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Halls (con't) Scott is 35. To make a mark so soon after leaving college, and in so rarefied a field, is unusual, to say the least. But, like the Add-Venture program he followed when he came to Moravian, his career is of his own design and it satisfies a complicated set of interests. “I loved music,” says Scott, who comes from Stroudsburg. “In high school, I was in musicals and the choir. But the moment I got outside Stroudsburg, I knew pretty early that I was going to be limited by my apparatus.” By that he means his voice. To earn spending money in high school, he sold stereo equipment in a catalogue showroom. He was good in math. He came to Moravian and enrolled in Add-Venture, a self-designed program that allows a student to combine areas of study that may have nothing to do with one another, except in the student’s imagination. Scott majored in physics and minored in music. His Honors project, with the highfalutin’ title of “Subjective and Objective Relationships among Three Moravian College Performance Venues,” was an acoustical design study of Foy Hall, Peter Hall, and Central Moravian Church. For a career, he thought of designing speakers for a high-end company. “At some point, I came across an article in Yale magazine about this field,” he says. That started him reading about acoustics, where he found that a lot of the articles that interested him were by a Danish chap named Anders Christian Gade of Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (Technical University of Denmark). They corresponded, and he received an offer to study there as a guest student in a one-year non-degree program. To go further, he would have to take a proficiency exam in Danish. His courses, though, were in Danish, not English, so “I learned Danish very, very fast,” he says. “The irony of this was that at Moravian, I took advantage of the flexibility of the Add-Venture program to avoid taking a foreign language!” At the end of the year, he passed the practice exam for Danish but not the official one. So there he was, with one year of study toward an architectural acoustics degree but nowhere to finish it. But he did have an offer from Kirkegaard Associates for a summer job writing computer software for acoustic analysis. That was in September 1993. He became full-time there in March 1994. Scott lives in Downers Grove, a pleasant upper-middle-class Chicago suburb, with his wife, Becci, and their two children, Benjamin, 7, and Abigail, 5. But much of his time is on the road, checking on the progress of the 18 or 20 acoustical projects that he manages simultaneously. Luckily, with the nature of construction and the nature of financing being what they are, one always seems to go into a hibernative state as another wakes up and demands attention. And Scott Pfeiffer shepherds each one to its next way-station on the road to good vibrations. *The author has interviewed R. Lawrence Kirkegaard on two previous occasions. As a music critic for several major daily newspaper between 1983 and 1996, she “participated in the conversation” about concert-hall acoustics and acoustic rehabs that preoccupied the profession of acoustical design and engineering in those decades.
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