The composer and critic Virgil Thomson as soon as outlined American music as music written by People. There isn’t any arguing with that. Much less apparent, nonetheless, is determining what, if something, describes L.A. music.
Los Angeles is the house of movie music. The 2 most influential classical composers of the primary half of the twentieth century, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, lived right here. (In Stravinsky’s case, the Russian composer spent extra of his life in L.A. than in another metropolis.) The composer with essentially the most radical affect on the second half of the twentieth century, John Cage, was born and grew up right here. Ferreting out L.A.’s bearing on jazz and the various, many points of well-liked music, in addition to world music, is a lifetime’s effort.
But these seeming incongruities of musical life are what fascinate essentially the most. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, as an example, flirted, if futilely, with writing Hollywood movie scores. The cash was a lure. The opportunity of reaching the lots, irresistible.
Mady Thornquest, lead dancer, and musicians carry out on the Hear Now Music Competition held on the 2220 Arts + Archives on April 14, 2023, in Los Angeles.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Instances)
Image Schoenberg, in 1935, within the workplace of Hollywood’s prevailing movie producer, Irving Thalberg, providing untenable necessities to attain MGM’s characteristic movie adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth.” Image the composer, thought-about by many the instigator of essentially the most daunting music of all time, asking for $50,000 (greater than $1.1 million at present adjusted for inflation) and full management of the film’s sound, together with having the actors recite their traces to his rhythms and recommended pitches. Image, once more, eight many years later and three,000 miles away, the top of the Opera of the Future venture in his workplace on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how’s ultra-futuristic Media Lab, mulling over an thought for an opera primarily based on that outstanding Thalberg incident as a approach to look at the profound implications of artwork and leisure had Schoenberg been given the inexperienced mild.
A brand new manufacturing of Tod Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood,” which had its premiere in Boston seven years in the past, lastly reaches L.A. on Sunday afternoon for the primary of 4 performances by the UCLA Herb Alpert Faculty of Music on the Nimoy. These very names — Schoenberg, who taught at UCLA from 1936 to 1944, Alpert and Leonard Nimoy — couldn’t higher illustrate the marvelous fantasy of L.A. musical juxtapositions.
Additionally Sunday at First Lutheran Church of Venice, the Hear Now Music Competition concludes its 2025 season of three live shows. This pageant is L.A.’s most devoted useful resource for surveying native music. During the last 14 years, it has featured greater than 200 composers, from essentially the most well-known to essentially the most obscure, from academia and from Hollywood, be they John Williams, an digital wizard at CalArts or a child fiddling away with a guitar within the storage.
The thought of inventive place and bodily place are on the coronary heart of Hear Now. If L.A. music is something, it’s a music that challenges the notions of borders. The pageant happened as a result of its co-founder, composer Hugh Levick — who divides his time between France, Spain and Venice Seaside — stated the music that his L.A. colleagues have been writing was simpler to listen to being carried out overseas than in venues right here.
Composers in L.A. are far-flung. Taking a look at universities alone, UCLA, USC, CalArts, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, Pomona Faculty and the Cal State campuses in Northridge, Lengthy Seaside and Fullerton are all facilities of musical exercise which have had widespread affect.
The seeds of Minimalism, essentially the most outstanding fashion of late twentieth century music as propagated most famously by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, might be traced to Los Angeles Metropolis Faculty within the Fifties. That’s the place La Monte Younger — whereas learning with, and discovering encouragement from, pianist Leonard Stein (who had been Schoenberg’s assistant) — started to contemplate what would occur if he radically slowed all the things down.
I sat down with Levick not too long ago to find what he had discovered from the pageant. Having espresso at a Santa Monica cafe, we have been close to a cottage the place Cage had lived within the early Thirties, when he discovered his first music job. It was as an assistant to pioneering animator Oskar Fischinger, who got here into inventive battle with Walt Disney over “Fantasia.” Cage didn’t final lengthy, falling asleep on the job and dropping a lighted cigarette on flammable celluloid.
Levick has in all probability encountered a better number of composers on this a part of the world than anybody else. The best way Hear Now works is that any composer can submit scores, so I requested the apparent questions. May he detect any commonality, as one may in, say, Paris or Berlin? Is there West Coast and East Coast music as there as soon as appeared to be? Does L.A. have its personal sound or perhaps laid-back sensibility?
“Not really,” Levick stated. “There are people whom you could vaguely put together stylistically. They may have obvious influences, but mostly they have gone their own way. What is a little different about the West Coast and the East Coast is there is a certain fluidity and flexibility here and certain rigidity on the East Coast.”
When requested what has stunned him through the years, Levick pointed to the truth that though John Williams, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès and Andrew Norman could appeal to audiences, curiosity additionally drives crowds. Of this 12 months’s pageant, which options works by 28 composers, I’ve beforehand encountered solely 4.
Even Levick was stunned by the nice many submissions from composers he didn’t know. But that seems to be a draw. At this 12 months’s pageant, the primary two applications have been offered out. I attended the primary at 2220 Arts + Archives in March dedicated to usually arcane electro-acoustic music, and it attracted a various and enthusiastic viewers taking pleasure in not understanding what to anticipate. No two works have been remotely the identical.
If Levick shies away from generalization, he too is a composer not simply pinned down. He began out as a fiction author who, whereas dwelling in Paris, chanced upon avant-garde jazz and took up the saxophone. That led him naturally to classical avant-garde. The live performance Sunday will characteristic his newest work, “The Song of Prophet X,” for speaker/singer and piano quartet, an analogous configuration that Schoenberg utilized in his antiwar “Ode to Napoleon,”
We can not escape Schoenberg. This season has seen widespread celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his start. Final 12 months, on April 30, Hear Now ended its pageant with a large-scale live performance given on the UCLA music division’s Schoenberg Corridor and that includes the UCLA Philharmonia carried out by Neal Stulberg, the identical forces tackling Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood.”
Schoenberg may finally be seen as the nice juxtaposition. Leonard Stein and John Cage have been in Schoenberg’s UCLA courses. Movie composers David Raksin (“Laura”) and Leonard Rosenman (“East of Eden”) studied with Schoenberg. Each Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman introduced up Schoenberg once I interviewed them, and it was their world of progressive jazz that led Hugh Levick to Hear Now.
May we then outline L.A. music as merely be music of, and open to, juxtapositions?
