Lawrence Zbikowski, Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College and Chair of the Department of Music, discusses the Logan Center for the Arts performance spaces. He will present a pre-concert talk on legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix at the University of Chicago Presents Special Logan Launch Festival event featuring the Turtle Island Quartet on Sunday, October 14 beginning at 2 PM in the Performance Hall.
With the addition of the Logan Center and its three new state-of-the-art performance spaces, I gather that there are number of ensembles that will perform at our other wonderful locations such as Fulton Recital Hall and Mandel Hall. So how do the ensembles and their performance spaces relate to each other?
One of the things that will happen with the Logan Center and the [Performance Hall] there in particular is that we now have a recital hall that is going to have some very fine acoustics. And we’ll have a seating capacity and also in some ways a hall capacity (I’ll come back to that in a moment) but a seating capacity that really fits quite a few of the events that will happen on campus. It’s always wonderful to look at a big hall like the Symphony Center downtown and say, ‘Wow! Wouldn’t it be great to fill this?’ But let’s face it. Not every event is going to fill that. But more importantly, acoustically, you don’t always want to have an ensemble or production or performance that will find its happiest home within that large space. Sometimes you want a more intimate space because you have an instrument or ensemble that has a more intimate sound.
And so I think the new [Performance Hall] is going to be ideal for more of a recital kind of event. And that gets back to the sort of volume… When I heard the Pacifica Quartet perform there in June of this year, one of the things that struck me about the hall is that at that point it was still just a little bit dry, but I felt that the overall volume of the hall in terms of the cubic feet of air there was really appropriate for that kind of ensemble. Because as a musician, what you have to do is that you have to push sound through the air. And anybody who’s ever taken their beautiful, wonderful sounding instrument outside has found a very disappointing result because you are not getting anything back from the instrument at that point. And my sense is that the [Performance Hall] – they’ve really done a very good job matching the overall size of the hall in terms of the volume with the kinds of performances that will be featured there. Kirkegaard was doing some additional work on the acoustics and I think they’re going to make it just a little bit more live that it was. And so my sense is that this is going to be a perfect venue for things like the Wind Ensemble and also for Chamber Orchestra – groups like that, which could play in Mandel Hall, but I think that much of the nuance and interesting things that those musicians can do will come out in a slightly smaller space.