Listed the National Register of Historic Places, this remarkable and charming century-old building is all that remains of Hervey White’s Maverick Concert Hall, a utopian artist-in-residence colony that’s tucked away in a grove inside New York State’s 700,000-acre Catskill Park. It also happens to be the site of America’s longest-running chamber music festival.
The rough-hewn, oversized building displays disparate architectural influences: pointed-arch portals and a soaring interior with slender columns draw the eye upwards, conjuring up the vision of a Gothic cathedral; decorative lattice work in the gables recalls Bavarian Bundwerk; while its simplicity brings to mind an archaic longhouse. Whether any of these references were intentional or not is debatable. Architect Stephen Tilly, whose firm has carried out the most recent restoration project, describes it as ‘a one-off vernacular invention, done with local materials, trying to create a mystical place’.
Hervey White, often referred to as the ‘original hippie’, constructed the building in 1916 with a group of local craftsmen. A shoestring budget dictated careful planning and a degree of ingenuity. Before establishing the Maverick, in 1902 White and an American artist and educator, Bolton Brown, had helped a wealthy Englishman, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, form the utopian artist/craftsman colony Byrdcliffe, just outside Woodstock. Such settlements proliferated from the late 19th century until the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the flow of cash from wealthy benefactors dried up.
After becoming frustrated with what Brown and White considered to be Whitehead’s autocratic oversight of Byrdcliffe, the socially progressive White broke away and created a looser, more freewheeling group. Maverick was born. It grew on a 102-acre farm that White purchased in 1904 with an investment partner.
The concert hall was purpose-built for summer festivals and was intended as the venue on Sunday afternoons for a cerebral counterbalance to the pagan-tinged, Bal des Quat’z’Arts-inspired Maverick Festival, a bacchanalian event that always started the day before and would last through the night. Originally created to help cover the colony’s annual operating expenses, the Maverick Festival featured pageantry, theatrical performances and mummery – the summer artists-in-residence and local craftsmen made elaborate sets, costumes and booths. Over the years, it blossomed, eventually drawing an estimated crowd of over 6,000 merrymakers, even attracting bohemians from Greenwich Village. Frowned upon by conservative critics, it was eventually discontinued in 1931, when it was deemed too rowdy and unmanageable. But the chamber concerts on Sunday afternoons continued.
In 1918, less than two years after this oddly beautiful, vernacular building with faultless acoustics was completed and hosted its first chamber music festival, the Spanish flu took centre stage. It was particularly hard on the Woodstock community, but it is far from the only crisis it has survived. White himself volunteered to assist one of the local doctors during the pandemic.
Over the decades, there’s been a formidable roll-call of musicians taking to the stage. John Cage’s infamous composition 4’33” had its world premiere at Maverick’s summer gathering in 1952. The woodland setting proved perfect for Cage’s piece, calling as it does for just over four-and-a-half minutes of silence.
In 1976, the building was given a new roof and additional structural updates. In the years since, however, concerns about water infiltration (causing deterioration to the floor) and the stability of the iconic north façade, with its diagonal barn sash windows creating what Stephen Tilly calls ‘a rustic, vernacular version of a curtain wall’, demanded action. ‘It needed an intervention; it needed more stillness. It’s a big-volume building – if you get some snow on the roof and then a strong wind blows, it starts moving the building around.’ Work began in the autumn of 2017. The north wall was completely dismantled. Each piece was numbered before the wall was put back together with a series of hidden steel connectors. ‘It took three months to complete and the wall looks the same as it always has,’ he says.
Another major part of the project addressed the issue of comfort. As well as four front portal-style doors and one on the opposite south wall, the hall has a lot of intentional gaps in the walls. These allow for cross-ventilation, but not really enough to keep a crowd cool on a blisteringly hot and humid Sunday afternoon in July. Factor in theatrical lights and some antiquated ceiling fans and you have an interior that would often become truly stifling.
The intention was to keep the building as faithful as possible to its original design while restricting temperatures to tolerable levels. The solution was to replace the old incandescent lighting with led fixtures attached to a new control module. ‘Now you can have house lights, dim them, and put a spotlight on a performer,’ says Tilly. In addition, a trio of aerodynamically designed Big Ass Fans (yes, that is the manufacturer’s brand name) move a lot of air around very slowly without creating noise. Other new features include lightning protection and composting toilets that don’t require sewage infrastructure. A local contractor fabricated the hall’s new benches. The site’s drainage upgrade was funded by a Save America’s Treasures grant.
Susan Rizwani, a member of the Maverick Concerts board of directors, says: ‘Maverick Concerts survived World War I, the flu pandemic of 1918, the Great Depression, World War II and the Great Recession [of the late 2000s] uninterrupted. We will survive the Covid-19 pandemic as well, sustained by the dedication to excellence of our music directors and volunteers, our intimate scale, our adaptation to change and not least by preserving our miraculous hall, which offers such a rare experience for music lovers.’
White died in late October 1944. He was a force of nature, and the Maverick Concert series manifests his determination. Within a decade of White’s passing, most of the 102 acres were subdivided and sold off. But what he started has become the longest continuous summer chamber music festival in America. The music chapel in the woods and its grounds have managed to survive and form the last remaining chapter of the Maverick’s diary. White’s original vision – of creating and sharing music in the woods – remains very much intact.
Maverick Concert Hall, 120 Maverick Rd, Woodstock, NY 12498, USA. maverickconcerts.org
A version of this article appeared in the August 2021 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
