Letter from LA

Letter from LA

Some things I have discovered since the last time I posted:

In the same period that I began reading Kevin Starr’s series of Californian histories and continued my usual round of musical and other activities, I also finally visited Yosemite and the gold country and other Californian sights. 

Late afternoon from the meadow

As Kate and I, and our Australian friend, Julia,  travelled down the coast from San Francisco, a theme of the sea emerged. In Monterey, where John Steinbeck wrote Cannery Row, I discovered that California’s first constitution was drafted here, at Colton Hall, in Spanish as well as English. Congress’s ratification of that constitution in 1850 made California a state. So, California’s bilingualism is foundational, not just a curious feature of PA announcements on public transit.

Curving down California’s magnificent coastline sent me back to a CD of The Dharma at Big Sur, the John Adams piece that opened Walt Disney Hall in 1998. I read with recognition Adams’ program notes which describes ‘the edge of the [US’s] continental land mass.’

                On the Atlantic coast, the air seems to announce [the continental edge] with its salty taste and briney scents. Coming upon the California coast is a different experience altogether. Rather than gently yielding ground to the water the Western shelf drops off violently, often from dizzying heights, as it does at Big Sur, the stretch of coastal precipice midway between Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara. Here the current pounds and smashes the littoral in a slow, lazy rhythm of terrifying power.

This time, unlike on previous occasions I’ve listened to the piece, I hunted down one of Adams’ sources: Jack Kerouac (as Californian a writer as you’ll ever find) and read his ode to the Californian sea, that ‘billion yeared rock knocker’. Big Sur came to mind again as I sat in Walt Disney Hall In November, listening to the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first performance of last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, Become Ocean by another Adams - John Luther Adams.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s programs are among those I approach with genuine excitement. There always seems to be such a judicious balance between the familiar and novel. And perhaps this appreciation is shared by much of the rest of the audience. One phenomenon I’ve noted while living in LA is that audiences tend to stay for the new work after interval.

This program paired Become Ocean with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The concert was a study in grandeur. Granted, Beethoven’s grandeur is achieved with spacious melodic exploration of a vast tonal layout; Adams’s with expertly crafted swells of orchestration. Adams’ work is certainly a listening experience, but perhaps more: a potentially life-changing experience. The title comes from a line of verse composed by John Cage in honour of the music of his friend (John Luther Adams’ mentor), composer Lou Harrison: ‘Listening to it, we become ocean.’

There are three big climaxes in this piece as the sections of two orchestras merge. 

At first, listening superficially, I thought of the piece as big washes, but that didn’t 

explain the monumental power of it. There was so much life teeming beneath the surface. 

These surges are made up of complex sequences of repeating patterns. 

‘It’s Minimalism!’ you think, but Minimalism raised to an elemental level.

Alex Ross describes the piece better in his review of the Seattle world premiere in an edition of The New Yorker in 2012, but I’d share with him the sensation of ‘coming away reeling’.

Californians can’t claim this Adams exclusively for themselves, though. Yes, he studied at CalArts out at Santa Clarita, in one of Los Angeles’ northern valleys, but he established his career while, famously, a citizen of Alaska. And Become Ocean was written at his new home in Mexico’s Sonoran Desert.

Adams describes his music as an exploration of environment. I read that he is writing a ‘desert’ piece next. It’s a tantalising thought for me, a one-time denizen of the driest continent on earth, ‘that great America on the other side of the sphere’ (in Hermann Melville’s designation for Australia in chapter 26 of his greatest novel).

‘Nantucket, New Bedford…Long Island’ - the geographical references in Moby Dick belong to the US’s other coast, the one that the Northern Californian Adams describes above as full of ‘salty taste and briney scents’.

Nevertheless the LA Opera’s production of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Melville’s novel, which we saw at the end of November, continues my months’-long circling of the sea. Funnily enough, I thought of Moby Dick when we stopped by the beach at Piedras Blancas on our  way down the Californian coast and saw the hundreds of elephant seals that have returned to these beaches now that the days of sealing (and whaling) are largely over.

