Schermerhorn Symphony Center

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The outside of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center's main entrance

The Schermerhorn Symphony Center is a symphony center in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. It opened with its first concert in the Laura Turner Concert Hall on September 9, 2006. Its opening night gala, conducted by Leonard Slatkin and featuring Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer, Zakir Hussein, Frederica von Stade and Janice Chandler-Eteme, was broadcast live on PBS affiliates throughout the state. The main affiliate, Nashville's WNPT, celebrated the occasion by presenting the event in high definition, the station's first HD telecast. In December, the event will be broadcast nationwide. A selection from the complete concert was broadcast on the NPR program Performance Today, on September 15, 2006.

Ground was broken for construction of the center on December 3, 2003. The hall has approximately 1,900 seats and is the current home of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra.

The center is named in honor of Kenneth Schermerhorn who was the music director and conductor of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra from 1983 until his death in 2005. The center was named before his death.

At the center of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center is the approximately 1900-seat Laura Turner Concert Hall. Modeled after the "shoebox" design of storied concert halls such as the Concertgbow in Amsterdam and the Musikverein in Vienna, the Hall is one of only a few such venues in the world to feature natural lighting, which streams in through 30 soundproof, double-paned windows that ring the its upper walls. Intricate symbolic motifs appear throughout the Hall and the rest of the Center, including irises (the Tennessee state flower), horsehoes (a tribute to the late Laura Turner's love of horses) and coffee beans (representing Nashville's Cheek family of Maxwell House fame).

The Center's neoclassical exterior belies the technological and acoustical advances embodied inside. For example, the orchestra level seats are mounted on several motorized wagons that can be driven forward and lowered through the floor on spiral lifts, revealing an ornate Brazilian cherry and hickory parquet floor and enabling the Hall to be converted from a concert hall into a ballroom in approximately two hours. Further, dozens of motorized acoustic drapes and panels can be quickly adjusted to pre-determined positions in order to accommodate many styles of acoustic and amplified music. Finally, those inside the Hall are spared the intrusion of the inevitable downtown noises by an acoustical isolation joint that encircles the entire Hall and prevents soundwaves from traveling into or out of the Hall.