ROHNERT PARK, Calif. — Country music veteran Dwight Yoakam sings it every time he’s on stage: he’s a honky-tonk man. He is a dive-bar traditionalist who made his breakthrough during the MTV years, whirling girls around the dance floor to the music of an old jukebox.
Last summer, however, Yoakam found himself in a house of worship, or at least its acoustic equivalent. Yoakam was one of the season’s headliners at Weill Hall, the stunning music venue at California’s Sonoma State University, which has been called — very much unofficially — “Tanglewood West.’’
Featuring 1,400 handcrafted beechwood seats, a choir loft and a third-floor balcony with spectacular mountain views, Weill Hall was designed by Boston’s William Rawn Associates, the same architecture firm that drew the plans for Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall. As with that venue, Weill Hall opens along its back wall to provide a classic indoor-outdoor summertime experience, with a pristine terraced lawn gently sloping to the building’s back patio.
Weill Hall, part of the rural university’s state-of-the-art Green Music Center, opened in September 2012. The center also includes Schroeder Hall, an intimate recital space resembling a cathedral, which opened in 2014. The name, honoring the piano-playing schoolboy in the late Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts’’ comic strip, was bestowed by Schulz’s widow, Jean. (The Charles M. Schulz Museum is a few miles away, in nearby Santa Rosa.)
Yoakam’s twangy music could have seemed an anomaly on a stage designed for philharmonics. “They used to call this stuff ‘cowpunk,’ ’’ he told the audience at one point.
But there are plenty of cows and other livestock in and around Rohnert Park, the sleepy, sprawling city located about an hour north of San Francisco, not far from the heart of northern California’s wine country. If you take the Lakeville Highway route to the campus, you can make a pit-stop at Ernie’s Tin Bar, a time-out-of-mind watering hole that forbids the use of cellphones and doubles as a working mechanics’ garage.
Programming at the Green Music Center is typically diverse. The 2016 event calendar at Weill Hall includes concerts with the Avett Brothers, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Boz Scaggs, as well as the Mexican group Los Tigres del Norte, stand-up comedy from “Daily Show’’ host Trevor Noah and a Marvel movie marathon.
Bill Rawn, the architect, says the venue does share some resemblance with Seiji Ozawa Hall, which was built in 1994. The barn door, opening onto the lawn, is the obvious likeness.
But “that’s about where the similarities end in our minds,’’ Rawn says. Weill Hall has a more modern design, with a sloping roof and a huge glass wall that provides a spectacular view of the Sonoma hills to the east.
When he and his team first arrived to scout the campus, University President Ruben Aminana encouraged them to walk the grounds and find the ideal site for the music center. They crossed a small creek and sat on a gentle hillside in foot-high grass.
Rawn was chagrined to learn that the parcel wasn’t part of the campus. “We found the perfect site,’’ he told Arminana, “but you don’t own it.’’
“Give me six weeks,’’ said the president, who is retiring this year.
Rawn, who also designed the award-winning Carneros Inn in Napa, was born in Berkeley. Though he grew up in Pasadena, he spent weeks each summer with his mother’s family around northern California. The land is “deep in my soul,’’ he says.
Like the venue itself, that sounds just right.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.