This story of Captain Ahab’s obsession with hunting down the great white whale that tore off his leg years before the tale starts, is a perfect subject for opera, when you consider that opera is best served when dealing with broad emotions. ‘At last,’ I thought while watching this, ‘a successful, contemporary traditional opera’, by which I meant one that was singable and aptly paced, with Heggie’s rhythmic and tempo decisions worthy of Verdi, and a libretto (by Scheer) that deserves to be sung.

It did occur to me, however, that a Broadway producer (that is a producer from New York’s Broadway) might be able to trim 30-40 minutes from this piece. Not every supporting character needs so many moments to shine. In the end what’s important is Ahab and how his obsession leads to destruction of his ship and the traumatising of Ishmael who escapes to tell the tale.

Like the Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Opera has a wide range of programming ideas. I caught up with the Opera’s new Public Relations director, Fran Rizzi, for a coffee during the month of November and talked about LA Opera’s full range of activities.

Like so many other classical music companies in the world these days, Los Angeles Opera is heavily committed to outreach. There are educational programs in the LA Unified School District; a whole zarzuela program ‘that goes out into the community on a monthly basis’ (acknowledging Los Angeles’ Spanish-speaking population). And there are experimental productions at Redcat. I’m sorry that I missed Halloween’s screening of the 1931 film Dracula with accompaniment played live by Philip Glass and his ensemble at the Ace Theater downtown (in what was once Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford and Fairbanks’ United Artists’ building).

But LA Opera has particular challenges. First off, there’s traffic: You might have to take opera to the public before they’ll feel encouraged to drive hours to Downtown. That’s why the company simulcast the season opener of the Woody Allen/Franco Zefirelli double bill of Gianni Schicchi and Pagliacci to the pier at Santa Monica; for all those people on the Westside who are reluctant to go east of the 405 after 4pm. There’s the Downtown itself. The city has certainly become safer at night. But Grand Avenue, where the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is located, is not yet a charming pedestrian precinct. The Broad, the new contemporary art museum housing the personal collection of Eli and Edythe Broad (endowers also of Plácido Domingo’s Chair at the opera) and down the road from Disney Hall and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, might change that. It ‘has been a game-changer for this sort of concentration of culture, an anchor,’ says Rizzi. ‘You see, at any time of day, a line that wraps around the block at the Broad. And those people, those hipster young people, are the people who need to be here to see opera and see the Phil and see all of the pieces and parts of what has really become a cultural center.’

Rizzi has been at the Opera six months. ‘My job,’ she says, ‘is to tell our story. We are looking at all those education programs and how to bring them all together in a way that is organised around: “what can you do with LA Opera? Can you perform? Can you bring it into your school? Can you just learn more about it?”’ The Santa Monica event was free, but ‘it was ticketed’. That way the Opera can tell if people migrate from the coast to the city. Rizzi also supervises the Opera’s social media enterprises. ‘We can see people reading our blog, joining us on social. Our blog readers may not be easy to match with sales because they may not yet have bought a ticket. But we can see the waves of interest.’

The LA Opera may in most respects - and at its principal home, the Dorothy Chandler - be a traditional opera company. But it is concerned with bringing in the community, ‘those folk from the beach’ in Rizzi’s words. It still does big traditional works like Bellini’s Norma which I saw in a production by Anne Bogart at the beginning of December and followed up next day with YouTube searching for its excellent singers, including Angela Meade and Morris Robinson. But it is also branching out into other sorts of productions and wondering how to bring those back to port.

But what of The Industry, LA’s experimental opera company? Over the years they’ve staged operas in light industrial areas (Crescent City, in which the sets were really giant art installations in an old Atwater factory) and at the iconic Union Station (the audience for Invisible Cities moved among peak-hour commuters listening to the opera on Sennheiser headphones). This year’s offering, in November, paid tribute to the idea that Angelenos spend a lot of time in their cars. It attracted a lot of attention on social media throughout the world and I even sent the trailer to a lot of people outside this country:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LivzsddPn-Q

Hopscotch was billed as a ‘car-opera’. Could you have anything more quintessentially Los Angeles? The action took place in 24 cars on three routes. Paying audience-members would get in at one of the eight stops along their chosen route that encapsulated another chapter/or outtake in the over-arching story of Luccha, Jameson and Orlando. The scenario, devised by The Industry’s Artistic Director, Yuval Sharon, was basically one of changing relationships but we weren’t necessarily meant to follow the developments sequentially or get a complete picture. Audience-members travelling with the numerous singers who ‘doubled’ the principal parts and their accompanying musicians could get to know the tale much in the same way as we become acquainted with a new city, piece by piece until forming some sort of overall impression.

