Mention the phrase “music festivals,” and the images that usually come to mind are packed, hot, dusty outdoor venues with multiple overlapping stages blasting rock, country, pop, hip-hop, EDM and so on — or perhaps even the mud pits of the original Woodstock. The throbbing bass from such events can easily carry for miles.
But not all festival events fall into this structure. In fact, the Aspen Music Festival is quite the opposite, offering an extended program of classical performances spotlighting delicacy and grace, with an equal emphasis on high-performance sound reproduction, where sonic detail, nuance and the purity of the signal chain — rather than max-to-the-wall SPL’s — is the goal of the dedicated audio team.
Breaking the Mold
Established in 1949, the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) takes place over an eight-week summer season in a variety of venues high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The Aspen festival annually attracts an audience of about 70,000 with a calendar of more than 300 classical music events, while also providing musical training to just over 600 young adult students from around the world.
Larger concerts are held in the Benedict Music Tent, which holds approximately 2,000 people, with additional events staged in the adjacent 500-seat Joan and Irving Harris Hall and elsewhere in the city, which has a population of under 7,000. Notable alumni of the program include Philip Glass, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw and many others. In fact, alumni Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang and Sharon Isbin performed at this year’s festival, the 67th season, alongside Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Edgar Meyer, Robert McDuffie and many others.
Complementing the world-class musicianship on stage at AMFS is the Edgar Stanton Audio Recording Center (ESARC). The staff of 12 engineers, drawn from industry professionals, is charged with recording every event in stereo and 5.1 surround (many for subsequent broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio and Aspen Public Radio), while also providing technical support at the venues.
The audio team at this year’s event was headed by Lisa Nigris, director of audio-visual services at the New England Conservatory (NEC) since 1996 and director of audio production at AMFS since June 2011. Scott Burgess, the manager of recording labs and live sound at the University of Colorado Denver campus and the festival’s head media engineer, was in charge of the broadcast recordings. Scott Wynne, associate professor at Appalachian State University and the festival’s head audio engineer, handled the non-broadcast recordings.
The festival’s audio team has a longstanding relationship with Sennheiser, ensuring that a dizzying array of microphones is available for any recording configuration. When Mike Pappas, who works with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and Sennheiser/Neumann, contacted the team this year, recalls Wynne, “I said, if he’s going to send anything out, then I want everything that he has. I may have overstepped my bounds on that request — but he did send everything. It’s amazing to be in this toy store, because no matter what the engineers want to use, they have it available to them.”
Upgrading Harris Hall
The primary performance venue for the Aspen Music Festival is the Benedict Music Tent. Erected in 2000, the tent has the acoustics of a fixed indoor concert hall and offers the romance and freshness of an open-air tent. The design has open sides; the curving roof is made of Teflon-coated Fiberglas, the same hard material also used in the famed design of the Denver International Airport.
The sizeable venue seats 2,050 persons — not including the lawn seating area surrounding the tent, which is offered free to the public. However, given the severity of the Aspen winters (after all, Aspen is also a world-class ski resort), the use of the open-air Benedict Music Tent is seasonal and does not have a permanently installed sound system.
Of the multiple venues in use during the festival, one of the key facilities is the Joan and Irving Harris Concert Hall. Built in 1993 and designed by architect Harry Teague, it’s an intimate and pristine mid-sized venue with a warm, woodsy interior. The room also features the “mothership” — a large, UFO-shaped, overhead acoustical reflector suspended over the stage that can be adjusted to vary the hall’s sonic signature.
The mothership’s front face has P.A. speakers that combine JBL 4646A woofers with 2426 HF drivers on a custom horn. Given the Harris Hall’s superb acoustics, these are not essential for most classical music, but add flexibility for pops performances, lectures, jazz vocalists, etc. The stage wedges are JBL MS26’s.
In Harris Hall, equipment suspended on the mothership was set up to offer easy comparison between digital and analog microphones in a variety of standard and modified configurations. “We purchased a Mogami 12-channel AES snake from Parsons Audio so that we could have a nice clean hang with six different stereo set-ups. We could patch those to digital or analog. We did the same thing with the flank mics — we could put up a pair of Neumann digital mics or Neumann or Sennheiser analog mics and really compare them.”
Those options, and the ability to quickly patch between them, are critical, according to Wynne. “Harris Hall is one of our busiest venues. In a single day, we’ll have eight or nine services — dress rehearsals going into master classes back into dresses going into concerts going into rehearsals.”
