[Dixielandjazz] The Ultimate Acoustician - Designer of Jazz at Lincoln Center - Obit

[Steve Barbone]

Russell Johnson, Who Transformed the Sound in Concert Halls, Dies at 83

NY TIMES -  DOUGLAS MARTIN - August 10, 2007

Russell Johnson, who combined architectural training, a love of music and
acute intuition to revolutionize the quality of sound in hundreds of the
world¹s 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 world¹s 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 ³so
elegant and dreamy it makes the head reel,² saying it testified to ³the
genius of Russell Johnson.²

Jean Nouvel, the architect who received accolades for designing the Lucerne
building, said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998: ³I am the
guardian of the eye, Russ Johnson is the guardian of the ear.²

Mr. Johnson¹s design for Jazz at Lincoln Center was intended to conjure the
³golden sound² that Wynton Marsalis, the center¹s 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.

³I found that as soon as I told musicians I was an acoustician, they wanted
to wring my neck,² 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.

³I 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,² he said in an interview
with The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, in 2002.

Mr. Johnson¹s first task was often persuading owners to give him priority
over the architect, who was sometimes reluctant to build around Mr.
Johnson¹s 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 ³We wanted the grand theater, and he wanted
something that worked.²

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, ³must be air around the music, as if the
music is floating.²

Frederick Russell Johnson was born in Berwick, Pa., on Sept. 14, 1923, and
was in the children¹s 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.

³The math today may not help you very much,² he told The New York Times in
2000. ³And if you believe some math that¹s wrong, you can get into trouble
very quickly.²

But he did believe in the overriding importance of silence, telling The
Times in 1998 that ³you have to work very carefully to get the silence
right.²

He added, ³The acoustician builds his signature on that silence.²