Eight months after breaking ground on their new headquarters in the East Village, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra invited members of the media to the Stella Boyle Smith Music Center — an $11.75 million, 20,000-square-foot space that will serve as the organization’s first permanent home since it was incorporated in 1966 — for a sneak peek this morning.
Billed as a “hard hat tour,” I assumed the noggin protection would be mostly about optics, but, sure enough, construction continued on as if media wasn’t there, with about a dozen workers scattered throughout the facility doing various noisy things amid a scrappy interior with a lot more sculpting still to be done. Rest assured, though: the Stella Boyle Smith Music Center is still “on schedule and on budget,” according to CEO Christina Littlejohn, and should open in the fall.
Layout wise, the lobby — named after longtime symphony champions Irene and Gus Vratsinas — divides the facility in half. Visitors will be able to come into the building from both ends and the entryways, currently exposed to the elements, will eventually be made of glass, encouraging community visibility.
“We wanted our lobby to be a place where if anybody walked in, they could see themselves here, so it’s a very welcoming space,” Littlejohn said. “The piano that we’ll have will say, ‘play me’ as opposed to ‘don’t play me.’
On one side of the lobby is a portion of the building dedicated to administrative offices and several spaces to support the E. Lee Ronnel Music Academy. In addition to multiple practice areas that can be used for private instruction, there’s a larger room accommodating up to 30 musicians. Littlejohn noted that the room will be especially helpful for orchestra section rehearsals, which have historically been pushed outside due to a lack of space, forcing players to forgo acoustical concerns entirely.
“With the growth of our educational programs where we currently are, classes are on top of rehearsals are on top of meetings,” Music Director Geoff Robson said. “For example, I asked Christina yesterday if she was leaving her office at four o’clock so I could teach a lesson, and she wasn’t, so I had to ask someone else. In terms of overall productivity, it’s going to make a tremendous difference.”
Up against the other side of the lobby will be the Pat Becker and Jim Wallis Broadcast Studio for audio and video recording; extensive instrument storage; a purposefully undetermined 2,000-square-foot room for future growth; and Morgan Hall — named after Suzie and Charles Morgan — a concert hall with 25-foot ceilings and tall glass windows that will be the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s primary practice space.
“One of the reasons it was really great that we were able to build our own space is that the orchestra needs ceiling height,” Littlejohn said. “And so when we were looking around for spaces that we could either buy and renovate or rent, there was nothing that had the ceiling height that we needed. As you make music, it needs space to go, for safety reasons but also so that you can actually experience the music in a beautiful way.”
“The orchestra produces a lot of volume when it’s all playing,” Robson added. “When we’re not rehearsing at Robinson Center and we’re rehearsing at our current space, we literally have to cut those rehearsals short because it hurts.”
While most of the orchestra’s major concerts will still take place at Robinson Center, Morgan Hall is big and flexible enough to also allow for occasional performances. Paired with a small ensemble, there’ll be enough room for up to 300 audience members.
Also along for the tour was Benjamin Gregory, a project architect from Little Rock firm WER Architects, who explained the thinking behind the facility’s unique facade, which hugs Morgan Hall.
“At the beginning of this project, we were tasked with creating a statement piece for the Arkansas symphony,” Gregory said. “We were inspired by curtains, ultimately. How do we create the look of a curtain opening up and the views through a curtain, and how can that be expressed architecturally? So the facade is a series of metal panels that are kind of tessellated, with windows in between them that start to open up and allow you to glimpse into the stuff that happens inside.”