![\"Morton](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/VVF4RS22GREZ7HFWIAE2IVJ4KM.jpg\")
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Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, photographed August 29, 2014. <\/p>\n
Evans Caglage \/ Staff Photographer<\/p>\n
News Roundups<\/p>\n
Meyerson<\/a>, who died Aug. 5 after a long battle with cancer, presided over conceptualizing the building, selecting the architect and acoustical consultant, negotiating land purchases and participation by the city of Dallas and innumerable decisions on the building\u2019s details and construction.<\/p>\n Related:Morton Meyerson stares down the end of his life, and the modern Dallas he helped build<\/a><\/p>\n The 10-year process, detailed in Laurie Shulman\u2019s book The Meyerson Symphony Center: Building a Dream, was fraught with innumerable challenges and near disasters. Not least of the challenges were egos of architect I.M. Pei<\/a> and acoustician Russell Johnson, not to mention moneyed civic leaders with their own visions.<\/p>\n For decades, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra<\/a> had played in halls that could hardly have been less acoustically supportive \u2014 mainly the vast Fair Park Music Hall, but also for a few years Southern Methodist University\u2019s McFarlin Auditorium. Even scheduling dates at the Music Hall was a nightmare. Following a financial collapse in 1974, it was increasingly clear that the orchestra needed a better performance venue.<\/p>\n In 1973, Robert W. Decherd<\/a>, a new Harvard grad, returned to Dallas to join the company his great-grandfather co-founded. (He served as DallasNews Corporation\u2019s board chairman, president and CEO, retiring in 2023.)<\/p>\n Six years later, in 1979, <\/b>Decherd was tapped to chair the DSO board. With interest in a new home for the DSO on many minds, Decherd asked Meyerson, president of Electronic Data Systems, to chair a planning committee.<\/p>\n In a 2018 DSO interview, Meyerson recalled telling Decherd, \u201cYou don\u2019t want me because I\u2019m not the right kind of person. I\u2019m semi-bad-tempered. I have a short attention span. I\u2019m very demanding. I\u2019m not political, and I couldn\u2019t fit in.\u201d<\/p>\n That, of course, was exactly why he was the perfect person for the job \u2014 which turned into a lot more work than he expected. He immediately set out to learn as much as he could about concert halls new and old, the great ones and the disasters.<\/p>\n He presided over a large committee to involve many different viewpoints \u2014and potential funders \u2014 and smaller subcommittees to address specific issues. Subcommittees to select and oversee the the architect and acoustical consultant were chaired by, respectively, the late Stanley Marcus and Eugene Bonelli. In a highly unusual move, Pei and Johnson were designated equals in the design process, which led to numerous headbuttings.<\/p>\n Morton H. Meyerson (center) led the project through financial woes and umpired the chronic dispute between I.M. Pei (right), the building\u2019s star architect, and its renowned acoustician, Russell Johnson. <\/p>\n File 2004 – Staff Photo<\/p>\n The late David Dillon<\/a>, former architecture critic of The News, recalled Meyerson describing one of those confrontations: \u201cI locked them in a room and knocked their heads together till I got a sound I liked.\u201d<\/p>\n There were endless negotiations with the city, and with owners of decaying commercial properties on what would become the setting for the concert hall \u2014 and, of course, struggles to raise the necessary funds. Books celebrating new buildings are usually all puffery, but Shulman\u2019s on the Meyerson is a real page-turner of outsized personalities and crises barely averted. Work was going on literally minutes before the doors opened. <\/p>\n In the end, thanks to Meyerson \u2014 and he would be the first to credit the many other people, from civic leaders to construction workers \u2014 Dallas gained an orchestra hall among the finest in the world. Opened in September 1989, it seems as fresh and welcoming and inspiring \u2014 and sonically sumptuous \u2014 as ever.<\/p>\n Meyerson Symphony Center lobby in Dallas<\/p>\n Daniel Golleher<\/p>\n The choice of Pei was inspired. A devoted music lover, the architect was thrilled to design the only concert hall of his long career. Elegantly finished, its dialogues of angles and curves, never quite what you expect, continue to fascinate. The lobby is vast and welcoming, the concert hall interior articulated in grids of sumptuous makore and mahogany, with backlit onyx punctuations.<\/p>\n Eugene McDermott Concert Hall in the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas<\/p>\n Daniel Golleher<\/p>\n Johnson was less well known at the time, but the Meyerson made him an overnight sensation in acoustical design. He and his colleagues gave the hall unprecedented adjustability, from the enormous overhead canopy that can be raised, lowered and angled to reverberance chambers that can be opened and closed behind grilles ringing the room. In normal symphonic settings the hall has a sonic signature unlike any other. <\/p>\n As I wrote recently, \u201cI can\u2019t think of another concert hall that puts orchestral sound so vividly in your face, so deep in your bones, with so rich and spacious an acoustical surround.\u201d Dallas doesn\u2019t know how lucky it is.<\/p>\n When Meyerson asked his EDS boss, the late Ross Perot<\/a>, for a lead donation to finish the hall, he expected it to be named for Perot or his family. Perot had a very different demand: that it be named for the man who more than anyone had brought it into being. <\/p>\n \u201cPart of me is embarrassed,\u201d Meyerson said in a 2015 KERA interview. \u201cI came from a middle-class family in Fort Worth, and I am the grandson of immigrants. So I basically have lived the American Dream. Even in an American Dream, you don\u2019t think that your name will be on a symphony hall. So for me it is slightly intimidating and slightly embarrassing. But it is not so embarrassing that I can\u2019t take joy in it.\u201d<\/p>\n Meyerson\u2019s service to the DSO included longtime membership on the board and participation in search committees that identified former music directors Andrew Litton and Jaap van Zweden<\/a>; he chaired the committee that recommended current music director Fabio Luisi<\/a>. A lifelong music lover, he sang in numerous performances of the Dallas Symphony Chorus.<\/p>\n Those of us lucky enough to have known Mort will treasure memories of a smart, no-nonsense guy who cared deeply about the important things in life and in many ways<\/a> did his part to make the world a better place. He wasn\u2019t a fancy dresser, didn\u2019t drive fancy cars and lived in an industrial-modern rehab of a power station. He was the real deal. <\/p>\n![\"Morton](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/LIPFKO7NDKKL72OGX3FS7ER2FI.jpg\")
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