Calderwood Hall..... what's the big deal.

Calderwood Hall, designed by Renzo Piano and Yasuhisa Toyota, is built into a cube 44 feet on a side. Two rows of audience surround the musicians on the floor. The rest of the seating is in three tiers of four-sided balconies – each only one row deep. Seating capacity is approximately 300

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The musicians are on the floor, and the audience surrounds them, as close as is practically possible.

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The design of the Calderwood is unusual for our time, but it is not historically unprecedented. Most chamber music was written for performance in small spaces – holding at most a few hundred people, and richly supplied with sound absorbing furniture and fabric.

In the Calderwood the goal was to make the sound for each audience member as uniform as possible, giving each both a sonic and visual unobstructed view of the performance. When BMInt visited in December the reverberation time was quite low – about half a second. It is not obvious why the room was so absorptive. The visual walls are made of decorative plywood cut with linear slits. Eighteen inches behind the slits there is a structural wall, with absorptive curtains in the space between the visual and the structural wall.

So – how does the new hall sound?

Short answer:

it sounds....

 Fantastic!

Calderwood represents a bold break with current fashion in chamber music hall design. It portends an acoustic much closer to the kind expected by the great composers of the Baroque and Classical periods – strong, balanced, and exceptionally clear.

That's the BIG DEAL !

I look forward to hearing many different types of concert there.