A Building of Note:
UCSC's New Music Center

(Photo by Don Kenny)

On a fall afternoon in 1994 nearly a hundred UCSC music students, faculty, and staff gathered under a large oak overlooking the campus's Great Meadow. They came to visit the site of their future home--a $21 million Music Center neighboring the Performing Arts and Baskin Visual Arts complexes.

The gathering was an overture to a new era in music at UCSC, ushered in this winter quarter when the campus's music community returned to the venerable oak, this time to move into the finished facility.

The center is designed by award-winning architect Antoine Predock, known worldwide for creating buildings that blend in with their environment. The UCSC building is arranged around a central plaza embracing stunning vistas of the tree-ringed meadow and the Monterey Bay. The center's courtyards, hallways, and sightlines evoke the gullies, canyons, and gentle slope of the surrounding hillsides.

The facility was eagerly anticipated by the Music Department, which has experienced years of steady enrollment increases and long ago outgrew its designated space in the Performing Arts Center. The new center provides 13 teaching studios, 20 practice rooms, 5 classrooms, an ensemble rehearsal room, a music library, a percussion studio, and office space. The complex's centerpiece is a 396-seat Recital Hall.

The signature feature of the complex, however, is its acoustic design--one of the best in the country according to dean of the arts and music professor Edward Houghton. "The design is uncompromising and reflects the most recent advances in acoustical science," he says.

Many rooms are custom-designed for specific uses: The hardwood floors, high ceiling, and nonparallel walls in the 60-seat performance studio encourage sound to blossom, while the cushioned walls and floor and curved panels in the percussion studio absorb sound. The Recital Hall makes use of curtains and a movable canopy suspended from the ceiling to "tune" spaces for specific performances.

(Photo by Don Kenny)

Another acoustic asset is sound isolation. In the old music building everyone knew when trumpet lessons and drum practice began. Now, thanks to insulated walls that are all at least 10 to 14 inches thick, only a whisper of the musical activity taking place behind classroom doors leaks into the hallways.

Additionally, students are learning in classrooms linked by advanced audiovisual technology and outfitted with state-of-the-art digital audio, video, and recording systems.

As the department settles into its new space, work has already begun on an adjoining electronic music studio, faculty and department offices, and a freestanding gamelan studio. At the same time, new construction is also expanding and improving other space in the Division of the Arts that will benefit the visual arts, theater arts, and film and video programs. That construction will be completed in the spring of 1998.

The Music Center and the latest construction round out the growing hub of arts above the meadow. "With all the pieces in place," says Houghton, "UCSC is poised to become an internationally visible center for the arts." The final opus in construction for the arts is a large-capacity auditorium, which is under discussion.

In addition to the obvious improvements of additional space and new equipment, such construction brings unexpected benefits. As Houghton notes, "This facility enables us to grow in the kinds of courses and performances we can offer, the quality of students and faculty we attract, and in the opportunities we have for collaboration with the local, national, and international music community."

--Barbara McKenna