"The joke used to be that a new building for the School of Music would be built 'when pigs fly,' " said Reed, who has been director of the University of Tulsa School of Music since 2008. "When we had our first recital class here, the faculty presented me with what we now affectionately call 'Hamlet.' " Reed laughed heartily, then said, "Because obviously, the pigs have flown."
Reed's new office is on the upper level of Roxana Rozsa and Robert Eugene Lorton Performance Center, the latest addition to the University of Tulsa's ever-evolving campus, on the corner of Fifth Place and Gary Avenue.
The center, the first new facility designed specifically for the arts to be built at TU since Kendall Hall was constructed in the 1970s, is the new home for the university's School of Music as well as its department of film studies.
The $32 million, 77,000-square-foot facility, designed by the St. Louis architectural firm Hastings & Chivetta, was designed to blend in with the majority of the buildings at TU, with a facade made of Tennessee ledgestone that incorporates Gothic arches.
The interior, however, is as modern as TU officials could make it. The center contains a 700-seat concert hall, a full-size performance stage with a multi-story fly space, a mechanical orchestra pit that can be raised or lowered as necessary, a special floor for dance performances, a green room and dressing rooms.
"All our major performances - music, dance and musical theater - will take place here," said Tom Benediktson, dean of TU's College of Arts and Sciences, as he sat in one of the seats in what is officially known as the Gussman Concert Hall.
"The only music program that won't be here will be the marching band, for obvious reasons," he said.
It also has two smaller spaces that can be used as classrooms or for recital performances. These rooms, along with the main concert hall, are equipped so that performances in them can be recorded.
"The place has been designed so that there is no sound bleed-over between the performance spaces," said David Hamby, director of university relations at TU.
It was also designed to fill a niche within the greater Tulsa community. Tulsa is home to arenas, large concert halls such as the Chapman Music Hall in the Tulsa PAC and the VanTrease PACE at Tulsa Community College, and smaller theater spaces, such as the PAC's Williams, Doenges and Norman theaters.
"There was some talk about making the theater bigger," Hamby said, "but everyone quickly realized that Tulsa has no other theater space of this size."
The center also includes practice rooms for student musicians, and lab spaces for music performance, composition, film scoring and production, as well as classrooms and office space for faculty.
"One thing I've learned in this job," Benediktson said, "is that the fine arts have become very high-tech these days."
The piano lab, for example, is stocked with electronic keyboards, and the various film studies labs are stocked with new Apple computers and - in the case of the film scoring lab - Axiom keyboards.
"We even have a (computer-operated) Smart Board in one of our classrooms that our faculty is learning how to use," Benediktson said, smiling. "Although I think some of our faculty members might have to get their grandchildren help them figure it out."
'Critical to the university'
Talk of creating a new home for the university's School of Music has been circulating around the TU campus for decades."When I was hired as a graduate assistant in 1988," Reed said, "Ron Predl, who was the director at the time, told me I was joining the university at just the right time, because there was serious talk about a new facility for the school."
Reed laughed, then said: "Of course, he then told me that when he was hired in 1966, he was told that he was coming onto the faculty at just the right time, because there was serious talk about a new building. So the idea for something like this has been around for nearly 50 years."
Up until last year, the School of Music was in Tyrrell Hall, built in 1930. Benediktson said Tyrrell Hall will be "repurposed" in the near future.
TU commissioned Hastings & Chivetta in 2002 to update the university's existing master plan and do a campuswide space-utilization study.
Among the projects the architects thought to be critical to the university was a new center for the performing arts. Construction began in 2009.
The Lorton family, which owns the Tulsa World, provided the lead gift to help realize the new center. The family also established an endowment that will help fund continued maintenance of the facility, Benediktson said.
"We had been brainstorming as to who would be a good prospect for a lead gift," Robert Lorton said. "My brother Fulton Collins, then chairman of the board at TU and a visionary of TU's growth, turned to me and said, 'Bob, you and Roxana ought to do this.' And that's what happened."
The Lorton family throughout its history has been a strong supporter of TU, as evidenced by several buildings on campus that bear the Lorton name.
Roxana Rozsa Lorton's father, Bela Rozsa, was a noted composer, conductor, pianist and teacher who joined the TU faculty in 1945 and did much to shape and influence the department for the next three decades.
Roxana Lorton recalled a time when the Academy Award-winning composer Miklos Rozsa came to visit her father (the two men were not related).
"Miklos said that he admired my father because he was a university professor," she said. "And my father - who was a very witty man - replied that he admired Miklos because he was making a lot of money.
"My father could have gone to Hollywood, when he was working with the NBC Orchestra that Arturo Toscanini conducted," Roxana Lorton said. "But my mother did not want to raise children in Hollywood, so they decided my father would pursue an academic career - which he loved.
"That's why I know he would have loved to have had a performing arts center such as this, to give his students the opportunity to study and perform in such a venue," she said.
'Truly a home'
For the School of Music, the Lorton Performance Center is more than another building on the TU campus, Reed said."This is truly a home for us," she said. "That's been the major benefit of this place - that it provides a true sense of community for both the faculty and the students."
Students will have key cards that will allow them access to the building, should they want to use the music practice rooms at odd hours, Reed said.
"They can feel safe and secure here," she said. "Sometimes, I'll be walking around the building and see students relaxing - even napping - on the furniture in the lobby. And I love that, because it shows the students already are thinking of this place as a home."
As for the future, Reed said the Lorton Performance Center will become "an arts hub for the city of Tulsa."
"We will be able to do things like have our annual jazz festival and jazz camp in the same place at the same time," she said. "We will be able to host events that will bring in artists and groups from around the state and country, such as a choir festival."
Benediktson said: "We would like for the center to have a strong presence in the greater arts community - and we've already received inquiries from some local groups about using the space.
"We won't be using this as a money-making facility, but as a goodwill opportunity," he said.
Benediktson added that goodwill has been a part of the creation of the Lorton Performance Center in a number of ways. Some 50 faculty members from the College of Arts and Sciences contributed a total of $80,000 to the center's construction.
"We also had one alum, who actually was a graduate of the business college, who donated two concert grand pianos and a harp to the new center," Benediktson said. "His only requirement was that his parents' names be on the pianos, so that they could be 'in attendance' at every performance here."
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