Into the Future
Harris Hall was outfitted with a Dante-networked Focusrite RedNet system for the first time this year. Ron Streicher, ESARC audio production manager (and the festival’s chief engineer from 1996 through 2005), installed what Wynne calls “an amazing infrastructure” in Harris Hall. But, he says, “We were getting some noise on the lines, oxidization of the connectors; we’d find redundancy where we didn’t expect it. Because we have almost a revolving staff every year — we’re really lucky if we can bring back four engineers like we did this year — we were constantly trying to figure out where everything goes.”
Nigris had recently overseen an upgrade to RedNet at NEC’s historic Jordan Hall. “The wiring was about 20 years old and we were having problems; it was really degenerating. As we started looking into the options, RedNet was screaming to be the choice. We installed it, and it has been a godsend. It saved us from having to rewire the entire concert hall,” she says. “Harris Hall had celebrated its 20th anniversary last season. It was interesting to see the same kinds of issues in an installation of roughly the same age,” Nigris continues. “The solution was a huge success in one venue, so why not install it in another?”
In Harris Hall’s RedNet implementation, Neumann DMI-8 digital microphone interfaces located in the mothership fed up to 16 channels onto the Dante network via a RedNet D16R unit. An 8-channel RedNet MP8R remote-controlled mic preamp with conversion was available for analog inputs, with two more MP8Rs located on the stage, offering flexible input options for any mic set-up. All four RedNet units were sent via a Cisco 24-port switch to a similar switch in the Harris Hall control room overlooking the concert hall. At FOH a RedNet 2 converter and a RedNet MP8R handled local I/O, and a pair of Cat-6 cables were routed to the Harris Hall Control Room switch to provide live sound support and splits.
The lines from the mothership, FOH and the stage also fed a Yamaha DM2000 console in the recording control room via a RedNet 6 MADI Bridge and traveled via a RedNet D32R 32-channel Dante-to-Pro Tools|HD bridge into the DAW, hosted on a Apple MacPro. An older, upgraded iMac runs the RedNet Control software, with Audinate software for patching, adds Wynne.
Files and Workflow
Recording almost 300 events a year generates a lot of data. “A couple of years ago, the former head audio engineer, Chris Cecere, had this wonderful idea to get us a SANmp from Studio Network Solutions; it has been our savior. We have somewhere around 12 TB of recording drives, and each engineer has their own partitioned drive,” Wynne says.
At the conclusion of a typical event, the engineer transfers about 50 GB of data to an edit drive and gets to work in the control room or one of the two edit stations, exporting the master as Red Book audio and the surround 5.0 files. “We typically ask the engineers to hold onto the Pro Tools session for a week or two. The finished archival copies go to our dub room manager, Jon Griesinger, on another partitioned drive of the SANmp. He double-checks the metadata then moves those files to a SAN of archival drives and produces a copy for the library in Aspen.” Griesinger also satisfies requests from artists, soloists and conductors for copies, says Wynne.
The new RedNet system fit nicely into the festival’s educational mandate. “It allowed the opportunity for these nine engineers plus the head audio engineers to really learn a new system and see how it’s implemented,” explains Wynne. “When we go back to our various jobs at universities or facilities, we’re able to bring this knowledge with us and perhaps employ those same technologies in other institutions.”
Nigris was as interested in the immediate benefits. “When you see it in action, it really is a beautiful thing. It takes your setup time from an hour to 10 or 15 minutes, which is huge when the turnover time in the hall is virtually non-existent. If I can get my staff a half an hour of wiggle room between one event and the next, it’s an amazing thing. Drawing on the successful relationship between Focusrite and NEC, when it came time to do this year’s Aspen Music Festival, Focusrite offered a clear solution. I’m glad they were there to support us, and I look forward to working with them again next year.”
2015 Aspen Music Festival Crew
- Director of Audio Production: Lisa Nigris
- Head Engineer: Scott Wynne
- Head Media Engineer: Scott Burgess
- Dub Room Manager: Jon Griesinger
- Senior Broadcast Recording Engineers: Brandon Johnson, John Fredenburg, Loren Stata.
- Non-broadcast Recording Engineers: Adam Borecki, Rebekah Wineman, Anastasia Rybakova
- Assistant Engineers: Peter Atkinson, Julian Pichette, Jordan Bailey
