So reads the epitaph for Sir Christopher Wren in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, which he designed. “If you require a monument, look around you.
The same inscription deserves display in Dallas’ Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, together with an image of the man who did so much to bring one of the city’s landmarks — indeed, one of the world’s finest concert halls — into being.
Meyerson, 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’s details and construction.
The 10-year process, detailed in Laurie Shulman’s 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 and acoustician Russell Johnson, not to mention moneyed civic leaders with their own visions.
For decades, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra had played in halls that could hardly have been less acoustically supportive — mainly the vast Fair Park Music Hall, but also for a few years Southern Methodist University’s 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.
In 1973, Robert W. Decherd, a new Harvard grad, returned to Dallas to join the company his great-grandfather co-founded. (He served as DallasNews Corporation’s board chairman, president and CEO, retiring in 2023.)
Six years later, in 1979, 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.
In a 2018 DSO interview, Meyerson recalled telling Decherd, “You don’t want me because I’m not the right kind of person. I’m semi-bad-tempered. I have a short attention span. I’m very demanding. I’m not political, and I couldn’t fit in.”
That, of course, was exactly why he was the perfect person for the job — 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.
He presided over a large committee to involve many different viewpoints —and potential funders — 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.
The late David Dillon, former architecture critic of The News, recalled Meyerson describing one of those confrontations: “I locked them in a room and knocked their heads together till I got a sound I liked.”
There were endless negotiations with the city, and with owners of decaying commercial properties on what would become the setting for the concert hall — and, of course, struggles to raise the necessary funds. Books celebrating new buildings are usually all puffery, but Shulman’s 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.
In the end, thanks to Meyerson — and he would be the first to credit the many other people, from civic leaders to construction workers — Dallas gained an orchestra hall among the finest in the world. Opened in September 1989, it seems as fresh and welcoming and inspiring — and sonically sumptuous — as ever.
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.
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.
As I wrote recently, “I can’t 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.” Dallas doesn’t know how lucky it is.
When Meyerson asked his EDS boss, the late Ross Perot, 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.
“Part of me is embarrassed,” Meyerson said in a 2015 KERA interview. “I 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’t 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’t take joy in it.”
Meyerson’s 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; he chaired the committee that recommended current music director Fabio Luisi. A lifelong music lover, he sang in numerous performances of the Dallas Symphony Chorus.
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 did his part to make the world a better place. He wasn’t a fancy dresser, didn’t drive fancy cars and lived in an industrial-modern rehab of a power station. He was the real deal.
Arts Access is an arts journalism collaboration powered by The Dallas Morning News and KERA.
This community-funded journalism initiative is funded by the Better Together Fund, Carol & Don Glendenning, City of Dallas OAC, Communities Foundation of Texas, The University of Texas at Dallas, The Dallas Foundation, Eugene McDermott Foundation, James & Gayle Halperin Foundation, Jennifer & Peter Altabef and The Meadows Foundation. The News and KERA retain full editorial control of Arts Access’ journalism.