carpets and at night its furry scampering creatures but also for great music, experimental performance and art shows, and the best receptions on campus. Many miss it.

The music center is a three--story, rectilinear, gray-colored modernist structure measuring some 46,880 square feet. It is mainly constructed of concrete and has open areas on the various levels offering expansive views. The basic theme is one of openness, transparency and access. There is much attention to detail with an artistic flair.

In addition to the concert hall, the center's first floor contains a 150-seat Experimental Theatre for multimedia presentations, a more conventional, boldly colored 150-seat theater/lecture hall, offices and a large orchestra practice room. The back wing is almost entirely devoted to the percussion department.

The second level houses a computer lab, recording studios, a conference room, faculty studios, and classrooms. On the third level, there are numerous practice rooms, faculty offices and a unique, artistically inspiring chamber music practice room.

Some may wonder if in these difficult economic times, with so many state cutbacks to education, if it was a bit extravagant for the university to spend so much money on a new music building.

Music department chair Steiger points out the building had been in the planning stages for more than 20 years, long before the budget crisis. The music department, which has 178 undergrad music majors and 85 graduate students, has been spread out in five locations. Its Mandeville headquarters, built in 1974, is hopelessly out of date and acoustically inadequate. To renovate Mandeville would have cost more than a new building, according to Steiger.

Steiger said the new building passed through two rounds of value engineering to cut costs, trim the fat and eliminate any frills. However, if not for private donations (not only from Prebys, but also $1 million from John Moores, $350,000 from Ann and Joel Reed, and others), construction would still have been halted due to budgetary concerns.

But putting all concerns about costs aside, what ultimately makes it all worthwhile is the concert hall. Ultimately, a da Vinci is worth it because of how it enriches the spirit. For this project, Harris was given complete freedom to design the physical manifestation of all his theories of acoustics. And Reddington said he set out to create something that would make patrons' hearts “beat faster upon first sight.”

The stage, although too small for a full symphony, is ideal for a chamber ensemble (the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, which incorporates UCSD students, will continue to perform at Mandeville Auditorium). The ceiling and the walls are constructed of fitted triangular panels, attached to metal frames that are hung securely from the high ceiling on numerous hidden cables with shock absorbing springs. Thus, if a jet plane rumbles over, the sound will not penetrate the hall.

On the back wall are long strips of wood paneling that can be covered with fabric and can be adjusted to “tune” the room's acoustics. The effect of everything in the hall on the sound has been precisely calculated – from the absorption of sound by each seat to the glue on the paneling.

Harris points out that the key factors affecting sound quality in the room are reverberation (the length of time sound takes to fade) and diffusion (how sound moves through the room). When you have both, he said, “you hear the sound from all directions.” All the shapes, absorptive materials and reflective surfaces in the room have been precisely and scientifically constructed to produce the optimal reverberation time and the optimal diffusion of the sound across the spectrum, in an effort to create the best possible acoustics for music.

“The initial sound coming from the stage is clear and true, no matter where you sit in the hall,” Steiger said. “And the beautiful reverberation that follows creates a rich, enveloping sound without sacrificing clarity.”

As Reynolds puts it, “the sound blooms around you in a way you may have imagined, but have never experienced before.”

The Experimental Theatre is equipped with more than $150,000 worth of sound equipment from Meyer Sound of Berkeley. Steiger calls it the concert hall of the future. The actual acoustics in the Experimental Theatre are quite dead, but with a push of a button you can digitally alter the sound to create a virtual acoustic environment. Many of the faculty are as excited about it as the concert hall.

“My own interests are particularly in the Experimental Theatre and in the new concert hall,” Reynolds said. “Doing innovative work in the arts is inevitably challenging. This building removes many of the usual obstacles from one's path and leaves the responsibility exactly where it ideally should be: with the creative imagination itself.”

There is an old folk belief that to dream of a building during sleep is actually to dream about the self in a metaphorical sense. UCSD's now realized its dream of a new building; it should be the site for a new and renewed self for the department that will have far-reaching consequences.

Still, some days department chair Steiger stands by the large window of the Experimental Theatre and gazes at the vacant lot across the street. He dreams of an even larger symphony-sized concert hall along the same lines of the small one UCSD now has. Steiger is hoping that once people experience the phenomenal acoustics of the small hall, they will want more and they will find a way to fund an even larger hall.

Yes, Steiger is a dreamer, but he is a visionary who knows how to do the hard work to make his dreams come true. He is truly unique in that he is inspired to reach out of the closed elite circles that characterize many UCSD departments to touch humanity. He wants to share his music and his concert hall with all of San Diego and perhaps all of the world.

Will Bowen is a San Diego writer.

A 7,500-Square-Foot Ad for Chanel, With an Artistic Mission

NYT
July 24, 2008
A 7,500-Square-Foot Ad for Chanel, With an Artistic Mission
By CAROL VOGEL

A rectangular patch of sand in Central Park may be the last place you’d expect to find a gleaming “Star Trek”-style spacecraft. But an art pavilion that resembles just that will make a temporary landing there this fall.

Called Mobile Art, the structure itself was designed by the renowned London architect Zaha Hadid and will occupy the Rumsey Playfield, midpark at 70th Street, from Oct. 20 to Nov. 9. (It is Ms. Hadid’s first New York building, albeit temporary, and has already made stops in Hong Kong and Tokyo and is headed later for London, Moscow and Paris.)

Yet beyond its artistic mission, the pavilion is a provocative advertisement. Chanel, the fashion brand, commissioned Ms. Hadid to create the traveling structure to house works by about 15 hot contemporary artists. Each was asked to create a work that was at least in part inspired by Chanel’s classic 2.55 quilted-style chain handbag, so named because it was first issued in February 1955.

Maureen Chiquet, Chanel’s global chief executive, declined to give specifics on financial arrangements. But officials familiar with the project, requesting anonymity in deference to Chanel, said that the fashion house was donating a sum “in the low seven figures” to the Central Park Conservancy. Chanel will also pay the city a “use fee” of $400,000.

Artists recruited for the project include Sophie Calle of France, Sylvie Fleury of Switzerland, Subodh Gupta of India and the Russian collective Blue Noses. The resulting works in the show, organized by Fabrice Bousteau, editor in chief of Beaux Arts magazine, include sculpture, photographs, videos and installation pieces.

Many of the artists explored the notion of the handbag as a cultural symbol, often with a dash of irreverence. Mr. Gupta produced “All Things Are Inside,” a video installation that is a meditation on people in transit, like an Indian laborer who returns from Dubai. It also includes clips from Indian films in which the handbag emerges as an element in a human drama.

Blue Noses created “Fifty Years After Our Common Era or Handbags Revolt,” an installation of packing boxes in which videos show satirical moments in the life of a handbag. Ms. Fleury created a giant Pop Art-style quilted handbag lined with pink fur; inside is a makeup compact in which you can view a video of women shooting handbags with guns.

The genesis for the project was the handbag’s 50th anniversary in 2005, when Chanel’s designer, Karl Lagerfeld, issued a new version of the purse, Ms. Chiquet said. The project took several years to come to fruition.

Admission to the exhibition in Central Park will be free, although visitors are advised to book timed tickets at chanel-mobileart.com.

With the weakened dollar New York has become a magnet for European and Asian visitors, and city officials are hoping that the art pavilion will be a draw for tourists. They cited precedents like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Gates,” in which 7,500 gates festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels were positioned along Central Park’s pathways for 16 days in 2005, or the four waterfalls designed by the artist Olafur Eliasson that grace the shores of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Governors Island this summer.

“Right now Central Park is one big international duty-free zone,” said Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner. “You can’t walk through it without hearing lots of different languages.”

Douglas Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy, said the pavilion would fit perfectly on the 1.5-acre playfield. “It’s low enough so it won’t disturb people,” he said. “We wouldn’t use the Great Lawn or Sheep Meadow. It’s not taking over someone else’s space. It’s a neat little surprise.”

He and Mr. Benepe described Chanel’s donation as a windfall for the park. The money will go toward enhancing its horticulture, particularly in the area from 85th Street to the Harlem Meer.

Asked whether he anticipated criticism for allowing Chanel to advertise one of its products in the park, Mr. Benepe countered, “Everything has a sponsor.”

“Artists in 17th-century Italy wouldn’t have been in business were it not for their patrons,” he added, noting that ING lends its name to the New York City Marathon, which generates millions of dollars in tourist revenue each year.

The convergence of art, architecture and fashion is commonplace these days. A Louis Vuitton bag designed by the artist Richard Prince is constantly spotted on the streets of New York, Basel and London. The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s creations for Louis Vuitton were sold in a special shop that formed part of a Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The architect Rem Koolhaas has helped define the look of Prada shops, and Frank Gehry recently designed a line of jewelry for Tiffany & Company.

“Art is art. Fashion is fashion,” Mr. Lagerfeld said. “However, Andy Warhol proved that they can exist together.”

Noting Ms. Hadid’s star status — she won the architecture profession’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, in 2004 — he suggested that “the most important piece of art is the container itself.”

In an interview in her London office, Ms. Hadid said that even though she has not yet designed a permanent building in New York, she liked the idea that the pavilion “lands, creates a buzz and disappears.”