Being that rarity - a Los Angeles pedestrian - I watched the opera down at the Arts District, the bohemian area sprouting up in the midst of one of the traditionally seedy parts of the city, in the Hub built by faculty members of SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture). The live action taking place in the stretch limos which served for performance spaces was beamed to 24 monitors arranged in a circle around the Hub’s pavilion. It was a mistake to ‘channel-surf’ the first time I saw the piece. I couldn’t get any bearing. I actually got most out of the opera on a second viewing by surrendering to the idea that I would not find a tale that spoke to me in traditional terms of mounting conflict, but by actually following a route (and doing some prior research) and locating the next section’s monitor with the aid of coloured string (mine was red) stretching across the roof of the pavilion.

That said, I enjoyed Hopscotch without paying as much attention to the plot, words or music as you’d expect. Yes, I noticed musical highlights - Omar Torrez’s guitar playing, the duets in Marc Lowenstein’s chapter ‘The First Kiss’, and the beautiful finale by Andrew Norman when the pavilion becomes a drive-thru and the whole cast and musicians and their drivers converge dreamlike (is that the point?). And certainly the fact that sections of the production were in Spanish lent the whole a certain ‘encantamiento’. But mostly what made the opera enchanting for me was the tribute to Los Angeles, particularly at this convergence, as the Hub’s monitors froze on city landmarks and the setting sun etched purple lines in the crevices of the Verdugo Mountains visible from the Arts District. It’s interesting that my favourite review of the opera was that of the Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, who rightly described the co-ordination of 126 singers, actors and instrumentalists, 24 cars and their drivers, and numerous technical crew, as ‘logistically miraculous’. I actually love Sharon’s productions as multi-dimensional (and multi-media: you can still see elements of Hopscotch on the Web) portraits of LA, with music a more-than-usually-prominent element.

So much for the past few months which also saw meetings with Mark Cleary, the Sydney-based founder of Short+Sweet  who is introducing this ‘biggest little play festival in the world’ to Hollywood, and was followed by a trip down to San Diego, where Kevin Starr tells me, Spanish navigator Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo dropped anchor on 28 September 1542. There we heard former Victorian College of the Arts department head, Donna Coleman, and a trio comprising Roger Wilkie (John Williams’ sometime concertmaster) and Australian-born cellist Antony Cooke play music by Connecticut’s Charles Ives, his Yale teacher Horatio Parker, and Brahms from Hamburg, on another sea.

Such has been the whirling swirl of the past few months. As Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, when he was an actor: ‘Hasta la vista, baby’.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2015

This article first appeared in December 2015 edition of The Podium, the newsletter of Symphony Services International

'Think like Thalberg': lessons from Hollywood for classical music

When I moved to Sydney in 1987 I got to know the city by memorizing its coves and bays. In Los Angeles since 2013, I’ve memorized where the studios are located. After all, locals often think of Los Angeles and Hollywood synonymously. Paramount is only a $10 cab fare away; Warner Bros is in the Valley. But in another sense I’ve learned a different geography. What I would call ‘classical music’s verities’ stand out more vividly now.

'Where the studios are located'. Fox and Paramount lie in this direction; Warner Bros and Universal are over the first hill. 

I had at first considered writing an article entitled ‘What Classical Music can learn from Hollywood; what Hollywood can learn from Classical Music’. I was going to include such ‘pearls’ as: ‘You’re never finished’. Film scripts, for example, are multi-coloured documents inserting rewrites way beyond the first day of shooting; how does that compare with classical music’s sketch, short score, orchestration..?

