A Jewel of a Juilliard

After ten years and nearly two-billion dollars, Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is now officially complete. This week the new Juilliard School, the last in the Center's complex of cultural institutions, celebrated its opening with a gala concert --by famous old grads--and a tour through its sumptuous new quarters.

The new Juilliard building is a triumph of architecture, technology and sheer cash. Designed by Architect Pietro Belluschi and put up at a cost of $30 million, the building encompasses 8,000,000 cubic feet spread over nine floors. It houses 15 gigantic rehearsal rooms, three organ studios, 84 practice rooms, 30 private studios, two recital halls (including Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center's acoustically superb home for chamber music) and limitless vistas of plush, carpeted corridors and lobbies. There is also the thousand-seat Juilliard Theater. Its pop-up ceiling can be raised or lowered (up for big orchestras, down for small ensembles). Its pit stage is bigger than the New York State Theater's across the street.

Most important, the new Juilliard is quiet. Elaborate soundproofing restrains the musical sawing, singing and pounding of adjacent performers. Meticulously angled walls and ceilings channel sound patterns in scientifically approved directions. (Practice studios, for instance, have no right angles at all.)

Disquieting Quiet. Juilliard has always been known for looking at music with a coldly practical eye. "We want only the really great talents coming to the school," says President Peter Mennin. "Entrance exams will be tougher, the curriculum will be tightened. We're sending students out into a hard professional life."

The school's only noticeable lack is a properly equipped laboratory for electronic music--probably because Juilliard regards electronic composers as a threat to the traditional instrumental playing it must teach. But at least one student complained: "They should sell some of that wall-to-wall carpeting and buy some electronics equipment." Composer Luciano Berio, who teaches composition at the school, feels that electronic music is indispensable. "The curriculum is incomplete without it," he says flatly.

In settling down in their lavish surroundings, both students and faculty inevitably indulged in less serious gripes. Even the perfection of the soundproofing upsets musicians grown accustomed to the cozy cacophony of the old building. Violinist Robert Mann of the Juilliard String Quartet, for instance, finds the quiet somewhat disquieting. "I like distant musical sounds; it reminds me I'm in a conservatory." Told that a student had complained because "the library is too comfortable; I can't take notes there," Mann admitted that the opulent new building takes getting used to. "It reminds me of what my father used to say when I told him I would only get married to a woman I love. 'Yes, fine,' he told me. 'But it doesn't hurt if she is rich.' "

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