The challenge, she said, was to create a pavilion that was both visually compelling and could be easily transported. Each piece had to fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Using computer software Ms. Hadid designed a 7,500-square-foot doughnut-shape structure with a central courtyard. Its lightweight panels can be packed in 51 shippable containers; no panel is wider than 7.38 feet.

Skylights admit natural light, and computer-generated lighting casts a rainbow of colors around the base of the exterior that glows day and night.

Visitors entering the pavilion will be given MP3 players. On a track created by the sound artist Stephan Crasneanscki they will hear the French actress Jeanne Moreau discussing everything from sex and love to the secrets at the bottom of a woman’s handbag.

After “Mobile Art” makes its last stop in Paris in 2010, Chanel will have the option to buy all the art. As for Ms. Hadid’s pavilion, Ms. Chiquet said, Chanel owns it but is not yet sure what it will do with it.

Its transitory nature, everyone agreed, will be part of the allure. “It’s like an alien spacecraft that lands in the park and, before you know it, takes off again,” Mr. Benepe said.

Capitol Records fears for its sound from Hollywood project

Los Angeles Times
Capitol Records fears for its sound from Hollywood project
Excavation would occur just feet away from famed echo chambers beneath the Hollywood tower. EMI is appealing an approval of the project as recording pros fret.
By Bob Pool
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 18, 2008

They were singing the blues in the legendary Studio A at Hollywood's Capitol Records tower.

"Losing this place would be a big deal. There's nothing better than this anywhere in the world," said recording engineer Al Schmitt.

Schmitt, a 19-time Grammy winner, was standing over the banquet-table-size mixing board in the Vine Street studio's control room. Punching a button on the console, he played back a silky smooth track recorded minutes earlier by jazz singer Roberta Gambarini. The sound was flawless.

Those involved in Hollywood's thriving music scene fear that's about to change.

A developer plans to build a 16-floor condominium and 242-car underground parking garage next door to the landmark cylindrical Capitol Records tower.

The Los Angeles Planning Commission has signed off on the project, but Capitol Records' parent company, EMI, has appealed to the City Council to overturn the approval. The council's planning and land-use committee is scheduled to consider the issue Tuesday.

Musicians, producers and sound engineers warn that the project would produce noise and vibrations that will make quality sound recording impossible at Capitol's famed studios.

At risk are Capitol's unique echo chambers: concrete bunkers that allow recording engineers to sweeten tracks with a rich reverberation.

The eight chambers are built 30 feet underground and are about 18 feet from where pile-driving and excavation work would be done for the condominium project.

"There is nothing like these echo chambers anywhere. Nobody can replicate them," Schmitt said.

He ought to know. He has mixed and recorded for the likes of Elvis Presley, Henry Mancini, Rosemary Clooney, Sam Cooke, Barbra Streisand, Natalie Cole, Ray Charles, Madonna, Steely Dan, Quincy Jones and George Benson.

"I come here 200 times a year," said Schmitt, a Bell Canyon resident. "This is a big deal. That intrusion could shut this building down. It would be a shame to have the history of this studio gone like that. People want to come here to work."

Some travel across the country to use the studios.

"We're here from New York to do this," said record producer Larry Clothier. "We can record in New York; that's where everybody lives. We could, but it wouldn't be the same. The chambers under here are legendary. They're the best in the world. Nothing can replace them. It would be a travesty to lose them."

Next door in Studio B, musicians were recording for the Rockettes' Radio City Christmas show. Producer John Porter bemoaned the disappearance of Hollywood's recording studios.

"The sad thing is there were a lot of historic studios turned into parking lots and office buildings without anybody saying anything," said Porter, of Malibu. "There aren't that many rooms left set up to accommodate as many musicians as this one."

Capitol's Studio A and Studio B can be combined into a single room with space for 75 musicians. That allows the recording of movie soundtracks and orchestral music.

Studio workers said such items as Frank Sinatra's chair and favorite microphone are still in use in Studio A. So is Nelson Riddle's wooden conductor's stand and Nat King Cole's piano.

Designed by architect Welton Becket, the 150-foot-tall Capitol Records tower opened in 1956. From the beginning, elimination of noise and vibration from the building was a goal.

To prevent the hum of fluorescent lighting, the fixtures' ballasts were mounted outside the studios. The heating and air-conditioning system used "decoupled ducts, sound traps and soundproofed vents," as the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society report put it in 1957.

Exterior walls are 10-inch-thick concrete. A 1-inch air gap separates the outer wall from the studios' inner wall, which in turn stands on a floor which "floats on a rubber-tiled, 3-inch concrete slab. This upper slab floats on a layer of cork, which rests on the 6-inch concrete foundation slab," according to the engineering journal report.

The studios' interior walls were built with shutter-like baffles. One side is birch wood, which creates a hard sound, and the other is fiberglass, which has a softer sound. Ceilings are suspended beneath thick, rock-wool, soundproof insulation.

The echo chambers were even trickier to build. Designed as trapezoidal rooms by recording artist and sound expert Les Paul, they have 10-inch-thick concrete walls and foot-thick concrete ceilings. With speakers on one side and microphones on the other, they can provide reverberation lasting up to five seconds. Sound engineers "use them like an artist's palette," as one Capitol worker put it.

As the City Hall showdown has grown closer, the chorus of Capitol supporters has grown louder.

Council committee members have been flooded with letters, such as the one from Professional Musicians Local 47's Linda Rapka, who pointed out that during the last few years Los Angeles has lost the Todd A-O scoring stage, Cello Studios and the Paramount scoring stage.

Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, national executive director of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, warned that the proposed condominium project could result in "an enormous loss to the music and entertainment community."

Added Maureen Droney, executive director of the Producers & Engineers Wing of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences: "One cannot overstate the importance of Capitol Studios within the Los Angeles music scene and, indeed, to the history of recorded music."

David Byrne Uses Building as Orchestra

From the New York Times; see video at the Times' page here:
May 30, 2008
David Byrne’s New Band, With Architectural Solos
By RANDY KENNEDY

THE symphony of Manhattan Island, composed and performed fortissimo daily by garbage trucks, car speakers, I-beam bolters, bus brakes, warped manhole covers, knocking radiators, people yelling from high windows and the blaring television that now greets you in the back of a taxi, is the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.

The other day, in a paint-peeling hangar of a room at the foot of the island, David Byrne, the artist and musician, placed his finger on a switch that did exactly the opposite: it made such music on purpose. The switch was a white key on the bass end of a beat-up Weaver pump organ that was practically the only thing sitting inside the old Great Hall of the Battery Maritime Building, a 99-year-old former ferry terminal at the end of Whitehall Street that has sat mostly dormant for more than a half-century.

The organ’s innards had been replaced with relays and wires and light blue air hoses. And when the key was pressed, a 110-volt motor strapped to a girder high up in the room’s ceiling began to vibrate, essentially playing the girder and producing a deafening low hum — like one of the tuba tones played by the mother ship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Or, if you were less charitably inclined, like a truck on Canal Street with a loose muffler. Mr. Byrne ran his fingers up the keyboard, causing more hums and whines, moans and plunks and clinks until he came to a key that seemed to do nothing.

“We’re not getting any register on that bottom one anymore,” he said, sending two artist-technicians up onto a scaffold to figure out why a certain magnetic knocker was not turning one of the room’s giant Corinthian columns — topped by upended, gaping dolphins — into a kind of architectural castanet.

The project Mr. Byrne has created with support from the public-art organization Creative Time is a kind of twist on the projects Creative Time has brought into being since it started helping artists use the city as a canvas in 1974. Often the organization finds dilapidated, neglected, historically rich buildings, and artists create installations inside, as the British artist Mike Nelson did last year when he turned a wing of the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side into a dimly lighted labyrinth. The ferry-terminal project, called, appropriately enough, “Playing the Building,” opens at noon on Saturday.

But in the case of Mr. Byrne — a founder of the Talking Heads who has been a visual artist as long as he has been a musician and producer — the Beaux-Arts terminal itself has become the installation, or at least a stunning, 9,000-square-foot part of it that once served as a soaring waiting room for passengers who came there to board ferries bound for South Brooklyn. The building has been one of those glorious Manhattan antiques caught in a decades-long time warp, not used for major ferry service since 1938. Plans to have it house everything from a children’s museum to a dance troupe to even Creative Time’s offices have fallen through over the years, and now a developer has been chosen to rehabilitate the terminal and build a hotel atop it.

At least for the next two and a half months, though, the building will simply serve as a gargantuan cast-iron orchestra. Besides being fitted with several motors, which produce the bass sounds by vibrating a set of girders that once supported a stained-glass skylight in the 40-foot-high ceiling, the organ is attached to a pump that blows air through a tangle of hoses. These hoses snake into the huge room’s old water and heating pipes and conduits, making primitive flute sounds. And then there are more than a dozen spring-loaded solenoids, attached like woodpeckers to the columns and even to a linebacker-size radiator that emits a surprisingly sonorous tone when struck in just the right place with a metal rod.

When you get both hands busy on the keyboard — as anyone who comes to see the work will be allowed to do — the room roars and clatters to life, seeming to harbor an invisible band playing something written by Philip Glass in collaboration with the Stooges, a Japanese sho virtuoso and a kitchen full of 3-year-olds with pots and ladles.

Working on the project recently in his SoHo studio, Mr. Byrne said he had generally avoided music-related art projects because he did not want his reputation as a musician to become confused with such work.