‘It Takes a Village’ (apologies to Hillary Clinton) occurred to me while sitting in our local cinema, the Vista, at the junction of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards (where D.W. Griffith filmed the silent epic Intolerance in 1915 before the roads were paved) and realizing that the audience was sitting through 15 minutes of end-credits. Such appreciation for everyone’s work! Classical music may have gotten over the idea of the lone genius starving in the garret. But in Hollywood you find the ‘sort of collaboration that once yielded cathedrals’, says Billy Mernit, a story-analyst whose classes on dialogue I’ve taken.

The distance I’ve travelled through this landscape also makes me sensitive to arguments about ‘New Music’. I’m reminded of a former piano teacher who said that when he came back to the piano after a long spell at the harpsichord all he could hear were the piano’s hammers. These days I notice the ‘shoulds’ in the programming debates. Companies should program New Music; people should listen to it.

Maybe it’s a worry that our classical music scene doesn’t seem to have a big-enough audience for the most future-bound music of our tradition but I wonder if there is another way of looking at this. Los Angeles suggests to me there is. ‘Should’ just isn’t in the vocabulary of anyone in the Green Room of ten million people that is Los Angeles County.

I guess people have been worrying about the decline in audience-appreciation for our modern repertoire since Henry Pleasants bemoaned the loss of singable themes in The Agony of Modern Music. Oliver Rudland wrote in a recent edition of Standpoint that composers stopped writing tunes because they lost their Christian faith. I don’t even think they have to write tunes (!).

But my favourite analysis is that of Richard Taruskin who, in a 2004 edition of The Musical Times, focussed on the idea (fallacious in his mind) that all that matters in a piece of music is the artist’s making of it (their ‘poiesis’), regardless of the audience’s capacity to hear. Taruskin traced what he called ‘the poietic fallacy’ back to 19^th century critics like Alexander Serov or Franz Brendel (remember them?), but in Schoenberg’s atonality and 12-tone music he felt that the audience had really been abandoned.

I know Schoenberg tried to help audiences comprehend his new music by emulating classical forms. But the classical forms couldn’t serve their previous clarifying purpose once a composer’s means of punctuating them (Tonality) was lost. That’s not a catastrophe, except that at some point after 1910 you could often detect an idea that composers didn’t have to worry themselves if the audience was left behind. The composer’s principal, if not sole, job was to extend the musical language; it was the audience’s problem if they were bewildered.

‘Most of the cuts were in the First Act’ says screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, of the Clint Eastwood film J. Edgar, ‘because we didn’t want the audience to get ahead of it.’ [italics added] ‘Subtext helps your audience to participate. It’s fantastic if your audience knows a bit more than your characters,’ [italics again] says Billy Mernit. What do these seemingly contradictory statements suggest? A filmmaker is constantly shifting their audience’s understanding, and the audience is granted enough of the basics to play along? I decided to collar Mernit, since I know him, and put some questions to him.

Billy Mernit is a former songwriter who has had his songs covered by people like Judy Collins and Carly Simon. These days he’s a story analyst for Universal Pictures, and is best known for his textbook, Writing the Romantic Comedy. Mernit gets to see and comment on each of the seemingly interminable drafts a screenplay goes through before the cameras roll. How important is consideration of audience to the film work?

‘The general rule of thumb is that with most writers, first draft is for you. Second draft is where you start to take into consideration who it’s for and who might respond to it,’ he says, when I catch up with him in the sculpture garden at UCLA, where he does some teaching. ‘In the Hollywood studio system it is almost scientific. One of the first questions any executive asks of a project is “what’s the demographic?” “who’s the intended audience?” “how do we expect to sell this thing?” because it’s in the studio system that you’re dealing with major money.

‘And by the way, back in the Silent Era, in the early days of Hollywood, a lot of the stuff that is now sort of codified, in its nascent form was responding to audience. In some of the earliest Silent Movies, like Chaplin two-reelers, audiences were going “give us more of that. We love that.” And only when the audience created the demand for things, did Hollywood say, “Hmm, if we put a woman in the picture with that comedian we’ll expand our audience” - things like that.’

