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When Melody Creates Disharmony

What to do when the walls are alive with the sound of music.

By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: December 24, 1995

THE Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev never gave a subtitle to his Second Piano Concerto, but the pianist Garrick Ohlsson concedes that some passages in the final movement could well be called "A Neighbor's Nightmare."

"There are some very difficult loud passages and jumps, with both hands crossing over each other," Mr. Ohlsson said, "percussive, aggressive, harsh phrases that must be practiced dozens if not hundreds of times so that in the adrenaline-filled panic of a concert you can keep your cool and hit most of the right notes. I certainly wouldn't want to live next to anyone practicing that."

Yet Mr. Ohlsson and thousands of other musicians -- professional or amateur, famed or aspiring -- do practice at home, sometimes hour after hour, day after day. And even in New York City, with its cacophony of car alarms, truck rumblings and late-night street encounters, living in proximity to a musician can be a disharmonious existence.

The strains, whether produced by an acclaimed soprano, a rock drummer or a neophyte fiddler scratching out "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" for the umpteenth time, can take their toll on neighborliness.

Nasty missives are slipped under doors. Broom handles thump ceilings -- though not in time with the music. Fistfights erupt. The police are called. Landlords and superintendents are notified. Co-op boards adopt strict noise-control codes or make it difficult for musicians to buy apartments. Sound-measuring devices are purchased. Complaint logs are kept. Lawsuits are filed.

Just last month, Judge Lucindo Suarez of Civil Court in the Bronx -- citing decibel levels "substantial in nature, intentional in origin and unreasonable in character" -- ordered a rock musician whose band practiced in his basement to pay $30,000 to the family on the other side of the wall in their semi-attached house on Fowler Avenue.

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"This went on with the band every Sunday, but he would play tapes of the band and other heavy rock the rest of the week, night and day," said Michael Stiglianese, 63, who won the judgment from his neighbor, Joseph Vallone, after four years in court. "The floors would shake, plates fell off the wall."

Mr. Vallone plans to appeal.

The tension is usually felt on both sides of the wall, above and below the floor or even across the alley. And, sometimes, musicians go to great lengths to give and get relief.

Mr. Ohlsson, for example, had no problems -- despite the Prokofiev passages -- with other tenants in his old rental building on West 93d Street. But there was this neighbor in a building just to the north, with a window 5 feet away.

"I got this rather cross letter, something like, 'Your infernal noisemaking is robbing me and my family of our sanity,' " recalled Mr. Ohlsson, who was not unsympathetic. "It's not as pleasant as some people fantasize, all this wonderful music cascading next door."

Mr. Ohlsson installed double-pane windows, draped thick fabric about his piano room and tried to limit his practice time. Still, he said, "I got a few visits from the police."

Then Mr. Ohlsson found the ultimate solution: he bought his own building.

Four years ago, he paid $780,000 for a five-story brownstone on West 73d Street in which he, along with three pianos, occupies the bottom two floors while six tenants rent one-bedroom apartments upstairs.

"I figured this would be a good long-term investment," Mr. Ohlsson said one recent morning, sitting at his kitchen table. Then, with a proprietary smile, he added, "And the tenants can't complain if it's the landlord."

UPSTAIRS, Lorraine Ruggieri had no intention of complaining. Ms. Ruggieri, a fashion designer for performing artists, lives and works in her studio "right above Garrick's grand piano."

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"What could be more enticing than to have a client here for a fitting and to have Garrick playing Chopin right below?" she said.

But the elderly couple living below Emanuel and Yoko Ax at their old co-op on Riverside Drive were never enticed by the cascade of notes. And the admissions committee at another co-op, which Mr. Ax identified only as being on the Upper West Side, seemed not at all interested in selling to Mr. and Mrs. Ax, both of them concert pianists.

The Axes originally owned one apartment in the Riverside Drive building, then bought another to serve as a studio. Soon came a cascade of complaints. "Eventually, it pushed us into moving," Mr. Ax said.

Although they had little problem selling their Riverside Drive apartments, the Axes had difficulty trying to buy another co-op. "We finally did go to contract on one apartment, a beautiful place," Mr. Ax said.

Then came the admissions interview. "They had us prepare letters, years of tax returns, but all of that didn't mean much," Mr. Ax said. "It was like an inquisition. They made us feel that being a pianist was akin to being a white-collar criminal."

The deposit on that apartment was refunded and, four months ago, the Axes bought a condominium on West End Avenue where, Mr. Ax said, "So far everybody's been wonderful."