But when he was invited several years ago to propose a piece for Fargfabriken, a gallery space in a former factory in Stockholm, he began thinking about how to turn a building into an instrument. (One of his ideas for the Swedish project was to build a huge microwave oven inside the hall.) He had inherited the out-of-tune pump organ from a friend who was moving out of his print studio in the meatpacking district. And so Mr. Byrne used the organ to create the first version of “Playing the Building” in 2005.

Because he generally likes to distance his art from his music, Mr. Byrne has not composed pieces for the building-organ and does not plan to play it publicly. But he said he hoped the project would say something about the direction of popular music.

“I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down,” he said in a discussion about the piece with Anne Pasternak, the project’s curator and Creative Time’s president. “The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.”

The music that will soon be heard from the maritime building’s infrastructure and the organ, with assistance from a stream of visitors over the summer, is essentially “authorless,” but “strongly directed,” he said.

With only four days left before the doors opened, Mr. Byrne and two people who helped build the piece, Mark McNamara and Justin Downs, were working hard one recent afternoon to arrange the organ’s keyboard so that it played the building roughly from low notes to high — very roughly. (“Nobody’s going to be able to play Bach on it,” Mr. Byrne said.)

A white rubber mallet, useful early on for determining the lyrical quality of rusty steam pipes and girders, lay atop the organ. And even with the sun streaming through the room’s expansive skylight, there was an element of gothic ghostliness about the setup, a prim-looking church organ commanding an empty waiting room. (By way of unintentional back story, to add a little extra eeriness, in 1885 The New York Times reported that J. O. Weaver, a member of the family that owned the Weaver Organ Manufacturing Company of York, Pa., became “violently deranged” in a Dallas hotel room and committed suicide by cutting his throat “from ear to ear” with a razor.)

Mr. Byrne, wearing a straw fedora with a feather stuck in the band, seemed to grow momentarily bored with architectural harmonies and took a visitor through a doorway into a shadowy hall that led to a seemingly darker history for the building: two empty meat lockers and a tiled room with a drain that might have been an abattoir, perhaps once used for supplying meat to Governors Island, whose ferry leaves from the slips below.

“There’s some really weird stuff back here,” he said.

Then he grabbed his backpack and headed out to another appointment uptown, by means of that weirdest and most musical New York City instrument of all, the subway.

“Playing the Building” opens on Saturday at noon and will continue on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, from noon to 6 p.m., through Aug. 10 at the Battery Maritime Building, 10 South Street, Lower Manhattan; (212) 206-6674 or creativetime.org/byrne. Admission is free.

UPDATE: YOUTUBE

The Death of the Irish Pub: In Affluent New Ireland, Rural Pubs Are So Yesterday

Washington Post

In Affluent New Ireland, Rural Pubs Are So Yesterday

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 25, 2008; A01

CONNOLLY, Ireland -- For generations, Carney's, the only pub in this tiny village in western Ireland, had been the place to strike up a romance, celebrate a birth or mourn a death -- or just sip a pint of Guinness among friends near a warm fire on a damp day.

So when Carney's shut down last year after more than a century in business, Teresa Tuttle, 62, took it hard. "Where can we go after a funeral? After work? Where would we all meet?" she recalled thinking, shaking her head in her kitchen, not far from the pub.

The "closed" sign abruptly posted on Carney's door -- and on the doors of 1,000 rural Irish pubs in the past three years -- was another sign of the profound lifestyle changes that have accompanied the country's dizzying rise to affluence.

"It was like a sudden death in the family," said Anthony Scanlan, 51, a farmer who lives near Carney's. "Everything has changed in Ireland. It's as fast as New York around here."

As recently as the 1980s, young people had to leave Ireland to find work and millionaires were as rare as hen's teeth, as the Irish say. But by 2005, according to the Bank of Ireland, the country of 4 million people had 30,000 residents worth more than a million euros, or about $1.5 million. A year later, the number of millionaires had jumped another 10 percent.

Ireland's per-capita income is now among the highest in the world, surpassing those in the United States, Sweden and Japan, according to the World Bank.

Wealth has given the Irish more options and less time -- a bad combination for the local pub. More people are spending sunny weekends in Spain rather than evenings of "craic," as good times and conversation are known, down at the pub.

Fewer people are farming the valuable rolling green hills around Carney's, about 50 miles south of Galway, and more are commuting long distances to better-paying jobs. And all over the country, when the weary commuters return home, many now prefer to stay in their comfortable homes with a glass of chardonnay in front of their flat-screen TVs.

The Vintners' Federation of Ireland, which represents rural pubs, said the number of pubs outside Dublin has dropped from 6,000 to 5,000 in the past three years. Some estimates suggest the number may soon dwindle to 3,500.

Smoking bans in pubs and stricter drunken-driving laws have also played a role in the decline, said Michael O'Keefe, a spokesman for the Vintners group. He said some pub owners are serving lattes along with beer and whiskey in an attempt to cater to changing tastes. "Twenty years ago, if you asked a barman for a cappuccino, he would have looked at you as if you had two heads," O'Keefe said.

Some shrug off the closures, saying Ireland had too many pubs anyway. Many say they are delighted there are more fine restaurants and upscale coffee shops. But others, particularly older people, lament the decline of a touchstone, a place that linked neighbors, a seat near the fire where their fathers and grandfathers chatted before them.

"There is a certain sense of loss, of the coziness and companionship of the pub life," said Patricia O'Hara, a sociologist and policy manager with the Western Development Commission, which promotes economic and social development in western Ireland. She said some older people feel isolated and alienated in a faster-paced Ireland, where young people's lives seem to revolve around cellphones and social networking Internet sites such as Facebook.

"Be absolutely assured that people don't want to return to the days of poverty," O'Hara said. But, she added, "there is a questioning how much we are losing as result of prosperity . . . a nostalgia for simpler times when people had more time for each other."

Connolly sits at a bend in the road in the middle of County Clare, a little cluster of buildings set around a towering gray stone Catholic church. For generations, village life has revolved around the church, the pub and a small post office that collected mail, cashed checks and dished out news.

But now all three of those institutions are under pressure.

Regular church attendance in this overwhelmingly Catholic country has fallen from 90 percent in the 1970s to 45 percent today.

Ireland had nearly 1,900 post offices a decade ago, compared with 1,255 now. People use bigger urban post offices, ATMs and direct deposit, and fewer families are handing down the job of running the local post office.

"You don't want to see things closing, you want to see them opening," said Pauline Connellan, the postmistress in Connolly for 34 years. She said she is not sure what will become of her job when she retires -- or of many other traditions in this era of "rush, rush, rush."

To Eamon Ó Cuív, the minister in charge of rural affairs and a grandson of Eamon de Valera, one of the founding figures of the Irish Republic, those traditions include the art of conversation that thrived in pubs. But he said: "What are we to do? We can't make going to the pub compulsory."

Still, Ó Cuív said, "Change doesn't mean the death knell for a culture. . . . It will take a lot longer than 20 years to change the basic nature of the Irish people."

The Irish novelist Maeve Binchy said she believed there was "a danger that Ireland might lose its relaxed, easygoing, peaceful lifestyle," given all the changes. "But it's only a danger, not a fact," she said in an e-mail. "I may be Pollyanna, but I think our brush with prosperity made us better rather than destroying us."

Terry Kennedy, 37, a bricklayer, was working one June day when his cellphone rang with the news about the "closed" sign on Carney's. "I had to sit down for an hour," he said.

After Carney's shut, Kennedy said, he sometimes drove to the pub in the next village, but it wasn't the same. At his own pub, he either knew everyone in the place, or soon did: "It's small here, so the seven or eight of us at the bar can all be in the same conversation."

Older people who didn't drive had nowhere to go. Many stayed home. Some called taxi driver Garry Boon, 64, to take them out and about to meet people. "It cut the heart out of the village when it closed," Boon said of the Connolly pub.

Then in November, Liam Moloney, a villager who had moved to London and runs a pub and a construction company there, bought Carney's, fixed it up and reopened it -- a rare example of a shuttered rural pub getting a second life.

"I'm not going to make any money to write home about," Moloney, 33, said from London. "But it was my local pub."

Now Carney's has a fresh coat of white paint and a giant new TV to show sports matches. It opens only in the evenings, but the weekly Tuesday night card game is back.

"Having lost it once, we are trying to keep it," Kennedy said one recent evening, pulling out the euro equivalent of $5.40 for a pint of Guinness.

It was a special night: John and Teresa Tuttle were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. Soon, two dozen people piled into the two-room pub, and a trio playing guitar, double bass and accordion filled the place with traditional music.

As the clapping began, John Tuttle, 82, sat smiling in his wheelchair and tapping his foot to an Irish reel. In the 1960s, when he dated Teresa, they had come here.

"If this pub weren't here, we wouldn't have a party," said their daughter Emer Tuttle. "All these people are country people and wouldn't leave the village. That is why these pubs are so important."

The day after the party, which lasted until 3 a.m., Teresa Tuttle sat in her kitchen looking out the window. In the near distance, over the green fields, she could see giant wind turbines, a new feature in an old landscape.

"I loved every bit of last night," she said, looking at flowers, candleholders and her other gifts.

She said she had marked First Communions, birthdays and funerals at Carney's and felt lucky that she had her meeting place back.