So, could I take another Clintonian expression and turn it into one of my ‘lessons’ - ‘It’s the Audience, Stupid’?

‘Well, the slight confusion in the question, the thing that’s being conflated is ...it’s creator versus producer, meaning a creator may not be thinking of the audience; a screenplay might be a very personal endeavour. But the producers of a screenplay are thinking audience first and foremost.

‘I don’t want to be too glib about this because if you’re a story analyst who’s worth what they pay you, on a certain level there’s this naive, fundamental “does this get me excited?” You have to have a personal response to it. And that, by the way, goes with producers as well. You don’t necessarily get into producing unless you have a great love for movies, like a good story and want to be involved. So I’m responding as a human being, that’s the litmus test. If it grabs me and I’m thinking “I’ve gotta keep turning these pages”, I am the audience; with the producer’s hat on. I don’t think of things in terms of what’s commercial or not. It’s more “is there something in the story that speaks to some kind of audience beyond myself?” Everything should be personal, of course, and the most personal projects are quite often the most impassioned and unique, right? but it’s a communicative medium.’

A producer like 1930s whizkid Irving Thalberg (the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘last tycoon’) thought that the success of a movie was arbitrated solely by the audience, director Billy Wilder’s ‘wonderful people out there in the dark’. I wonder if the classical music fear of giving so much consideration to audience response is that we would lose out on masterpieces?

Says Mernit: ‘Well, it’s not like Mozart or Verdi or Vivaldi were writing extremely esoteric masterpieces that were being foisted on an unsuspecting public; they were using the popular vernacular. But the crucial difference is that Hollywood is not attempting to make the general public watch a Godard movie. You can have a Best Picture winner like 12 Years a Slave and it’s something that people can relate to, whereas much modern classical music - unless it’s Minimalist - is very difficult for most audience members to even hear. It’s as if you were making a movie with a strange lens on the projector.’

I find myself wondering if classical music would ever get to this level of deference to the public. After all A Composer’s Cohort, an article on the Opera America website, says, ‘...try not to worry about the reception....Whether the audience likes your piece is arbitrary but informative.’ I can’t help feeling that not only would this be a strange abdication of skill in the movie world which is premised on predicting hits (and often does), school teachers wouldn’t say, ‘I have no idea at what point I lose my students’ nor would sales personnel concede, ‘I have no idea when I’ve lost the buyer.’

And it’s not as if classical music was always in such an unknowing position. A classical composer knew that if you put an A minor chord after a G while you were in the key of C, an audience would experience interruption. Wagner knew that if he kept withholding resolution of the ‘Tristan chord’ we in the audience would lean in with yearning. And I’m convinced Tchaikovsky set his audience up so that they would burst into applause at the end of the march in the ‘Pathétique’ and feel all the more excruciatingly the wrench into the Adagio lamentoso which in fact ends the symphony.

Do classical music writers want to second-guess the audience? Do they want positive reinforcement of their vision that badly? I wonder what would happen for contemporary repertoire if the practitioners began to ‘Think like Thalberg’; if classical music had its equivalents of film producers, people in orchestras who could stand between a CEO and a Director of Artistic Planning, a CAO (Chief Artistic Officer) if you like, with the authority to say, ‘Look, the audience feels you’ve got ten minutes more music than thematic material. I saw them fidgeting at the preview we set up to test their responses.’

These are just some of the thoughts that have come to me from immersing myself in a different artistic milieu. But to come back to an earlier promise, what can Hollywood learn from classical music? I said above I was thinking of writing about each artform’s lessons for the other.

So far I only have one, but it’s big, and fairly reaffirming. Paradoxically it’s something about form. In Save the Cat, probably the most popular screenwriting text of today, the book that every second aspiring screenwriter working on WiFi in Starbucks has sitting by their elbow, the author Blake Snyder says ‘Act II begins on page 25. No, please. Don’t argue’. Yes, but I will. (By the way, since screenplays are formatted so that one page equals one minute of running time, this is even more restrictive than it sounds.)

