The Heart of the Hall

by Thomas May

Alice Tully Hall’s dramatic new lobby gives audiences a clearer view of Thomas Buechner’s life-size 1987 portrait of its namesake. Her tall, elegant, regal pose is a familiar landmark, but where Alice Tully’s presence can be most keenly felt is in the range of music-making that is once again transpiring within the hall, which originally opened on her 67th birthday.

In fact, the hall represents only the most visible act of largesse from Tully’s long and highly influential role as a philanthropist. Her passion for music was a guiding force and initially led her to pursue a career as a singer. Born in 1902—the daughter of a state senator and granddaughter of Corning Glass founder William Houghton—she grew up in New York City and then headed to Paris in the early 1920s to study voice, where she made her professional recital debut in 1927.

Tully later sang her first operatic role (Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana) at New York’s Hippodrome. Her singing career continued on both sides of the Atlantic until she decided to direct her energies to the war effort in the 1940s, joining the civilian air patrol program as a pilot and working in a New York hospital as a nurse’s aid for the Red Cross. Tully gave up singing professionally around 1950. “It may not have been the biggest career,” she recalled decades later, “but it was a good one.”

Yet music remained one of her principal obsessions. When Tully inherited her grandfather’s fortune in 1958, she had already become an active patron across a wide spectrum of musical activities. As Irving Kolodin noted in the program book for the hall’s inaugural concerts, “a considerable personal experience on both sides of the footlights” sensitized Tully to focus on what would most enhance the concert experience, from acoustics and ample leg room to details of décor.

Eventually the arts patron became so identified with the venue whose creation she subsidized that she was once presented as “Miss Alice Tully Hall.”

Robert White, a tenor who teaches at Juilliard, was a close friend of Tully’s. “Her impact on the music scene was enormous and went beyond the big-scale projects to include support for young artists,” White says. “She was there in the most open and generous way for musicians who could come to her privately, whether they needed a new bow for their cello or help paying the rent.”

White also points out that “her taste in music was as astonishing and cultivated as her taste in painting,” referring to the collection of masterpieces (among them paintings by Monet, Tintoretto, Picasso, and Magritte) that crowded her legendary penthouse in the Hampshire House looking north over Central Park.

Tully continued to support an array of beloved causes—for the most part anonymously—through a foundation she called the Maya Corporation, until her death in December 1993 at the age of 91.

“With all her patrician values, she also tuned into the everyday life of America,” says White. “She was special that way.”

Thomas May writes frequently about the arts.