"Without it," she said, "the likes of us would have nowhere to go."

Restaurant Noise: No Appetite for Noise

Washington Post Magazine
The No. 1 complaint of restaurant-goers in the Washington area isn't the service, or even the dinner. It's the din.

By Tom Sietsema
Sunday, April 6, 2008; W16

IT'S A TYPICAL NIGHT AT ZAYTINYA IN PENN QUARTER, which means there's a wait for a table, a mob at the bar, hundreds of mezze flowing from the open kitchen and a flock of hungry vultures waiting to snatch your bar stool at the slightest sign you might be vacating it.

The noise from all this activity is deafening. I can barely hear Eric Stehmer and Amy Wang, my drinking and dining companions for the evening, over the din. The problem is exacerbated by a concrete countertop, bare floor, overhead speakers and the occasional crash of a plate gone astray. A bartender's attempts to share his passion for Greek wines, which he's pouring by the splash for us to try, might as well be in Greek. The three of us have to lean in to hear what he's describing.

"The bar is definitely not a place for an intimate date," I think I catch Stehmer saying.

"It's a strain," agrees Wang, who has to repeat herself twice. "I don't like the feeling I have to raise my voice."

Our restaurant pager goes off. We know this only because the device lights up in bright red and vibrates across the counter toward Wang's pomegranate-flavored cocktail. A host leads us to a table in the dining room, which provides little relief from the aural assault. "This is the loudest restaurant I've ever worked in," our waiter shares after we ask him to repeat the evening's specials.

The scenario might prompt a yawn if it occurred on a weekend or if any of us were AARP members. The reality is, we're meeting on a Tuesday night. Wang is 25. Stehmer is 26. I'm 40-something.

As measured by the sound-level meter I'm carrying, the noise in the restaurant averages about 86 decibels -- the equivalent of truck traffic on a busy street, or a lawn mower.

BON APPETIT!

MORE THAN BAD FOOD, MORE THAN TIPPING QUANDARIES, more than someone wondering if a free meal should follow a rodent sighting in a dining room, the most frequent concern I get from readers involves loud restaurants. The complaints about noise have crescendoed so high in recent years that I've decided to add noise ratings to my dining column in the Magazine, beginning April 20. Henceforth, as I make my restaurant rounds, a discreet sound-level meter will be used to determine the average decibel count. [See this article for how the ratings will work.]

I know readers will welcome the addition of a sound check. When I raised the subject of noise on a recent online food discussion, I got an earful from scores of restaurant mavens. The feedback came from both sexes and a wide range of ages.

"The noise levels don't make me feel lively or youthful," wrote one. "They make me shout and keep asking, 'What?' I'm 34, but recently I have been seeking out 'oldster' restaurants for the noise levels alone. Would much prefer a younger vibe at lower decibels, if such a thing existed!"

"Why do restaurateurs think we want to eat but not to chat with our companions?" another chatter demanded.

"Thank you for bringing up something that's been bothering me for years -- the increased noise in restaurants," someone else chimed in. "I'm not just talking about those ubiquitous chains with their warehouse construction where everything echoes; [noise is] everywhere, it seems. And I hate it! I hate having to shout at the person next to me and not to be able to communicate without everyone at surrounding tables being aware of everything I say. Yet restaurateurs, and in some cases restaurant critics, defend the noise as 'exciting,' 'energetic,' etc., and insist that young people like it. I bet not all of them do. And, even if they do, is that a reason to alienate such a large segment of the dining population?"

The most compelling complaint came from Ron Brown, who told me that restaurant noise had drowned out his attempt to get his girlfriend to say "yes."

Brown, a 35-year-old senior finance manager at a Washington nonprofit, planned to propose to Rebecca Oser at Central Michel Richard downtown just before Valentine's Day. Fueled by a few drinks, Brown says, he pulled out a gift-wrapped box containing a sapphire ring from his jacket pocket before the dessert course. It should have been a memorable moment. Instead, Brown found himself competing for Oser's attention with a bustling open kitchen, CNN anchors on overhead TVs and a conversation at the next table that got louder when another person walked over to say hello.

Despite the distractions, Brown popped the question: Rebecca, will you marry me? He's not sure if he actually heard the reply, but he got the response he was looking for. Oser, a 29-year-old project director, slipped on the ring and came around the table to sit beside him.

Still, neither of them was satisfied with the way the big moment unfolded. "It was the wrong place to propose," says Brown. The next morning, he repeated his invitation "in a more romantic manner."

Oser said yes, again. This time, Brown got the message loud and clear.

While his story is unique, the manner in which loud restaurants affect diners isn't. In ways major and minor, consumers are changing their routines to avoid being subjected to cacophony when they eat out.

Take Emily Wallace, 30, a consultant based in Falls Church. Wallace says she thinks she's becoming a better cook because restaurants are so noisy. She says she can no longer take her hearing-impaired father, a spry 60, to some of his favorite steakhouses. "Unfortunately, there are so many places we can't take him. So I cook more at home." She keeps a mental list of what's quiet (Capital Grille in Penn Quarter, but only after prime time; Charlie Palmer Steak on Capitol Hill, but only in the back area) and what's not (Ray's the Steaks in Arlington).

Eileen Harrington, 55, is a big fan of the food at Rasika, a contemporary Indian destination in Penn Quarter. But the Washington lawyer finds the restaurant so "intensely noisy" that she sits down to eat there only during off hours or if the manager can find a spot for her in an enclosed area off to the side. Other-wise, says the deputy director of consumer protection for the Federal Trade Commission, "I do carryout 90 percent of the time."

ACCORDING TO THE ZAGAT SURVEY, whose familiar burgundy restaurant guides cover 42 markets throughout the United States, noise ranks second, just behind service, as the response to the query: "What irritates you most about dining out?"

"A certain level of noise people consider to be exciting or good energy," says Tim Zagat, the guide's founder. "Once it gets so loud you can't hear yourself chew, it's over the top."

The cause of the clatter is just about everywhere a diner glances these days. In a restaurant's hard floors. On its naked tables. At the high ceilings. In other words, the blame for all the noise comes from the clean, slick and modern look favored by so many restaurant operators and their customers, says Griz Dwight, who has designed 20 or so interiors as an employee of the Washington-based Adamstein & Demetriou Architects and for his five-year-old firm, GrizForm Design.

His trickiest assignment so far was revamping Black's Bar and Kitchen in Bethesda. Only after a glass-wrapped wine room was in place and a room-length, glass-fronted mural was hung, did Dwight discover that their angles and surfaces bounced noise from one to the other, an effect known as slap-back. To catch the excess sound, the architect hung four box-shaped acoustical panels wrapped in fabric. The design, he half-jokes, is "ninety-nine percent functional, one percent decorative." With a sound level registering about 77 decibels on a weeknight, however, patrons still have to raise their voices.

Dwight says the vast majority of his clients want to know, "What can we do to make this quiet?" Or at least quieter. His arsenal of noise busters at Proof, the wine-themed restaurant in Penn Quarter, includes acoustic panels in the ceiling, high leather banquettes and a brick wall that diffuses sound by scattering sound waves. But the restaurant still measures in at 80 decibels on a typically busy weekend. At the nearby PS 7's (70 decibels), the bar is completely separated from the main dining room, which is broken up into smaller areas. To prevent a ruckus in the new tasting room at BlackSalt in Palisades, Dwight installed a floor-to-ceiling padded banquette.

Still, it's not easy for restaurant owners to think about details they can't see, and a lot of noise issues are discovered only after a restaurant opens for business. Regulars of the late, loftlike -- and initially ear-splitting -- Viridian in Logan Circle were amused to find that the undersides of their table were subsequently covered with egg crate-type foam to help absorb the clamor. The padding helped lower Viridian's volume before the restaurant closed for non-noise reasons.

Some restaurants want the volume turned up. One of the few attempts at noise reduction at the new Westend Bistro by Eric Ripert is a glass partition separating the bar from the dining room. General manager Gonzague Muchery says the restaurant's casual concept demands a certain liveliness in the room, which measured an uncomfortable 80 decibels in a recent sound check. Like other restaurants, Westend Bistro has installed a sophisticated sound system and serenades its patrons with music that is programmed to start mellow and get jazzier as the night wears on. The trouble is, once you fill the place with diners, it's hard to tell what's playing.

Even so, Muchery doesn't think the noise at Westend Bistro is a problem. He says he hasn't received a single complaint about it since the restaurant opened.

EXPOSURE TO NOISE MAY BE HARDEST ON RESTAURANT WORKERS, who spend more time in a dining room than do the people they wait on. "Theoretically," says Robert W. Sweetow, director of audiology and professor of otolaryngology at the University of California in San Francisco, "the sound levels over time are loud enough to get impaired hearing." (Otolaryngology is the branch of medicine dealing with ear, nose and throat disorders.)

Noisy restaurants affect more than just the ears. Loud sounds can elevate blood pressure, increase breathing rates, intensify the effects of alcohol and make sleep difficult -- even after the noise ceases. At certain elevated levels, some people can experience dizziness and even nausea.