Every second person working on a script. Actor Joey Marino studies a screenplay while working  in Bru Coffeehouse, Los Angeles

Classical music wouldn’t buy this. Classical Sonata Form, for example, is a 3-Act structure. It was a screenwriting teacher, Sydney’s Linda Aronson, who made me think about this. Classical Sonata Form contains exposition, development, and recapitulation. There are certain goals it must satisfy but look, there is a world of variation in the way Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich and others even closer to our time went about it. Classical music proves you don’t have to be rigidly formulaic.

But screenwriting may not be as schematic as I think. I put this to Billy Mernit. ‘It gets moved around a lot,’ he says. ‘The A-teamers are not slaves to those kinds of restrictive formulas really.’ And then I think of Pulp Fiction - three acts functioning traditionally but out of real-life chronological order, containing enough that’s familiar for an audience to appreciate what’s fresh. Yes, even as I continue to try to learn from classical music, Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction’s screenwriter/director) proves you can create an innovative masterpiece that is also popular.

Gordon Kalton Williams

© 2015

This article first appeared in the 7 May edition of Symphony Australia’s The Podium under the title: A Different Geography: how LA has affected my musical thinking

The whole county a workshop

LA - Of course, it was impossible to escape the Oscars last night. But the whole town talks movies all the time. And seriously. The whole 4,752 sq miles of LA county is like a giant campus or drama workshop. I almost can't describe how inspiring it is.

When I was at the Conservatorium in Melbourne in the 1970s, I remember waking up one morning and thinking, 'All I have to think about today is music'. It's not totally like that, here, but close. Just about every time I sit in a cafe I see people working on scripts. I hear people working on scenes, testing dialogue perhaps with their drinking companion.

Today as I walked up Lankershim Blvd toward North Hollywood station, I found people reading scenes in the street, practising audition techniques. Los Angeles must be the most productive 'arts precinct' on the planet.

I ran into them in the street. Katja Gerz and Colin Flynn practise their audition technique.

 (A quick note: I know that the last few posts have been on the short side. A lengthier one is coming up, I promise.)



 

The ghosts in these streets

For some reason I find myself thinking about Charlie Chaplin a lot these days. We watched City Lights the other night and I loved its humour, Chaplin's romantic score, and its simple means of creating poignancy. But most of all I loved its backdrop of old LA.

That's one of the treats of living here. The East has a different history - the emergence from Europe, a political history. But here it's the thrill of knowing every so often that you're standing where Chaplin positioned his camera in 1931, walking past the steps that Laurel and Hardy tried to take the piano up in 1932, meeting a guy who lived in the apartment around the corner on North Kingsley where Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) supposedly lived in Double Indemnity.

It's not always an immediate awareness of the ghosts. I passed this building on Wilshire Boulevard a number of times before learning that street level is where the millionaire is supposed to live in City Lights.

Sidewalk Scene

As I was walking along one of LA's narrow sidewalks the other day I could hear the conversation of the two guys ambling ahead of me.

"He shot me in the stomach and I flew back 20 feet. So I turned around. I aimed at both his shoulders. I tried to blow out his pelvis and I aimed at his pecker. This is lying down, you know."

Aware that I was fast coming up behind them they stood aside to let me pass, and I heard the bigger guy go on: "I got both his shoulders. I got an inch above his pelvis and half an inch above his pecker."

By then I'd steamed out of earshot.

But what got me, I have to say, is once more that strange American conjunction of violence and courtesy. It does my head in.  

Landforms as much as grids

Three cheers for cities that sit lightly on their landscape. Such a one, I am always surprised to be reminded of, is Los Angeles.

Just a few blocks north of us is Griffith Park, the "largest urban park in the United States". Unlike Central Park in New York it is not man-made. There are signs warning hikers against Mountain Lions and Rattlesnakes. The topography and the Live Oaks survive.

Developing an inner map of Los Angeles means memorising landforms as much as grids. Whereas in Sydney I learnt to map the bays and coves, here I am now seeing that Griffith Park is part of the hill chain that leads west to the Hollywood sign; part of the 'little hills' that the Native Americans called cahuenga, sitting between the coastal plain and the larger Verdugo Mountains which are backed by the peaks of the San Gabriels surrounding the San Fernando Valley. Memorising landforms also means developing an indigenous, pre-European view of the area.