New York City's Administrative Code prohibits landlords and co-op boards from refusing to rent or sell to anyone with a legal occupation, including musicians. What they can do, said Stuart Saft, chairman of the Council of New York Cooperatives, which represents 1,800 co-ops, is place limits on how much a musician may practice.

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"Most house rules provide that musical instruments can only be played between 9 A.M. and 8 P.M.," Mr. Saft said. But he cited a recent instance in which, after an unneighborly dispute, the board at 400 West End Avenue added a provision "that they could not play more than two consecutive hours without taking a two-hour break."

The city code says residents cannot be subjected to what it calls "unreasonable noise" from outside their homes, but distinguishes between commercial and noncommercial noise sources.

If the source is commercial -- perhaps a disco on the ground floor -- the sound cannot exceed 45 decibels inside the complainant's home. "That would be about as loud as someone talking 3 feet away from you," said Alan Fierstein, president of Acoustilog, an acoustical engineering company. "Of course, if you're trying to sleep you don't want someone talking 3 feet away."

The code, however, sets no decibel level for sounds coming from a noncommercial source; it defines "unreasonable noise" as "any excessive or unusually loud sound that disturbs the peace, comfort or repose of a reasonable person."

Asked about that vague definition, John Bennett, a spokesman for the city's Department of Environmental Protection, which investigates complaints, said: "If an inspector or a police officer comes they make a determination whether there is unreasonable noise. To paraphrase former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, 'You know it when you hear it.' "

IN Fiscal Year 1995, which ended June 30, the city issued 494 violations for noise coming from noncommercial sources, Mr. Bennett said. In 181 cases, fines ranging from $90 to $350 were paid, and in 61 instances the case was dismissed after a hearing. In the remaining 252 cases, the violator did not pay or show up for a hearing, Mr. Bennett said, after which civil proceedings were initiated or a lien was placed on the property.

Ultimately, New York State's Warranty of Habitability Law holds the owner of a building liable for noise violations. Michael Finder, a Manhattan real estate lawyer, said that New York courts "have held 'unreasonable noise' to be a breach of this warranty, and that a tenant or shareholder victimized by such noise is entitled to a rent or maintenance abatement."

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The statute, however, does not apply to condominiums, because a landlord-tenant relationship does not exist between the condominium-unit owner and the condominium board, while technically the shareholder in a co-op is a tenant of the corporation.

Jessica Josell is getting cooperation from her co-op board.

Ms. Josell, a public relations consultant who works out of her apartment in Lincoln Towers on West End Avenue, is having trouble with a pianist upstairs. "He practices 10 hours a day," Ms. Josell said. "There are times when it's so loud you feel you are sitting inside the keyboard. You get something into your head at the computer and then the music starts."

Ms. Josell said her co-op board asked her to keep a complaint log, "and they send security up whenever we have noise." The board has hired a lawyer to handle the case, she said.

Sometimes, parties to a dispute take illegal recourse. Mr. Fierstein, the acoustical engineer, knows of an incident "where one neighbor punched out the other because he was complaining about his music."

He also knows of fractured relationships. "There was a rock musician who was looking to set up a recording studio and mentioned it to his friend, who advised him of a vacant apartment above him in a loft in Chelsea," Mr. Fierstein said. "Improper soundproofing resulted in a bitter court fight -- and a broken friendship."

Hundreds of musicians prefer to live in the pre-war buildings of the Upper West Side because of the thickness of the old walls and floors. And some buildings in the city -- like the Ansonia at Broadway and 73d Street and the Wyoming at Seventh Avenue and 55th Street -- have reputations as historical havens for musicians and artists.

"The walls in these buildings," said Cyril M. Harris, a professor of architecture at Columbia University and an expert on acoustics, "might be 8 to 12 inches, and they were made of brick or cement block. But some of these new buildings, all they have is studs with gypsum board on them." And walls in new buildings, Dr. Harris said, can be as little as 3 1/2 inches thick within an apartment and "usually under 6 inches" between apartments.

Sound construction, literally, was the highest priority for the flutist Marina Piccinini and her husband, the pianist Andreas Haefliger, when they saw a building under construction eight years ago -- the Copley, a condominium on Broadway at 68th Street. "We watched to see that they were really using cement in the walls and the floors," Ms. Piccinini said. "This made us think it would be equivalent to a pre-war building."