I never felt lightheaded or sick to my stomach at Zaytinya, one of the loudest restaurants in the city, but I did find myself eating faster than usual, raising my voice to be heard and assuming the posture of the Hunchback of Notre Dame as I bent into the table to hear what my tablemates were saying. Wang and Stehmer are strangers to me and to each other. I invited them to restaurant hop as I measured decibel levels in several popular restaurants because they are young and should theoretically be more tolerant of raucous dining spots. But both find restaurant noise just as annoying as do older participants in my online chats.

Wang is a paralegal with the Justice Department who knows Zaytinya well, having celebrated her 2004 graduation from the University of Maryland there -- and been unable to hear much of what her family said. Stehmer is a temporary office assistant who says he prefers to eat out in July and August, when dining rooms are less busy and thus quieter.

Zaytinya isn't the only place where I find myself almost shouting to be heard. Excess noise is also the unwelcome accompaniment to the meals served at such popular Washington eating establishments as Hook (which registered 84 decibels); Two Amys (86 decibels during a family-packed Saturday afternoon); and Bistro du Coin (90 decibels -- equal to a lawn mower).

According to Sweetow, sounds louder than 80 decibels are potentially hazardous. Which brings up another side effect of loud restaurants. "You have to ask, what is the emotional impact?" he says. The physician, who treats patients with hearing disorders, says many clients don't go to restaurants for fear of embarrassing themselves, because they can't understand what the waiter is saying or have trouble following a table conversation. "It's a big problem."

An estimated 28 million Americans are hearing-impaired, with hearing loss greater in men, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Wallace, the Falls Church consultant who prefers to cook for her father rather than have him suffer through a noisy restaurant meal, says she wishes waiters would make better eye contact and enunciate their words when they talk to him.

Sweetow has studied the problems of noise in movie theaters and restaurants (his paper on the latter is titled "I'll Have a Side Order of Earplugs, Please"). Ten years ago, he was tapped to examine noise on the Bay Area dining scene by the San Francisco Chronicle, which subsequently introduced noise ratings in its restaurant reviews.

The newspaper's format uses a series of bells and a bomb to illustrate how loud a restaurant is. The more bells, the noisier the venue. One bell (less than 65 decibels) represents a "pleasantly quiet" room; at the opposite end of the scale, the bomb indicates a restaurant that is 80 decibels or higher, or "too noisy for normal conversation."

But the ratings haven't seemed to have much impact. Michael Bauer, the Chronicle's executive food and wine editor, says restaurants have actually grown louder in the decade since he and his staff began recording results. Like critics in other cities, he blames the design penchant for "warehouse," "industrial" and "raw" spaces as well as restaurant budgets. In a pinch, owners tend to cut back on details that diners might not notice, including acoustical treatments. These days in San Francisco, he laments, "you can hardly find any restaurant with fewer than four bells," which is just below 80 decibels on the Chronicle's scale.

To avoid the noisier parts of a restaurant, Sweetow advises his patients to ask for tables on the periphery of the dining room and to avoid seats near the bar or an exhibition kitchen. (The bar at Zay-tinya is a full six decibels louder than the dining room.) No restaurant is going to go out of its way to tell you how loud it is. Still, Sweetow says diners can get a sense of what's in store for them by calling the restaurant during its rush hours, around noon and at night. (The strategy obviously only works when the phone is answered in a public area of the restaurant.)

FOR ALL THE DINERS WHO DON'T LIKE NOISE, there are plenty of people who look forward to some buzz with their Wagyu burger.

Janice Carnevale felt as if she had to whisper when she dined in a snug upstairs room at 1789 in Georgetown. "I don't like it when everyone around me can hear what I'm saying," says the 27-year-old wedding consultant from Falls Church. She much prefers the "dull roar" and "revelry" of a louder restaurant. Plus, "If my husband and I don't have a lot to talk about," she says, a noisy restaurant allows her a little anonymity and the chance to zone out. "I talk to people all day long."

"It's a double-edged sword," says Zagat, the dining guide founder. If a restaurant is hushed, "a lot of people feel it's dead."

Parents often seek out loud restaurants for a different reason. "I can dine out with my infant and never get dirty looks for the occasional squawk or utensil banging," one mom explained during an online chat.

And most restaurateurs don't seem all that worried about the decibel level in their bars and dining rooms. From the moment he opened Rasika three years ago, Ashok Bajaj knew he had a noisy venue on his hands. The floors were wood, and the bar was paved with stone tiles. To soften any blows, he'd had the walls covered in orange fabric, but it wasn't enough to dampen the volume of a full house. Sound experts came in to look at the problem; they recommended more fabric and acoustic tiles.

Ultimately, the restaurateur opted not to change the interior: The vibe, after all, was intentional. "I wanted a place with buzz," Bajaj explains. He also hoped to distinguish it from his more traditional Indian restaurant near the White House, Bombay Club. While some diners at Rasika told him they didn't like the din, Bajaj says he queried upwards of 70 patrons in all age groups, and the message he says he heard was: "Don't change it. If we wanted a quiet restaurant, we'd go to the Bombay Club."

"You have to know why you're going out," says Bajaj. "Different moods call for different restaurants." But even he has his limits. To buffer the sound level a bit, large parties aren't accepted in Rasika's main dining room. "They drink more" and tend to make more noise, says the restaurateur.

Ambience -- the look of a place, the feel of a place, the sound of a place -- is one reason many diners choose one restaurant over another. But what's on the menu remains a significant deciding factor.

"Noise won't turn me off," says Dwight, 34, the restaurant designer. "Bad food will."

Tom Sietsema is The Post's food critic. He can be reached at sietsema@washpost.com.

Acoustician/Concert Hall Designer Russell Johnson

August 10, 2007
Russell Johnson, Who Transformed the Sound in Concert Halls, Dies at 83
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Russell Johnson, who combined architectural training, a love of music and acute intuition to revolutionize the quality of sound in hundreds of the world’s concert halls, each of which he regarded as a complex, unique instrument, died on Aug. 7 at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

Tateo Nakajima, managing director of Artec Consultants, the firm that Mr. Johnson founded in 1970 and at which he worked until he died, confirmed the death.

Mr. Johnson prescribed the acoustic design of concert halls from Dallas to Birmingham, England, to Jazz at Lincoln Center to Lucerne, Switzerland, often working with the world’s leading architects. The concert hall he designed for the small Finnish city of Lahti helped elevate its orchestra and its annual Sibelius Festival to prominence.

After the Scottish Chamber Orchestra visited the Lucerne Concert Hall, completed in 1999, a reviewer for The Glasgow Herald called the sound “so elegant and dreamy it makes the head reel,” saying it testified to “the genius of Russell Johnson.”

Jean Nouvel, the architect who received accolades for designing the Lucerne building, said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998: “I am the guardian of the eye, Russ Johnson is the guardian of the ear.”

Mr. Johnson’s design for Jazz at Lincoln Center was intended to conjure the “golden sound” that Wynton Marsalis, the center’s music director, said he wanted. Mr. Johnson did this by working with architects and others to build a soundproof box inside a bigger box.

At the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, his solution included a movable over-the-stage canopy, around-the-room reverberation chambers that can be opened and closed in combinations, and sound-absorptive adjustable curtains.

After decades when few new concert halls were built and old ones were seldom retuned for sound quality, there was a post-war boom in creating and remaking them. But successful outcomes were so spotty that Mr. Johnson found that musicians and concertgoers considered acousticians to be practitioners of a phony art and a failed science.

“I found that as soon as I told musicians I was an acoustician, they wanted to wring my neck,” he said in an interview with The Financial Times in 1997.

Mr. Johnson helped revolutionize the profession with new movable and often automatic technology that can create different environments for different groups. Perhaps most important, he persuaded many owners and architects to return to the basic shape and dimensions of beloved older halls like the Musikverein in Vienna, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Symphony Hall in Boston. All are shoebox-shaped and relatively small.

“I believe that you cannot, should not, design opera houses and concert halls for the next century unless you really understand the last three centuries of the design of this type of building,” he said in an interview with The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, in 2002.

Mr. Johnson’s first task was often persuading owners to give him priority over the architect, who was sometimes reluctant to build around Mr. Johnson’s reiteration of the classic concepts he thought necessary to achieve superb sound. The National Post quoted Clint Kuschak, who was general manager of the community auditorium in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and oversaw its building, as saying “We wanted the grand theater, and he wanted something that worked.”

Mr. Johnson strove to achieve four acoustic qualities: loudness, warmth, clarity and reverberation, meaning the after-ring as a sound slowly tapers into silence. The result, he said, “must be air around the music, as if the music is floating.”

Frederick Russell Johnson was born in Berwick, Pa., on Sept. 14, 1923, and was in the children’s choir of his church. He climbed into the pipe organ there to see how it worked, The National Post reported. When he was 12 or 13, he began listening to opera broadcasts on the radio. By 15, he wanted to be a recording engineer and make classical albums.

After Army service, he studied architecture at what is now Carnegie Mellon University and then transferred to Yale, from which he graduated. From 1954 to 1970, he worked for Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Mass., an acoustical consulting firm. In 1970, he started his own company, which has since completed more than 2,000 projects.

Mr. Johnson is survived by his sister, Barbara Johnson Mansfield, of Vienna, Va.

Unlike many acousticians, Mr. Johnson did not believe designing space for sound is susceptible to scientific approaches and preferred to call what he did an art.

“The math today may not help you very much,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “And if you believe some math that’s wrong, you can get into trouble very quickly.”

