Cyril M. Harris | Acoustical engineer, 93

Cyril M. Harris, 93, an acoustical engineer responsible for the sound in many of the most prominent concert halls, theaters, and auditoriums in the United States, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan.

Mr. Harris was a traditionalist intent on taking the full, resonant sound of the great 19th-century concert halls to their modern descendants, whose cleaner, less ornamented architecture often proved fatal to classical music. In an age of steel, glass, and concrete, he favored wood and plaster, an approach that proved highly successful in a string of triumphs that began in 1966 with the Metropolitan Opera, whose acoustics he designed with the Danish engineer Vilhelm Jordan.

After the Met, he was hired as a consultant on Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis; the Great Hall at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana, Ill.; the three theaters of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington; Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis; Symphony Hall (now Abravanel Hall) in Salt Lake City; the renovation of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center; and, when he was in his 80s, Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

All told, he designed the acoustics for more than 100 halls, most recently the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall at the University of California, San Diego, which opened in 2009.

It was the renovation of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in the mid-1970s that put the seal on Harris as the preeminent acoustical engineer in the United States. The hall had been cursed with a long list of acoustical problems from the day it opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall and had defeated nearly every effort to overcome its dead spots and lack of reverberation.

Harold C. Schonberg, the classical music critic for the New York Times, wrote that Mr. Harris' acoustical makeover had transformed the hall from "a horror to one of the important acoustic installations of the world."

- N.Y. Times News Service