Woolsey Hall renovations?!
For nearly 117 years the NHSO has performed mostly in Yale University’s historic Woolsey Hall. Known for its grandeaur, elegance, and yes, those famed wooden seats,Yale Daily News reporter Nora Caplan-Bricker explores the University’s long-term plans to renovate our famed concert hall:
Woolsey on ‘wish-list’
Administrators say renovation needed but unlikely
One of Yale’s most iconic spaces may be in need of a face-lift, but it’s unlikely to get one any time soon.
The spacious Commons eatery and the 2,700-seat Woolsey Hall auditorium often house large-scale gatherings, from formal meals like the Freshman Holiday Dinner and traditional events like Convocation. University President Richard Levin said these spaces have fallen behind much of Yale’s newly renovated campus. But other projects have consistently taken precedence and, especially in light of the recession, will continue to do so.
“They’re vast spaces, and they’re going to be quite expensive to renovate,” Levin said. “While they are certainly deserving of a renovation, they’re serviceable, and they still have an aura of elegance and grandeur and importance in our community.”
While the economic downturn has forced the delay of $2 billion in building projects, Levin said Commons and Woolsey were not among them. New residential colleges, the School of Management building, an updated biology facility and the renovation of the Sterling Chemistry Laboratory would all have broken ground if not for the crash, but Woolsey and Commons remained “on the wish list, but not the to-do list,” Levin said.
They have been there for years. Although administrators looked into tentative renovation plans and budgets nearly a decade ago, Provost Peter Salovey said administrators have never found refurbishing Woolsey and Commons as pressing as other projects, such as building Loria Hall, Rosenkrantz Hall and a host of new buildings on Science Hill and renovating the 12 residential colleges, the Rudolph Center and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Still, a quick walk through the Woolsey rotunda reveals cracked floors and discolored walls.
University Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer said administrators dreamed of receiving a gift to fund the renovations upon Yale’s tercentennial in 2001, the 100th anniversary of the building’s construction. She added she still hopes the University will find a donor for these spaces in the next decade, but with the development office focusing on the two new residential colleges and the SOM building, they are far from the top of the list.
Levin said the cost to renovate Commons was estimated at over $50 million nearly a decade ago, and Woolsey was expected to cost more than $100 million. Those numbers would be higher today, he added.
Each space presents its own engineering challenges. In Commons, the question is how best to install air conditioning to make the dining hall more pleasant in the early fall and late spring. But given the room’s size, and a lack of convenient places to conceal air condition ducts, this won’t be an easy task, Levin said.
In Woolsey, Levin said the echoing acoustics —which have led members of the Yale Concert Band to affectionately call the space a “toilet bowl” — need an update. The auditorium was built for organ music, which requires a great deal of reverberation, which is why the seats are wooden and don’t have cloth padding that would absorb sound. But the hall’s excessive resonance can sometimes swallow up orchestral music or the spoken word, Levin said.
Levin said he hopes to someday install mechanical elements into Woolsey’s ceiling, making it possible to change the acoustics to fit the occasion at hand.
Published for Yale Daily News March 25, 2010
5 Fun Facts: Schoenberg Edition
1. Irving Thalberg once sent an emissary to persuade Arnold Schoenberg to produce a score for The Good Earth. The man, finding Schoenberg indifferent at best, launched into an animated discussion of the potential for music to complement the film. “Think of it,” he enthused. “There’s a terrific storm going on, the wheat field is swaying in the wind, and suddenly the earth begins to tremble. In the midst of the earthquake, Oo-Lan gives birth to a baby.” “With so much going on,” Schoenberg drily replied, “what do you need music for?”
Schoenberg never did score a Hollywood film. “I will write the music,” he once offered, “and then you will make motion pictures to correspond to it.” Unsurprisingly, the producers declined.
2. Following his arrival in the United States, Arnold Schoenberg was forced to teach music courses at all levels to make ends meet. He once found himself instructing a class of kindergarten music teachers. “You are teachers?” he asked, bewildered. “You mean there are people who know less than you do about music?”