But he did believe in the overriding importance of silence, telling The Times in 1998 that “you have to work very carefully to get the silence right.”

He added, “The acoustician builds his signature on that silence.”

Story Behind Iconic 1967 Song "For What It's Worth"

L.A. THEN AND NOW
Club's closing ignited 'riots' on the Sunset Strip


Young rock fans take to the streets after the shuttering of Pandora's Box in 1966. The unrest inspired Stephen Stills' landmark anthem.


By Cecilia Rasmussen, LA Times Staff Writer
August 5, 2007

There's battle lines being drawn.

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.

Young people speaking their minds,

Getting so much resistance from behind.

I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that

sound?

Everybody look what's going

down.

— "For What It's Worth"

Stephen Stills

Gangsters, nightclubs and rock 'n' roll make up much of the Sunset Strip's colorful history — along with a little-remembered tussle in 1966 that became known as "the Sunset Strip riots."

The melee erupted as young rock fans were protesting efforts to enforce a 10 p.m. curfew and to close nightclubs that catered to them — including Pandora's Box, at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards.

The confrontation with police also inspired musician Stephen Stills to write "For What It's Worth," released two months later by Stills and the band he was in, Buffalo Springfield.

"Riot is a ridiculous name," he said in an interview. "It was a funeral for Pandora's Box. But it looked like a revolution."

The club, painted purple and gold, was perched on a triangular traffic island in the middle of the Strip. It drew a crowd of mostly clean-cut teenagers and twentysomethings wearing pullover sweaters and miniskirts.

Ensuing traffic jams annoyed residents and business owners, who pressured the city and county to get rid of the kids, the clubs and the congestion.

It's unclear from Times files whether Pandora's Box or other clubs had been closed by the time the protests began. But young rock fans interpreted efforts to enforce curfew and loitering laws as an infringement on their civil rights.

On Nov. 12, 1966, fliers were distributed along the Strip inviting people to demonstrate. And hours before the protest, "One of L.A's rock 'n' roll radio stations made an announcement that there would be a rally at Pandora's Box and cautioned people to tread carefully," wrote Domenic Priore, author of the 2007 book "Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood."

As many as 1,000 people turned out, along with such celebrities as Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda.

"[Nicholson] just showed up to see what was happening," said lifelong Sunset Strip denizen and Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker. Wanamaker played drums in a band called Mike and the Mad Men, which sometimes performed at Pandora's Box, and was there that night as an observer.

"Everyone called them hippies just because some had long hair," Wanamaker said. "But they weren't the flower-power types from San Francisco, just rock 'n' roll fans, mostly students."

The event began peacefully. Protesters sat on the Strip blocking traffic, holding hands and singing. Trouble began when a car full of off-duty Marines got into a fender-bender. The Marines got out of their car and at least one punched the driver of the other car, The Times reported. Fighting spread.

Police and sheriffs' deputies closed off part of the Strip and ordered everyone to leave, but some protesters ran amok.

They rocked a city bus until passengers and the driver got out. Then they knocked out the windows, dented the roof with an uprooted street sign and let the air out of the tires.

One youth tried unsuccessfully to drop lighted matches into the fuel tank, The Times reported. He was booked for attempted arson.

Protesters hurled rocks and bottles and smashed storefront windows and car windshields. Fonda, son of actor Henry Fonda, was handcuffed.

But when he said he was merely filming the melee, he was released without charges.

The unrest continued the next night and off and on throughout November and December. Some clubs shut down within weeks.

"These kids weren't looking for trouble; they were simply going out to see their favorite bands and hang out with friends," Priore wrote.

Demonstrators carried signs that read, "We're Your Children! Don't Destroy Us" and "Ban the Billyclub." Mayor Sam Yorty showed up and invited the protesters to City Hall. Los Angeles County Supervisor Ernest Debs called the youths "misguided hoodlums."

Sonny and Cher, who got their start on the Strip as Caesar and Cleo, made an appearance in front of Pandora's Box in December.

The ensuing publicity got them kicked off the Rose Parade float they were supposed to ride two weeks later. The float sponsor, the City of Monterey Park, figured this was not the image it wanted to show the world.

"I admit at first we were somewhat hurt, shocked and a little upset," Sonny Bono said at a news conference after the duo was bumped. "They never even gave us the courtesy of notifying us personally. I heard it on the news."

Bono denied being part of the protest. "[The demonstrators] saw I was there and I told them to be peaceful, that's all," he said.

On Christmas Day, Pandora's Box reopened for one night only, according to Priore. There, Stills first publicly performed "For What It's Worth."

The Los Angeles City Council condemned Pandora's Box, claiming that it had to be demolished to realign the streets.

On Aug. 3, 1967, a wrecking ball turned Pandora's into rubble. "Hippies Pout, Politicians Cheer," The Times reported.

No sign of the triangle occupied by Pandora's remains today; it was eliminated by the street rerouting.

As for Stills' song, many fans saw it as an antiwar anthem, but he says that was only part of the equation.

"It was really four different things intertwined, including the war and the absurdity of what was happening on the Strip," he said in the interview. "But I knew I had to skedaddle and headed back to Topanga, where I wrote my song in about 15 minutes. For me, there was no riot. It was basically a cop dance."

cecilia.rasmussen@latimes.com

New Orleans Musicians: The Katrina Effect, Measured in Gigs

NYT
August 5, 2007
The Katrina Effect, Measured in Gigs
By ANDREW PARK

New Orleans

ON a recent sultry afternoon here, Tipitina’s — arguably the most famous musical haunt in a city famous for its music — is eerily quiet. This ramshackle, two-story yellow joint at the corner of Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas won’t start jumping until after dark, when Ivan Neville and his band, Dumpstaphunk, take center stage.

But upstairs, past balconies smelling of stale beer and cigarettes, past walls plastered with yellowed concert posters, musicians are working. Some edit concert fliers, tweak Web sites or research overseas jazz festivals; others get legal advice or mix audio and video; others simply chatter about who has found gigs and who is still struggling.

Since late 2005, just a few months after Hurricane Katrina tore through this city, more than 1,000 New Orleans musicians have become members of Tipitina’s three cooperative music offices. “I go in sometimes and all I’m doing is checking my e-mails,” says Margie Perez, an effervescent blues singer.

For Ms. Perez and others trying to rebuild fragile livelihoods as artists, grass-roots efforts like the co-ops have been a boon, helping them to replace lost or damaged instruments and sound equipment, arranging and subsidizing gigs and providing transportation, health care and housing. The Tipitina’s Foundation, the club’s charitable arm, has distributed about $1.5 million in aid; in all, Tipitina’s and other nonprofit groups have marshaled tens of millions of dollars in relief from around the world to help bolster the music business here.

But it remains to be seen how long a loose-knit band of charities can stand in for coordinated economic development in one of New Orleans’s most important business sectors. Although New Orleans is one of the country’s most culturally distinct cities, a large-scale recording industry never took root here, even before Katrina. Yet the informal music sector, the kind visitors find in clubs and bars, and large-scale musical events like Jazz Fest, is a mainstay of the city’s tourism business.

In fact, local authorities say, music and cuisine are the twin pillars of the tourism industry here; the leisure and hospitality businesses account for almost 63,000 jobs in the city and for about 35 percent of the sales taxes. Both of those figures are larger than those of any other business sector, including the energy industry.

Still, nearly two years after Katrina, there are fewer restaurants and bars offering live music, and the ones that do are paying less, musicians say. As the reality of the slow recovery has set in, fewer locals feel that they can afford cover charges or even tips, so clubs that used to have live music four or five nights a week have cut back to two or three.

Conventions, typically a strong source of music gigs, are running at 70 percent of 2004 levels, but leisure travel remains far below pre-Katrina levels, according to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. Over all, visitors generated $2.9 billion in spending in 2006, down from $4.9 billion in 2004, according to the bureau. About 3.7 million people visited the city in 2006, compared with more than 10 million in 2004.

Compounding the music scene’s slow revival is the challenge of tracking musicians — who are typically paid in cash and often hold down other jobs — in order to get them financial support. Habitat for Humanity, which is building what it describes as a “musicians’ village” in the Ninth Ward, initially struggled to find creditworthy applicants — just one instance of relief for artists failing to meet its mark.

“It’s kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” says Roland von Kurnatowski, who owns Tipitina’s with his wife, Mary. “New Orleans musicians are unique and if you try to mess with what makes them unique too much, it’s not a good thing. What they need is revenue opportunities.”

Economic development leaders for the city and the state of Louisiana praise the efforts of Tipitina’s at a time when governmental resources are strained. “With the demise of the venues and the lack of tourism, we’ve got to find a way to get people back to work,” says Lynn Ourso, executive director of the Louisiana Music Commission. “They’re putting these musicians to work on computers, showing how they can globally transmit and distribute — they’re teaching job skills.”

MR. KURNATOWSKI, 56, is an unlikely anchor of the local music business. A New Orleans native and Tulane graduate, he says he had never heard of Tipitina’s until he was asked to invest in the club in 1995. By then it was a beloved venue known for rollicking performances by locals like Dr. John and the Meters as well as touring acts like James Brown and Widespread Panic, but it had a spotty financial history. It was started by friends of the influential New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair as a place for him to play late in his career, but struggled under novice management and closed for a year in the mid-1980s.

