Music Mountain forges ahead into its 90th season

FALLS VILLAGE — Music Mountain is moving with vigor into its 90th season, with a full schedule of chamber music, jazz, show tunes and Gilbert and Sullivan. 

But for those who have been attending concerts at the Falls Village venue for decades, it still feels a little wistful to walk around the hilltop campus and not see the towering figure of Nick Gordon striding into the historic building with one of his beloved large dogs. 

Time moves on, though, and the concert hall is in good hands with Artistic Director Oskar Espina-Ruiz, following Gordon’s death in 2017 at the age of 89. 

Music Mountain was a part of Gordon’s world almost literally from his birth. His father, Jacques, was the concert master for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In the 1920s he formed the Jacques Gordon Quartet (of which he was first violinist). 

He wanted to find a permanent home for the quartet and had, in the back of his mind, a promise that was made to him by Julius Rosenwald, the owner at that time of Sears Roebuck, which was headquartered in Chicago. 

When Rosenwald heard of Gordon’s dream, he promised to donate all the building materials in the form of what have become known as Sears Houses.

These simple homes, popular in the early 1900s, were ordered from catalogues and could be quickly assembled by a builder. There are still some examples around the United States; they are a favorite of home design aficionados. 

At around this time, Gordon’s wife, Ruth, saw an ad in the New York Times for a large piece of wooded land on the top of Barrack Mountain in Falls Village. 

Her son, Nick, liked to tell the story of his mother’s determination to get to Connecticut and see the property herself. 

“She took the 20th Century Limited from Chicago to Albany, then the B&A from Albany to Pittsfield and the New Haven Line from Pittsfield to Falls Village,” he said in an interview with The Lakeville Journal in 2000. And then with a smile he would recall how his mother fell in love at first sight with the property, which at that time had nothing on it but a caretaker cottage and some trees. 

Rosenwald came through with the promised building materials. The first building was a home for the Gordons that was designed by an architect using the Sears building parts. It had six bedrooms, a dining room that could seat 24 people and a living room large enough to hold two grand pianos.

“That was my mother’s idea of a country house, which I find kind of amusing,” Gordon said. 

Additional (and less ambitious) cottages were built for the other quartet members and were named for the other instruments (viola, cello, second violin). 

Ruth Gordon was in charge of the domestic designs but her husband took charge of plans for the building now known as Gordon Hall. 

His son described the hall as being “as close to acoustically perfect as any building can be.”

The building mimics a violin, with the many French doors on both sides of the hall acting like the holes that let sound out of the instrument, he said. 

The interior beam that runs along the center of the hall is meant to mimic a violin’s sound post. 

“The crawl space under the front of the stage is 4 feet deep,” Gordon said, “but only 6 inches deep under the rear of the hall. The attic above is totally open  and the walls are hollow, so if someone onstage plucks a double bass, you can touch the wall in the center of the hall and feel it vibrate.”

“Perfection” sounds very daunting. What Gordon was also seeking, his son said, was intimacy and peace. His goal was to create a place for a small string quartet to perform in an atmosphere “of great serenity.”

Over the years, there have been some small changes to the concert hall and surrounding buildings (notable was the addition of air conditioning 10 years ago). For the most part, though, the grounds and buildings are remarkably intact. To see them, and to enjoy intimate music in an atmosphere of serenity, come for this season’s concerts. The schedule is online at www.musicmountain.org. Gordon was particularly interested in introducing young people to the joys of classical music. All children ages 5 to 18 can attend concerts at no cost.