Why is it that some opera houses support and enhance the singers and others muffle them? Why do pit orchestras overwhelm singers in some houses, while too weak in others? In many halls, dead spots occur in some seats where the brass and percussion are all too prominent and the strings are strangely absent. The balcony may sound alive and clear, but in the orchestra seats, the sound is so distant and flat.

Most opera companies struggle with facilities that were built decades ago to serve a broad range of not-for-profit performing arts and for-profit users. For those who perform or operate an opera house that is less than ideal acoustically, there are successful, real-world approaches for renovation.

I have advised on acoustic renovations of historic movie houses into fine homes for opera companies, from the Cleveland Opera at Playhouse Square’s State Theatre, to the Detroit Opera at the Michigan Theatre. Since they were built to serve as the home for film, movie houses’ sightlines, pit, stage, and lobby often do not meet the expectations of modern opera companies or audiences. A large single balcony hall is best suited for viewing and hearing action in the center of a movie screen, not a pit orchestra and live singers, yet with acoustic upgrades, the movie palace has proved to be a successful, and even outstanding, opera house.

Typical vaudeville pits from the early 1900s were built to accommodate 15 to 20 musicians in a small and narrow dropped zone in front of the stage. The modest pit served silent films and live musical numbers. A modern opera house pit must accommodate up to 100 musicians with comfort, ADA access, and excellent acoustics. The pit design, to be ultimately successful, needs to be mindful of the musicians’ needs first. 

There is a desire by many owners to reduce the depth of the pit—upstage to downstage—because of the understandable need for highly priced, front-row seats to be as close to the stage as possible. While it is advisable to limit the depth, we can make the pit wider, left to right—as wide as possible.

The new Koch Theatre pit at Lincoln Center is 24' deep at the center—no need to go deeper than that. The guideline used for years is 16 to 20sq-ft. per musician, depending on the makeup of the instrumentalists; piccolo players, for example, need less space than timpanists. Limit the number of musicians that must play under the overhang of the stage, because they find it too loud there and very difficult to hear other musicians. Eight to 10' under the stage is often enough to allow some room for musicians to circulate and some room for the sound to expand and bloom.

Other tips for the pit (and this applies to many pit designs, not just movie palaces):
A wood pit floor with large air space below makes a resonant surface for the bass and cellos. Even a plywood subfloor is better than concrete.

In order to improve pit balances, heavy velour drapes on tracks on the upstage wall of the pit behind the high energy instruments (brass and percussion), and not near the weaker instruments, is inexpensive and beneficial.

By adjusting and repositioning the musicians in the pit, vast differences in pit balances and levels can be made. For example, moving from a traditional pit setup—winds on one side, brass on the other—to a more orchestral set where the winds are centered and horns off to the side can improve balances to support, rather than work against, the movie house acoustics.

In the typical historic movie house, a deep balcony overhang and a concave ceiling directly over the pit causes real balance issues in the seating. In the Carpenter Center renovation in Richmond Virginia, the concave ceiling focused some instruments in the center orchestra seats, creating “hot spots,” while missing others entirely. The answer was to hang custom acoustic clouds made of scenic materials to look like actual clouds suspended on winched cables over the pit. These foiled sound focusing and hot spots off the existing atmospheric ceiling.

I have had the unique experience to have worked on renovations of three of the major opera houses built in the 1960s, the Seattle Opera House, the Kennedy Center Opera House, and The New York State Theatre (now the Koch Theatre) at Lincoln Center. All three were built after the age of the movie palace and modeled on other successful rooms in Europe and America. We saw (and heard) room for improvement in all three halls.

HVAC systems in the 1960s were unsophisticated and contained such now taboo materials as asbestos insulation and cork vibration pads. It was considered sufficient to blow cold air from the ceiling 40' to 50' up, hoping it would cool the patrons far below, using an HVAC system similar to office parks and shopping malls. However, noise from HVAC ruins otherwise acoustically sound halls by covering up the positive sound reflections from walls and ceilings that give a space its characteristic aural live-ness or presence.

We designed the three pits to be more commodious and sonically supportive, and more thermally comfortable. In fact, we turned the wood pit floor in Seattle and New York into ventilation systems by hand-drilling thousands of small holes and moving ventilation air through the holes. The wood floor surface lost none of its resonance, and air moves slowly and silently, making the pit more thermally pleasant.

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