Hill Auditorium and the Sound of Ann Arbor

The building across from you is one of the most acoustically perfect halls in North America. That was not an accident, and it did not come easily.

Hill Auditorium was completed in nineteen thirteen, designed by Albert Kahn, the architect who would go on to define industrial Michigan with his factory designs for Ford and General Motors. Here, Kahn applied that same engineering discipline to sound. The hall seats approximately thirty-five hundred people and features a parabolic ceiling designed to carry a whisper from the stage to the back row without artificial amplification. Kahn's granddaughter later recounted that he had set out simply to build a hall with perfect acoustics.

The building was made possible by a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bequest from Arthur Hill, a University of Michigan regent from Saginaw who had died four years earlier. His name is on the door. The hall was inaugurated at the twentieth Ann Arbor May Festival in nineteen thirteen, the same festival series that had been bringing major classical performers to town since eighteen seventy-nine.

Over the following century, Hill became a crossroads for American cultural life that defies easy categorization. Leonard Bernstein conducted here. Cecilia Bartoli sang here. Bob Marley played here. Bob Dylan played here. The hall does not distinguish between repertoires because the acoustics serve them all.

A major renovation in two thousand two restored the interior to its original character and installed a new pipe organ with thirty-six hundred pipes, now one of the largest organs in the Midwest.

Michigan's University Musical Society, founded in eighteen seventy-nine, is one of the oldest performing arts presenters in the country and calls Hill its home stage. On any given night when the lights are on in that building, the hall is doing what Albert Kahn built it to do.