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Archives on the trail of... Gartner Auditorium
By Walter Holtkamp, Jr.
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Walter Holtkamp with Albert Schweitzer at the McMyler organ console, 1949.
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The 1922 McMyler organ, following its initial revision by
my father, Walter Holtkamp, Sr., in 1933, became a work-in-progress. As
funds became available to Walter Blodgett, curator of musical arts, we would
change or modify a voice in the organ. It was quite piece-meal, depending
upon the largesse of individuals at any given time.
Around June 1962 Walter Blodgett told me that a man had left some money
to the museum specifically for the McMyler organ and organ recitals. It
was said that he came to organ recitals and enjoyed them, but he had never
made himself known to Mr. Blodgett. Wisely, Sherman Lee proposed using the
funds to incorporate an 800 seat concert hall into the proposed education
wing. The museum badly needed a concert hall for several reasons. First,
the existing chamber music hall was too small and acoustically deficient
to be of real use. Second, the location of the McMyler organ in the interior
garden court projected music into the galleries. This was fine during scheduled
recitals but when visiting organists spent hours practicing the music was
a distraction to many.
The museum director and trustees having made the decision to build the education
wing proceeded in the selection of an architect. I was delighted by the
selection of Marcel Breuer Associates, with Hamilton (Ham) Smith as the
partner in charge. Certainly, Ham Smith was among the finest architects
with whom it was my pleasure to work over the years. It is also fair to
say he had strong convictions about his view of a project and the decisions
he made in the project.
The focus of the education wing for me and Walter Blodgett was the auditorium.
Walter sought an 800 seat hall with a pipe organ and a stage which would
accommodate a chorus and orchestra. The auditorium had to be a first-rate
facility for organ, chamber music, large choral works; and also function
for movies, lectures, and dance. This was a tall order for one hall and
I believed it would require the services of the best acoustician available.
However, Hamilton Smith hired consultants without input from museum staff.
Walter Blodgett and I worked on the tonal design of the organ which I translated
into a visual design for the Breuer office. As was my practice, I constructed
a scale model of the organ and hall and took it to New York for evaluation
and consultation with Mr. Breuer, Ham, and other partners. Mr. Breuer, having
started his career as a designer and cabinet maker at the Bauhaus, greatly
enjoyed my wooden scale models. The most contentious part of my design was
placing close-in sound reflecting walls on each side of the organ creating
a kind of sound reflecting shell. Mr. Breuer wondered if the side walls
were necessary. Ham was opposed to them. I explained that they were essential
for the projection of low frequencies of the organ. We could not rely on
the side walls of the hall, which were too far away to be low frequency
reflectors.
Construction on the new education wing began in June of 1968. In early 1969
we removed the McMyler organ from the garden court to our shop. In the spring
of 1970 we began installation in the new Gartner auditorium. Gartner was
to my eye a beautiful auditorium. It was severe and quite strong. I was
fortunate to have such a fine looking hall for my pipe organ. Then commenced
a difficult year. Gartner was beautiful to behold but acoustically awful.
We tried many musical groups and many settings of the in-the-wall acoustical
control curtains built into the auditorium by Ham Smith and his consultants.
We had meetings with Ham who felt the hall was fine and we would learn to
use it. He did not want any surgery on his beautiful hall. We needed a world-class
musician who had as much stature in the music world as Breuer had in the
architectural world to experience Gartner and express his professional opinion
about the sound.
The museum's general manager, A. Beverly Barksdale, was a personal friend
of composer Pierre Boulez. Mr. Boulez accepted an invitation to assess the
acoustical quality of the auditorium. After only thirty minutes he rendered
his opinion. The acoustics in the auditorium were horrendous. Sherman Lee
was informed of Mr. Boulez' assessment and with a wave of his hand ordered
the problem fixed. The museum hired Dr. Robert Shankland, a physicist and
acoustician at Case Institute. His recommendations resulted in the removal
of all carpeting and stage curtains and the in-the-wall curtains. These
and other changes were implemented with only minimal visual changes to the
auditorium. The result was a hall that has worked well for the past thirty
years.
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