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WHEN apartments at the Copley were being shown, the couple consulted with the construction supervisors and the architects "to know what materials were used and how the sound would travel," Ms. Piccinini said. "My mother-in-law is an architect and she went with us to check." Whatever contentions Ms. Piccinini and Mr. Haefliger have experienced at the Copley have been with each other. "We chose an L-shaped apartment, to make sort of a natural barrier between each other," Ms. Piccinini said. "We will practice simultaneously, and just accept it, like being in the practice rooms at Juilliard, like we never left school."

For the concert pianist Ursula Oppens, the solution was to build, in effect, a room within a room. Before she moved into her co-op on 115th Street near Broadway, Ms. Oppens consulted with the board, had the sellers introduce her to the neighbors and had a friend play his saxophone as loud as he could in her prospective apartment while an acoustical engineer held a stethoscope to the walls in adjacent apartments.

Then Ms. Oppens paid $13,400 for construction of, in the architect's words, a "floating floor" of alternating plywood and sheetrock layers, supported on "compressed, high-density fiberglass resilient cubes," as well as "an inner, independent ceiling below the existing building ceiling" filled with fiberglass, and 200 square feet of "wrapped fiberglass absorption panels" on the walls.

Ms. Oppens had moved from a rental building on West 98th Street after new neighbors began "complaining and banging," she said. "They wanted me to be allowed to practice from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M., but only if they weren't home."

"I mean, I asked them to tell me when they would be out," Ms. Oppens said. "They wouldn't."

Fortunately, not every residential musical encounter turns dissonant.

Michael Mitchell, a baritone who has played featured roles in "Hello, Dolly," and "Fiddler on the Roof" on Broadway, moved into a rental building on West End Avenue two years ago, then made a point of consulting with the neighbors about his his singing.

"I asked two elderly women from across the hall, 'Have you been disturbed by my singing?' " Mr. Mitchell said. "They said, 'Oh, no, we love it. We open the window and sit there to listen.' "

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Keeping Noises Off

THE sound was an ersatz castrato, piercing the walls, ceilings and floors of an Upper West Side apartment used by a teacher of the falsetto style of singing that in centuries past was usually the result of surgery on selected boy sopranos.

"The neighbors were being driven nuts," said Alan Fierstein, president of Acoustilog, an acoustical engineering company in Manhattan. "It's not like they were singing 'Moon River.' This was high-pitched opera, at the top of their lungs."

Called in for consultation, Mr. Fierstein recommended "a complete enclosure of their practice space and piano with an inner room made of gypsum wallboard, with insulation." The enclosure's walls would have been 6 inches inside of the 20- by 20-foot existing room. But the $25,000 price tag proved prohibitive, Mr. Fierstein said, "so they ultimately left the building under threat of a lawsuit."

There are less elaborate sound-muffling measures that can be taken, some as simple as practicing in another room. But one that won't work is to simply throw pillows under the baby grand.

Cyril M. Harris, a professor of architecture at Columbia University and an acoustics expert, explained that sound is transmitted two ways: through the air and "by solid-borne vibration."

"When you have anything vibrating, a piano or a loudspeaker, sitting directly on the floor, the sound travels down through the floor and then up through the walls," Dr. Harris said.

To deal with airborne sound, he said, "increase the mass of the wall or add a second wall." For solid-borne sound, "isolate the source of vibration from the floor -- put it on fiberglass or better yet, on a platform."

Mr. Fierstein recommended, at a minimum, using rubber shock absorbers -- called isolators -- under each piano leg. "Many people," he said, "do the wrong thing. They put blankets or pillows on the floor under the piano, which soak up the sound they are hearing more effectively than the sound the neighbor hears. Then the player plays harder."

Frequently, holes around steampipes and air-conditioners allow sound to travel from apartment to apartment. They should be sealed airtight with silicone caulk. Acoustical air-conditioner covers are also available, but must be removed when the machine is used.

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Neighborly diplomacy can defuse situations. Marina Piccinini, a flutist, and her husband, the pianist Andreas Haefliger, maintain good relations by inviting neighbors to their concerts or giving them copies of their CDs.

But sometimes the complainer must take self-defensive action. Turning on a fan can mask unwanted sound.

Or a device called active noise-canceling headphones can pick up sounds entering a room, particularly low bass sounds, and "cancel them out before they get to your ear," Mr. Fierstein said.

Do people really sleep with headphones on? "You could if it was bad enough," Mr. Fierstein said, "while you're waiting for the case to go to court." DENNIS HEVESI