In this current series of articles I am offering a counter to the oft-heard and tiresome bromides claiming that Western art music is rapidly crawling out of relevance and into the history books. Having previously shown how conservatories and professional music schools are flourishing, I now move on to another harbinger of well-being: the construction of new concert halls in the United States.
Building a concert hall is not a trivial undertaking, perhaps not on the scale of ballparks or coliseums, but nonetheless requiring a sizable investment in funding, planning, and community support. If classical music in the United States were becoming extinct, then it follows that concert halls would be crumbling away, and certainly there would be very little — if any — new construction going on.
I've made an informal study of the construction dates of American concert halls, not just big civic-type halls but also smaller venues such as those in a college or university. I stress that this isn't any kind of exhaustive or professional-grade survey; I'm not a statistician, just a guy with a computer, Internet connection, and some skill with a spreadsheet. Without knocking myself out, I was able to determine the construction dates for 199 concert halls, ranging from a date of 1861 for the building of the Howard Gillman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (pictured to the left), to 2009 for the completion of Kansas City's Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. My findings -- such as they are -- go far to contradict any notions of malaise.
To begin with, of those 199 concert halls, 66 have been built since 1990 — nearly one third of the total. It would appear that of late we've been building concert halls like crazy.
Even more intriguing is the number of halls built since 2000 -- that's 36, nearly 18% of the total number of halls in my list. Let's compare that amount to previous decades:
1960s: 17 halls, 8% of the whole
1970s: 25 halls, 12.5% of the whole
1980s: 27 halls, 13.5% of the whole
1990s: 28 halls, 14% of the whole
2000s: 36 halls, 18% of the whole
So not only have we been building plenty of concert halls, but the building tempo has increased dramatically since 2000. The survey indicates record number of concert halls built, and we're not even finished with the decade yet.
Now consider some recent, landmark concert halls.
In Miami, the Knight Concert Hall is the home of the New World Symphony, an orchestra founded specifically for the training of promising young orchestral players. Los Angeles has seen the dramatic addition of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The august Philadelphia Orchestra has moved into its new home in Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center, while the Omaha Symphony Orchestra has taken up residence in the fine new Peter Kiewit Concert Hall at the Holland Performing Arts Center.
The Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts (pictured to the right), to be completed in about a year, will be the new home of the Kansas City Symphony.
Then there's the 2003 opening of Zankel Hall in New York City (left), part of the Carnegie Hall complex. Zankel had a long and spotty history, even being used as a movie theater for a time, but nowadays it is a full-scale recital hall in its own right.
Other orchestras all around the country are playing in concert halls built within the last two decades: Fort Worth, Seattle, Santa Fe, North Carolina, Dayton, Madison, Baltimore, Nashville, Austin.
In short, we seem to be looking at a glorious efflorescence, and not sad decline, at least in the realm of new concert halls.
Coming up: the orchestras themselves, chamber groups, recitals, and recordings.
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