Mr. Kurnatowski, a real estate investor who owns about 35 apartment complexes in the Gulf Coast region, had begun marketing storage units in a converted hotel as rehearsal space and thought that having a connection with Tipitina’s might lure musicians into renting. But the deteriorating club, facing new competition from the House of Blues, needed a new sound system and air-conditioning system. Mr. Kurnatowski agreed to make an equity investment; within a year he bought it outright for about $500,000.

He soon realized that he had neither the expertise nor the time to run Tipitina’s properly — especially because he was a morning person. “It’s a different routine,” he says. “It’s working nights, and it just wasn’t very practical.”

Intrigued by the club’s history and its intense following, he couldn’t bring himself to sell it. He also says that his other real estate investments gave him enough financial breathing room to think creatively about what to do with Tipitina’s. So, in 1997, he and his wife formed the Tipitina’s Foundation, which would begin to use the club, still for-profit, to serve the nonprofit mission of helping musicians. The move provided a rationale for holding on to Tipitina’s, even if it only broke even, and marked a return to the club’s early purpose of supporting the local music scene.

Its projects included an internship program for children wanting to get into the music business and a fund-raiser to buy instruments for local school bands. The first of its co-ops, a collaboration between the foundation and the city, opened in 2003. (Branches in Shreveport and Alexandria, La., opened later.)

The foundation could have easily fallen victim to Katrina’s devastation. Many of the city’s cultural organizations suffered extensive damage to facilities and had to cut their payrolls. Tipitina’s suffered only limited wind damage, and the foundation’s services were in demand. Many musicians lived in devastated neighborhoods like Gentilly and the Ninth Ward; those in other parts of town still lost instruments, amplifiers and CD collections to the flooding. Bands were scattered around the country, and some meager savings accounts were obliterated.

After Katrina struck in August 2005, Mr. Kurnatowski and the executive director, Bill Taylor, decided to try to reconstitute the foundation’s work. By late October, they had reopened the club and the co-op, both of which quickly became hubs of activity for musicians returning to town. A legal clinic that provided musicians with free help with contracts, copyright issues and licensing agreements became a popular service.

“Even if they lost everything, they still had their intellectual property,” says Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who runs the clinic. “You could see the look in people’s eyes: ‘This is all I have, this is my career, and I’m going to do everything I can to protect it.’ ”

For his part, Mr. Kurnatowski pledged to plow all profits from Tipitina’s, which scaled back its staff and eliminated guaranteed payouts to musicians, into the foundation. The club has cut its number of shows to four nights a week from six, but has seen total attendance and bar sales stay steady. Even so, Mr. Kurnatowski says, Tipitina’s operates on razor-thin margins: he says the club earned about $40,000 last year on revenue of about $500,000.

Other organizations also tried to put some financial muscle behind the local music business. The New Orleans Musicians Clinic paid musicians to play at the airport and offered $100 guarantees to musicians who could find gigs for themselves elsewhere. The Jazz Foundation of America also subsidized performances. The New Orleans Musician’s Relief Fund, a charity started by the former dB’s bassist Jeff Beninato, offered a temporary apartment to musicians. Renew Our Music, another relief fund, gave financial grants to musicians, while funds from Gibson Guitar and MusiCares, a charitable organization affiliated with the Recording Academy, helped buy scores of new instruments.

For artists dependent on support, such backing was invaluable.

Margie Perez, a former travel agent, had arrived in New Orleans just eight months before the storm. She returned to town in January 2006 to discover that her apartment in the Broadmoor neighborhood had been badly flooded. Determined to stay, she found other housing — for twice what she paid pre-Katrina — went to work cleaning damaged houses and started visiting the Tipitina’s co-op. She picked up work in different bands and this last spring was invited to sing with the pianist and producer Allen Toussaint at Jazz Fest.

Ms. Perez, 42, also has a part-time job at a clothing boutique and is training to be a tour guide; the music business here is still too anemic for her to depend on it for her livelihood. “You just get into as many projects as you can,” Ms. Perez says. “I’m in, like, five different bands and that’s kind of the case with a lot of musicians in town.”

Indeed, even as crowds come back, littering Bourbon Street with beer cans and daiquiri cups, musicians say they’re not seeing their incomes rebound. Wil Kennedy, a guitarist and singer who plays for passers-by in Jackson Square, says the situation is still “as bad as it was after 9/11,” with his tips down as much as 75 percent from the peak period before 9/11. In the clubs, guarantees of a minimum payout are now less common; many clubs offer musicians just the take at the door or a percentage of drink sales.

“They’ve kind of gotten used to getting the music cheap when people were so desperate they’d play for a sandwich and a $20 bill,” says Kim Foreman, secretary and treasurer of a local branch of the American Federation of Musicians, which has lost about 120 of its 800 dues-paying members. Poverty keeps many musicians living with substandard housing and health care, Mr. Foreman says.

Katrina left as many as half of the city’s roughly 5,000 working musicians marooned elsewhere, says Jordan Hirsch, executive director of Sweet Home New Orleans, an organization that provides financial support to musicians.

“A lot of people in Texas and Georgia and around the country want to be back, feel that their best economic opportunities are here, but just can’t get from A to B,” Mr. Hirsch says.

Others are scared off by the rampant crime and lack of basic services here, despite an economic need to be back in the Big Easy’s cultural stew. “Right now, New Orleans is not fit for my family,” says the Hot 8 Brass Band trombonist Jerome Jones, who has relocated to Houston with his wife and four of his five children. Mr. Jones, whose bandmate Dinerral Shavers was murdered here last December, says he plans to commute to New Orleans for gigs and band business.

IT’S an article of faith among New Orleanians that the music scene is an indelible part of the city’s appeal. But the city and state historically haven’t recognized the role that musicians and other creative workers play in driving tourism and improving the quality of life, advocates say. As a result, they say, the city and state have underinvested in the cultural sector of the economy.

“People don’t think of artists as a category of workers,” says Maria-Rosario Jackson, director of the Urban Institute’s Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program, which found that the city’s infrastructure for “cultural vitality” even before Katrina rated in the bottom half of the country’s metropolitan areas.

Figuring how “to translate that authenticity to economic development has been the challenge for all these years,” says Scott Aiges, who headed the city’s music office before Katrina and is now director of marketing and communications for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation, which owns Jazz Fest.

Just weeks before the storm, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu unveiled a new strategy for developing what was described as the “cultural economy.” Since then, the state has pushed through tax breaks for arts districts, musical and theatrical productions and sound recordings and made sure that events like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, which provide work for many musicians, survived.

But a separate individual tax break for artistic earnings failed in the State Legislature because of concerns that it wasn’t fair to other working people, and other large-scale attempts have languished because of a lack of financing. In May 2006, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which was formed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, recommended plowing $648 million into the cultural sector to create jobs, rebuild damaged facilities and open a national jazz center. But those ideas were shelved with the rest of the commission’s work, and subsequent, scaled-back proposals still await financing.

New Orleans “needs some anchors around which the economy can begin to rebuild, and arts and culture are an obvious one,” says Holly Sidford, a principal at AEA Consulting in New York, which developed the recommendations for the commission’s cultural subcommittee at the request of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. “But without investment, really deliberate and coherent investment, that won’t happen.”

Ernest Collins, the city’s executive director for arts and entertainment, says of the commission’s recommendations, which Mr. Nagin endorsed: “That was a very large price tag. And needless to say, we don’t have that money.”

Leaders of nonprofit groups and organizations like Tipitina’s say they are resigned to filling the void left by the public and private sectors as long as they can. Mr. Aiges, whose group owns Jazz Fest, is using receipts from the event to add new festivals, build an Internet-based system that will allow musicians to connect with talent coordinators and potential licensees, and put on a networking event for musicians during next year’s festival. Sweet Home New Orleans is compiling the first database of local musicians, which should help it to distribute relief faster and more effectively, and hopes to get part-time work for them in other businesses.

Next month, the Tipitina’s Foundation will release a new CD honoring Fats Domino, with proceeds from it earmarked for resurrecting his music publishing company and opening a co-op near the singer’s home in the Lower Ninth Ward.

But musicians say they wonder if New Orleans will ever nurture their careers the way it once did. The Hot 8 Brass Band, which was featured prominently in Spike Lee’s documentary film “When the Levees Broke,” is concentrating on touring elsewhere in the United States and abroad — even if that might mean missing Mardi Gras — so it can play for outsiders. Outsiders, say band members, seem to value them more than their hometown.

“They make you feel how valuable you are to New Orleans,” says Raymond Williams, a trumpeter for the band. “I feel like maybe the city should treat musicians in the same way.”

A Bayreuth Drama Worthy of, Well, Wagner

NYT
July 31, 2007
A Bayreuth Drama Worthy of, Well, Wagner
By ALAN RIDING

PARIS, July 30 — Devotees of Richard Wagner’s operas have no trouble sitting through long hours of intense music and convoluted plots, but even they may be tiring of the extended family power struggle over control of the Wagner Festival held in Bayreuth, Germany, every summer.

This year’s festival, which began on July 25, has brought new twists to the plot, suggesting that a final curtain may be nigh — or at least coming closer.

Founded in 1876 by Wagner himself, the Bayreuth Festival has had a colorful and at times unsavory history, not least when it was embraced by Hitler. But despite this, Bayreuth remains a kind of shrine for Wagner lovers, and they care passionately about its future.

