Page 45 - Winter 2011

Co-sponsored Meeting Reports
Dick Stern
Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University PO Box 30, State College, Pennsylvania 16804
Acoustics Today welcomes contributions for “Co-sponsored Meeting Reports” There is no charge for this service. Submissions of no more than 1000 words that may be edited in MSWord and up to two photos should be e-mailed to <AcousticsToday@aip.org>.
Fig.1 Attendees of the 2010 Summer Institute of the Concert Hall Research Group
The 2010 Summer Institute of the Concert Hall Research Group (CHRG) was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 25–29 July 2010. This was the 4th Summer Institute since the initial conference was held at Tanglewood in 1999. The 2010 con- ference was held at the historic La Fonda Hotel, on the Plaza in downtown Santa Fe. There were 70 participants, which included faculty, professional consultants, university stu- dents, and accompanying persons (See Fig.1). The highlights of the week were three listening experiences—Santa Fe Opera, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and a private demonstration of the reverberation enhancement system in the Lensic Theater.
The Santa Fe Opera has a worldwide reputation for excellent production values, superb acoustics, and a beautiful setting in the hills outside Santa Fe. The audience area has no side walls, yet the singers are loud and clear throughout the 2200-seat opera house without sound reinforcement. The
group took a private tour of Santa Fe Opera led by produc- tion director Paul Horpedahl (See Fig. 2),and attended an evening performance of Life is a Dream by Lewis Spratlan. Three members of the design team for the 1999 additions and renovations made presentations about their work on the project and the unique design features of the Santa Fe Opera. These presenters were Tim Hartung, the project architect from the Polshek Partnership (now Ennead Architects), Len Auerbach of Auerbach Pollock Friedlander theater consult- ants; and Tom Clark of Artec, who worked as director of audio-visual systems for the Santa Fe Opera.
The chamber music concert was in a much smaller venue, the Saint Francis Auditorium, which is the presenta- tion space in the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts. Saint Francis Auditorium has a seating capacity of 600 people, and the architecture is based on a mission-style church, typical of historic churches in the Southwest. The performance was
Co-sponsored Meeting Reports 41