3. George Gershwin often sought advice and lessons from other composers (Ravel and Stravinsky among them). While playing tennis with Arnold Schoenberg one day, Gershwin asked him for some lessons as well. Schoenberg declined: “I would only make you a bad Schoenberg,” he explained, “and you’re such a good Gershwin already!”
4. “My music is not modern,” Schoenberg once remarked. “It is only badly played.”
5. Reluctant Modernist
In 1917, the forty-three-year-old Arnold Schoenberg was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Though he was careful to conceal his civilian identity, he was often asked by fellow soldiers: “Aren’t you that controversial modernist composer?” Eventually he was forced to come clean: “I must admit that I am,” he declared, “but it’s like this: somebody had to be, and nobody else wanted to, so I took it upon myself.”
“I am a conservative,” Schoenberg declared on another occasion, “who was forced to become a revolutionary.”
Revolution
The upcoming concert, Revolution, on March 25th at Woolsey Hall and March 26th at the Quick Center on the campus of Fairfield University, features Beethoven’s masterful Symphony No. 3, “Eroica” and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). While every classical music aficionado, and many classical music novices know the Eroica, Schoenberg’s work remains unexplored terrain for many. Schoenberg’s upending of traditional harmony with his pioneering of the twelve-tone system of composition has meant that many listeners have rejected Schoenberg outright. This is a shame because Transfigured Night owes far more to Wagner and Brahms than to Schoenberg’s later works. While there are hints of the atonality that he would eventually embrace fully, Schoenberg is romantic, lush and lyrical in this work. Based on the poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel, Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night is in five parts that mirror the five stanzas of the poem. Each part of musical work evokes the same emotional ground as its corresponding stanza.
So why is Eroica paired with Transfigured Night under the moniker Revolution? We know that Schoenberg was a revolutionary figure in 20th Century music. He fundamentally changed, for better or worse, the musical landscape; not just classical music but all western music. Beethoven, too, closed the book on the Classical era and ushered in the Romantic era, fundamentally changing the symphonic form in the process. But again, why these two particular works, especially in light of the fact that Schoenberg’s truly revolutionary work was to come much later with the spiky, and perhaps harsh, strains of atonalism?
The Eroica is revolutionary on several levels. It was penned in homage to the revolutionary Napoleon (when the revolutionary Napoleon became the Emperor Napoleon Beethoven stripped the dedication to his once democratic hero.) More than that, though, is the nature of the work itself. As Maestro Boughton has pointed out, the Eroica introduced the notion that symphonic music could be the vehicle to express specific ideas and emotions. Thus, 100 years later (and only separated by an intermission on the NHSO program!) Schoenberg took Beethoven’s revolutionary romantic ideal to heart in Transfigured Night, though the emotions and ideas expressed are quite different. Following is an English translation of the poem and when you come to the concert hall on March 25th or March 26th you can decide how well Schoenberg described the poem in musical terms and how true to Beethoven’s revolutionary ideals he was.
Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht) by Richard Dehmel
Translated by Stanley Appelbaum
Reprinted from the website oldpoetry.com
Two people walk through a bare, cold grove;
The moon races along with them, they look into it.
The moon races over tall oaks,
No cloud obscures the light from the sky,
Into which the black points of the boughs reach.
A woman’s voice speaks:
I’m carrying a child, and not yours,
I walk in sin beside you.
I have committed a great offense against myself.
I no longer believed I could be happy
And yet I had a strong yearning
For something to fill my life, for the joys of
Motherhood
And for duty; so I committed an effrontery,
So, shuddering, I allowed my sex
To be embraced by a strange man,
And, on top of that, I blessed myself for it.
Now life has taken its revenge:
Now I have met you, oh, you.
She walks with a clumsy gait,
She looks up; the moon is racing along.
Her dark gaze is drowned in light.
A man’s voice speaks:
May the child you conceived
Be no burden to your soul;
Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming!
There’s a glow around everything;
You are floating with me on a cold ocean,
But a special warmth flickers
From you into me, from me into you.
It will transfigure the strange man’s child.
You will bear the child for me, as if it were mine;
You have brought the glow into me,
You have made me like a child myself.
He grasps her around her ample hips.
Their breath kisses in the breeze.
Two people walk through the lofty, bright night.