At the heart of the current drama is who will succeed the composer’s 87-year-old grandson, Wolfgang Wagner. He took over the festival with his brother, Wieland, in 1951 and has run it as a personal fief since Wieland’s death, in 1966. But his management has come under growing criticism in recent years.

Tradition has it that the festival is always run by a Wagner, and this time round, the main candidates are again all in the family: Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 62, Wolfgang Wagner’s daughter from his first marriage; Katharina Wagner, 29, Wolfgang’s daughter from his second marriage; and Nike Wagner, 62, Wolfgang’s niece and Wieland’s daughter.

At first glance, the choice appears to be between youth and experience. Katharina Wagner has only recently begun directing opera, while Ms. Wagner-Pasquier is artistic adviser to the Aix-en-Provence opera festival in southern France, and Nike Wagner, a musicologist by training, is director of the Weimar Festival in Germany.

But there is a bitter twist: Wolfgang Wagner is so determined to impose Katharina as his successor that he now refuses to speak to Ms. Wagner-Pasquier or to Nike Wagner.

The outcome is in the hands of the Richard Wagner Foundation, which owns the festival’s theater, the Festspielhaus, and subsidizes the event. But while Wolfgang has only one vote on a 24-member board dominated by German, Bavarian and Upper Franconian officials, he has so far had his way with the foundation.

Now, with his health failing and demands for a clear succession mounting in the German press, the question is whether the foundation will take up the issue this fall, and, more specifically, whether it will dare to flout the will of the festival’s ruling patriarch.

The last time it tried to do so, it was simply ignored.

In 2001, after Wolfgang indicated a willingness to step down, the foundation chose Ms. Wagner-Pasquier over Nike Wagner and Wolfgang’s second wife, Gudrun, as the festival’s new director. When his wife was rejected for the job, Mr. Wagner responded by announcing that the position was his for life. He further indicated that if necessary, Gudrun would succeed him until Katharina, then just 23, was ready to take over.

Now, to prove she is ready, Wolfgang has allowed Katharina to direct her first opera at Bayreuth. Her new production of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” opened the monthlong festival last week before an audience packed with Wagner experts and German V.I.P.’s, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Although Katharina has previously directed Wagner and Puccini operas in other cities, her maiden show at Bayreuth was widely viewed as a kind of public audition for her father’s job. The intense booing that met her when she appeared onstage at the final curtain suggested that it had become more of a trial by fire.

Certainly, “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” was a daring assignment for the youngest director in the festival’s history. Not only is it Wagner’s only comedy, but it is also a paean to what it calls “Holy German Art” and, as such, became Hitler’s favorite opera and the only work performed in Bayreuth in 1943 and 1944.

Ms. Wagner tackled the opera’s dark association with German nationalism by satirizing luminaries of German culture like Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller and even Wagner himself. But European critics said much of the audience turned against her in the last act, when she resorted to topless dancers, full male nudity, plastic phalluses and a bizarre auto-da-fé.

Some critics noted that cheers could be heard among the boos, but their reviews were generally negative. Andrew Clark in The Financial Times of London called it “an intermittently titillating but ultimately depressing show,” and Der Spiegel’s critic was reminded of “a flat Wagner pizza — a thick topping on a thin base.”

Still, it is unclear how the public and critical response will affect Ms. Wagner’s bid to run the festival. In the past, some new productions at Bayreuth have been booed before later being acclaimed. At the same time, Katharina, a statuesque blonde nicknamed Bayreuth Barbie by her traditionalist foes, can probably still count on the support of those who believe that Bayreuth needs a youthful shake-up.

Certainly, during rehearsals, she displayed no insecurity, inviting reporters to watch her work, releasing glamorous studio photographs of herself and telling a news briefing, “I don’t think I’m too young anymore.” After last Wednesday’s opening night, she added, “Being booed belongs to the job description of a director.”

Meanwhile, her two competitors are again preparing to make their cases to the Wagner Foundation. Ms. Wagner-Pasquier has always avoided public mud-slinging, but her cousin Nike has spoken dismissively of Katharina, saying she has a “ready-made nest” and describing her opera productions as “old wine in a new wineskin.”

For the moment, the Wagner Foundation has given no hint that it is ready to name a new festival director, although there is widespread speculation in the German press that its board will meet for this purpose after the current festival ends on Aug. 28.

One fresh sign that change is in the air came last week at the annual meeting of the Friends of the Bayreuth Festival, which has two seats on the Wagner Foundation’s board. For the first time Wolfgang Wagner did not attend the meeting, and for the first time the Friends openly criticized his management style.

Rebel Composers on a Rock Tour of Sorts

NYT
July 4, 2007
Music
Rebel Composers on a Rock Tour of Sorts
By STEVE SMITH

“I used to be someone who wrote new music,” the composer Judd Greenstein says at the beginning of “The End of New Music,” a new video documentary by Stephen S. Taylor. “But there’s a sort of ossified new-music scene that privileges certain things that are no longer relevant to a new generation of composers. There are people for whom it is still relevant, but new music, as I think of it, is something apart from what I do.”

Hardly a week goes by without some new declaration of classical music’s declining relevance in contemporary society. Mr. Taylor’s film, which has its premiere screening tonight at Anthology Film Archives, might seem to be the latest verse of an extended eulogy. The film documents a 2005 tour of rock clubs and alternative spaces by Free Speech Zone, a collective founded by Mr. Greenstein, David T. Little and Missy Mazzoli. In it, these three busy, highly regarded composers, whose boisterous, attractive music is influenced by neo-Romanticism, Minimalism and rock, forcefully reject the standard conventions of concert halls and academia.

Presenting classical music in nightclubs to attract young audiences has begun to verge on the commonplace. But what Free Speech Zone was proposing in 2005 was a more comprehensive paradigm shift prompted not by age or aesthetics, but rather by frustration that followed the emotionally charged 2004 presidential race, during which Mr. Greenstein and Mr. Little had campaigned together on behalf of Get Out the Vote.

“It was a very visceral experience, that whole process leading up to the election,” Mr. Greenstein said during a recent conversation in the apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, that he shares with Ms. Mazzoli and Mr. Taylor. “Afterward, it was like this calamitous blow, because we’d put all this energy into something that was a failure from our perspective.”

For a time, Mr. Greenstein was unable to compose. “I felt like I was wasting my time with something that didn’t have the societal import that working for the election had,” he said. “We needed to do something. And it couldn’t be just going back to business as usual in the world of new music, which is not just apolitical but distanced from the idea that music is connected to human emotion and human experience.”

What resulted was Free Speech Zone, a collective named after the spaces for confining protesters during political events. Eschewing traditional concert spaces, the group booked Mr. Greenstein’s Now Ensemble and Mr. Little’s Newspeak into Manhattan and Brooklyn rock clubs, a New Haven recording studio and a small hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The programs featured politically inspired works by the three members and fellow activists. Mr. Taylor, a friend of Mr. Greenstein and an aspiring documentarian, followed the tour, shooting film without any set notion of how it might be used.

Given the context, the near-complete lack of political content in “The End of New Music” is something of a shock. The election is barely mentioned. Instead, Mr. Taylor’s jumpy, kinetic 50-minute film, assembled from the 20 or so hours he shot, emphasizes the human elements of the tour. He includes powerful performance segments as well as candid accounts of obstacles: grueling load-ins, tedious drives, one badly out-of-tune piano.

Mr. Taylor’s voice is seldom heard, but his off-screen interrogations prompt the composers to discuss the challenges of taking contemporary music to places where young audiences will feel comfortable and receptive. Classically trained musicians ponder aloud how to play in rock clubs in a way that feels uncontrived.

Mr. Taylor also captured some of the epiphanies the tour occasioned. In one scene, Mr. Little describes a sense of freedom that allowed him to include a bombastic drum-set part in his piece “Electric Proletariat,” which he had not been willing to risk in earlier versions.

“I was not caught up in the idea of writing music that anyone would approve of,” Mr. Little said by telephone. “I was trying to find music that would communicate these ideas most clearly from a sort of activist perspective. The artistic results were really exciting and have had lasting effects on the work Newspeak has done since.”

The tour had a similarly striking impact on Ms. Mazzoli. “I finally felt like I had control over how my music was reaching an audience, for maybe the first time in my life,” she said. “And it was because we had taken control of all aspects of production from beginning to end. That was a really moving, powerful, addictive thing for me, and it was a turning point in the way I thought about how I wanted to get my music out there.”

The members of Free Speech Zone, now including Mr. Taylor, are at work on a socially conscious multimedia opera. But all three composers have softened their iconoclastic stance toward conventional institutions. Mr. Greenstein still books Now Ensemble into clubs but also programs a chamber music series in Gallerie Icosahedron, a TriBeCa exhibition space. Ms. Mazzoli was recently named executive director of the MATA Festival, a prominent new-music series that originated as Music at the Anthology. Mr. Little, who plans to have Newspeak share bills with rock bands, was a co-winner of a chamber-opera competition last month.

“The main thing is understanding that you can actually take control over the way that your music is heard,” Mr. Greenstein said. “Once you see that you had that power all along, then it suddenly doesn’t become ‘you versus the system’ anymore. It’s just you behaving as an adult, going out and making decisions in the world.”