Daring music in safe surroundings

MEDFORD -- Sometimes a building can be wonderful for all its purposes, and yet not be particularly interesting as a work of architecture.

The new Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center at Tufts University is a case in point.

The Granoff opened last weekend with a round of concerts and celebrations. From the point of view of any music teacher or student, it's a winner.

Granoff contains a good concert space, the Distler Performance Hall. And it has all the trimmings: classrooms, rehearsal spaces, a generous library, offices, workshops, and a fascinating storage room that doubles as a museum of non-Western instruments. There are 12 Steinway grand pianos and one concert grand. Audio technology is state of the art.

Harvard should be so lucky. Tufts now has the best music building of any liberal arts campus in the Boston area.

That's why it's disappointing that the Granoff doesn't look or feel more interesting. Viewed from outside, it's a puzzle. It looks like two buildings, side by side, that don't have much to do with each other.

The one on the right is the concert hall. It's fronted with a big prominent curving limestone facade, a bit like a starched white shirt, that successfully announces, right away, "important building." The one on the left, made mostly of red brick, features an improbable mansard roof.

The oddity is that the concert hall with its bold curve looks as if it ought to be the centerpiece in a traditional three-part composition, with less prominent wings on both sides. But there's only one wing. The Granoff is like a rowboat with a single oar. Its parts look as if they'd been worked on by different architects.

There's nothing terribly wrong with any of this. It's just that you hope for more. A building like this, a building for the arts, can seek to be memorable. Instead, the Granoff is a tame effort of a kind familiar from many college campuses. It seeks to bridge the gap between traditional and innovative and thus make everyone happy. As often is the case, it falls between those two stools.

The building is cleanly detailed but it lacks any definite character. The architects were the Boston office of Perkins + Will, a national firm, working with Babcock Design Group of Salt Lake City.

The architectural timidity is especially odd given the music program, which is anything but safe. At the opening concert in Distler hall a week ago Saturday, almost every piece was contemporary. One piano work, we were told, had been composed in just over an hour that very morning. There was a demonstration of Dagomba drum music from Ghana. There was a contemporary jazz trio. There were several raucously untraditional fanfares. Whatever you thought of the music's quality, it possessed the zest of daring, freedom, and risk -- the very qualities that are lacking in the architecture.

With so much new or unfamiliar music, it's hard to judge the acoustics. The Distler has only 300 seats. The acoustician, Tony Hoover of Cavanaugh Tocci Associates of Sudbury, says the acoustics are optimized for chamber music. Certainly the sound is loud, clear, and reverberant, as it should be. Beyond that, I'll leave it to the musicians to judge.

The Distler is visually handsome, too, up to a point. It is finished in maple-faced panels that belly out like sails and are stained to a medium golden brown. The panels are beautiful, and they're made to do everything. They form the rear and sides of the stage and also the sound-reflective "clouds" above it, and they clad the Distler's side walls.

Here, though, the evil snake of cost-cutting enters the garden of Granoff. Starting halfway back in the auditorium, the maple panels disappear from the upper walls and ceiling, to be replaced by gawky white flat slabs. The wall slabs are dramatized, unfortunately, by cove lighting. The effect is to transform what should have been a quietly superb space into one that seems still to be under construction.

There are a couple of minor drawbacks that may be correctable. When Tufts' president, Lawrence Bacow, called for a moment of silence in the hall to show off its acoustical isolation, you could hear a hum from some mechanical source -- I'm guessing the lights. And the beautiful maple panels at the back of the stage are washed with light from above that nastily picks out every minor imperfection in the wood.

This critic hadn't known how strong the musical program is at Tufts. Bacow points out that of the college's 4,700 students, 2,000 are enrolled in some kind of music course. He says the college was known in the 19th century (it was founded in 1852) as "The Singing College," and he possesses a song book Tufts published around 1900.

Tufts has a joint degree program with the New England Conservatory of Music. It also has a "Music in the Community" program that reaches out to non-Tufts families.

Already, some 60 performances are scheduled for Distler hall, most of which will be free and open to the public.

The Granoff will do a good job of supporting this commendable artistic activity. It just won't be, itself, a work of art.

Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.