Sound Check with Jay Perlman and Jim Pfitzinger
Interdisciplinary artist PaviElle French sits down with two of Minnesota’s leading sound professionals to talk sound design and engineering
Interview by PaviElle French | May 2, 2022
PaviElle French, Jim Pfitzinger (seated), and Jay Perlman on the Icehouse stage in Minneapolis. Photo by Farm Kid Studios.
2022 PRINT ANNUAL
This feature appears in the 192-page, 2022 ENTER print annual, available for purchase here.
Just about everyone loves live music, but not many people understand the sound dynamics in the different kinds of performance spaces, or the work that live audio engineers do to optimize sound for concerts and other events. To shed light on these subjects, ENTER contributing editor and award-winning musical artist and composer PaviElle French reached out to two of Minnesota’s most accomplished sound engineers: Jay Perlman, who works with the Minnesota Orchestra and Icehouse, and Jim Pfitzinger, a freelance engineer whose clients include the Minnesota Orchestra, the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, and the Minnesota Wild.
The three worked together in December 2021 on “Joyful Echoes,” a concert in which PaviElle and storyteller Kevin Kling joined the Minnesota Orchestra for a celebration of diverse holiday traditions in Minnesota. For this feature, PaviElle met with Perlman and Pfitzinger at Icehouse in Minneapolis to learn more about their craft and the local concert halls they know best.
Pfitzinger works through the IATSE Local 13 and freelances with a number of production companies and venues. Perlman spent 15 years at the State Theatre prior to his work with the Minnesota Orchestra. Photo by Farm Kid Studios.
PaviElle: Thank you, Jay and Jim, for joining me here at Icehouse. We’re in a room I love to perform in. [Icehouse co-owner] Brian Liebeck told me you designed the sound system.
Jay: I met him when this space was just a shell. We walked in, and there was nothing here—all of this wood wasn’t here, no stairs, no kitchen. The only things were these two pillars. With the stage here and the audience on three sides, and with all this highly reflective concrete and brick, stereo didn’t make sense. I just went with what I knew. I made an upper and a lower array [of speakers], and I time-lined everything to where the drummer would sit, so the band gets a really cool experience. If you get it right, it’s like the room is one thing, which means you’re giving everyone the same show.
Jim: Yes! The room is like an acoustic guitar body for your event.
PaviElle: That makes sense because there’s a really full sound on stage for performers. Sometimes, it sounds like I’m hearing the band playing without amplification.
Jim: We’ve got the energy [from the arrays] angled toward what are wonderful absorbers—the people in the audience. You don’t want it on the glass, because if you get too much energy on the glass, it comes right back here, really late. Anytime you’re doing reinforcement, you’d rather the energy just leave. If it gets absorbed, it’s way better.
PaviElle: The concrete is a challenge, as well?
Jay: Yes, but we’ve got some drapes to help with that.
Jim: On the plus side, because we have a lot of concrete and heavier objects in here, the energy doesn’t resonate as badly as it would if we had flimsy gypsum walls all over. The latter absorb low end, but they resonate—they produce noise—and that can cause problems.
Jay: Every building has its characteristics, and then the speakers introduce a whole other interaction. When you’re on tour, your job is to bring consistency to that band’s sound, night to night, venue to venue. You’re just taking stock of what’s there to use. Some rooms are not accurate in the high end [of the sound spectrum], others are not accurate in the low end. Some rooms are perfect.
St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis was designed by Edwin Hewitt and completed in 1911. Photo by Morgan Sheff.
PaviElle: What are some other local venues you enjoy working in?
Jim: I’m doing some production managing for St. Mark’s Cathedral right now. They can do anything from a solo violin to a full-on-orchestra-with-organ kind of thing. They’ve got a decent hang time [reverb tail, as in how long a clap reverberates in a tunnel], and even though the cathedral is right on Hennepin Avenue, the noise floor [background noise like street sounds or HVAC fans] is pretty workable for recordings, which is surprising. Plus, St. Mark’s has an organ that is just fantastic. It has some low notes that can shake the building in a way that only a handful of organs in the U.S. can do.
Now, if you want to talk about some of those perfect—or nearly perfect—rooms that Jay alluded to, then we’re talking about spaces that are all floated and have a lot of good, natural sound.
PaviElle: What do you mean when you say, “floated”?
Jay: Separate foundations.
Jim: The floors, walls, and ceiling are isolated from everything else in the building. At the Lincoln Center in New York, for example, the performance spaces sit in steel cages that “float” inside the building on rubber padding; that padding goes all around them. Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, too, is essentially a building within a building. The Ordway in St. Paul is two buildings within a building, because the newer Concert Hall is totally separate, acoustically.
“If you get it right, it’s like the room is one thing, which means you’re giving everyone the same show.”
PaviElle: A few years ago, I composed a symphony, A Requiem for Zula, to perform with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and two of the shows were held in the Ordway Concert Hall. That was the first time in my life that I played in a room where I could literally hear a pin drop.
Jim: It’s a well-designed room. I remember the first rehearsal we did in there with the chamber orchestra—Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony. I told principal bassoonist Charles Ullery, who’s retired now, that I was going up to the back of the top balcony to listen to one of the movements. When I came back, I told him, “Charles, you’re going to have to watch what you eat before you come play here, because if you fart, they’re going to hear it all the way up there.”
Jay: You can print that.
Jim: I mean, it’s that good.
PaviElle: Yes! In the middle of the show, I could hear if an audience member had opened a mint!
The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts Concert Hall (2015), designed by HGA, who worked with acoustician Paul Scarbrough of Akustiks. Photo by Paul Crosby.
Jay: It’s the same at Orchestra Hall. Once, I was sitting in the back while percussionists gathered around the tympani, tapping their fingers on it. Just the lightest thing, and you could hear it everywhere.
Jim: Orchestra Hall is one of the finest buildings in the world for orchestra. Tuned by [famed acoustical engineer] Cyril Harris. The space is such a great horn. The orchestra makes a noise, and the horn throws all of that energy. Well, not all of it, but most of it.
Well-designed spaces throw energy across the stage as well, so that the musicians can hear other sections and play perfectly together. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in Germany has to have a great hall, because their string section plays as one person. The Concertgebouw in Bruges, Belgium, and the Musikverein in Vienna are other top buildings, and Orchestra Hall is right there with them.
Another important element at Orchestra Hall is the plenum [air-filled space] underneath the orchestra. It’s tuned with a lot of air passages, so those low frequencies, they basically don’t even see the main floor—they go right down into that plenum and resonate, creating this full, low end. It’s just amazing. The recent renovation and expansion of the lobby reduced the number of air passages, so it’s not quite as good as it used to be. Remember in the film A Christmas Story when Ralphie dreams his teacher gives him an A-plus-plus-plus-plus? That’s what it used to be; now it’s only like two pluses [laughs].
Orchestra Hall (1974), designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates with HGA, was renovated in 2013 by KPMB Architects. Photo by Travis Anderson.
PaviElle: There are so many cool dimensions and dynamics to optimizing the live orchestra! It’s fascinating to get a breakdown of how all the moving parts work.
Jim: Yes. With classical music, you’re moving an acoustic event across a stage and out into an audience, balancing it so that the different [instrument] sections can be heard very evenly throughout the hall.
Jay: The reflections, too. For instance, when you’re listening to something from three feet away, you’re hearing the immediacy of it. And then there’s a distance at which you’re hearing reflections as well, and that’s what Orchestra Hall does really well.
Jim: The idea is that most of the reflections support the music coming off the stage instead of fighting it. In halls that aren’t as well designed, the energy misses, or it’s late, in some areas. You have echoes, or what you perceive as echoes, because there’s a certain amount of time when the music sounds full, and then it sounds distant, and then echoes. It’s all based on how long it takes for the reflections to be supported in your area in the audience.
PaviElle: With all this talk of fine tuning, I’m wondering if either of you have ever achieved what you would say is the “perfect show.”
Jim: It’s an interesting question. A colleague did the sound for a college graduation ceremony where [musical artist and writer] Dessa was the speaker. She said, “You better be out there failing every week, because the only way you learn—the only way you improve yourself—is to fail.” I mean, all we do in our business is fail [if the measuring stick is perfection]. I’m always like, “Oh man, I should have put the vocalist up a little bit louder, and I should’ve pulled the sax back, because the sax just blew her out of the way.” I haven’t ever done a perfect show.
Jay: I’m always striving for perfection, but the perfect show is very elusive. For me, it’s where I wouldn’t have changed anything about my mix, I hit all my cues, the performance was inspired, and the audience was appreciative. That’s a lot of variables. In my 38 years [in this work], I can count the perfect shows on one hand.