Here in this photograph you can see the eastern end of Griffith Park. Go round this corner and you head toward Toluca Lake or northward to Burbank before embarking on the great east-west 'boulevards' that head sea-ward toward Ventura County. Pan right of this view and you might see snow on Mt Whitney. Four and a half miles from Downtown, there are freeways and traffic galore, housing, shopping strips...

...but also the original lie of the land. It's a pity the river was cemented, but in places it's going to be restored.

Ups and downs

There is so much I enjoy about Los Angeles. I love that the whole city is a writers' workshop. You look over the shoulders of so many people working on wifi in Starbucks and see screenplay format on their computer screens. You hear neighbours talk of a coyote in their driveway the other night. You can walk into a roomful of Giacomettis at the County Museum of Art or see the huge ceramic that a couple commissioned from Matisse for the patio of their home...

But there is a downside. Tonight, on the 181 there was a guy yelling, 'You'll do HARD TIIIIME!!!!" and sneezing pathologically. Yesterday it was a woman cooing to two baby dolls in a basinette. When she looked up she had doll makeup on her face - heart-shaped lips and rouged cheeks. We see disturbed people every time we get on a train or bus. And then there's this (see attached). Just an ad...

There's an Australian type called "a battler" but I think some people battle even harder in America's more energetic, but more "sink or swim", society.

Moved

We've moved to Los Feliz, the center of Los Angeles' film industry in the Silent Era. A typical street:

Charlie Chaplin lived about 2 o'clock in the direction this photograph faces several streets away, next door to Cecil B. DeMille. Walt Disney first drew Mickey Mouse in his uncle and aunt's house down the hill to the left and a bit over, in what is now a photocopy shop.

Realtors describe this area as 'New York walkable'. You can encounter sidewalk cafes, cinemas and theaters on an evening stroll. But I always think of Los Angeles as a series of villages dotted around the place and this is 1920s LA, conceived before cars took over. To the east (10 o'clock in this photograph) is Little Armenia and Thai Town. No wonder John Adams described Los Angeles as one of the most ethnically-diverse cities in the world.   

But we seem to have left behind the intense Hispanic-ness of the San Fernando Valley, the bilingual signage (if you don't take the bus and train). As a tribute to the Valley, I'll finish this blog with a photographic sequence. America's Religious Right considers Los Angeles "Sodom and Gomorrah". But I noticed a lot of Catholicism over there.

In the Valley, you could almost become an expert in images of Our Lady of Guadalupe

The patron saint of Mexico is everywhere

Even on supermarket shelves

 

Always take public transport in LA

There are wonderful things to discover in Los Angeles. You might walk past a block of flats that Charlie Chaplin built for his crew or the streets where Chinatown is set. I recently mentioned an article on the remnant stairways in hilly Silver Lake.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23724797

You can still find the stairs that Laurel and Hardy tried to take the piano up, or the one that the Three Stooges took the iceblock up only to end up with an ice cube at the top. This article makes the point, though, that most Angelenos don't notice these jewels because they're encapsulated in their cars zooming along the freeway.

I take the bus. And it's fantastic.

Granted, it takes two hours to get a lot of places. But you can sit in a traffic jam in your own car too. Sometimes, I think, public transport (or 'transportation' as they call it here) might be faster. But you certainly learn the layout of the city, and it's definitely interesting.

You get to pick up Spanish, meditate, read. Most of all you're exposed the theater that is America from the moment the bus, or train, pulls in at your stop.

What about the guy in the maroon striped suit playing shells on a flattened newspaper on his knee, and passengers vying to pick which shell the nut was under. 'Lemme have a go at that!' shouts a guy about to get off who just will not allow himself to be left out, and who turns over an empty shell - 'Oh m-a-a-a-a-n!' - and then scoots before the doors close again.

What about the two guys in front of us talking about guitar playing? The conversation - basically a sharing of enthusiasms - was like a seminar: 'I said, "This is 60s music, man. It's got to have bass." He kept playin' it soft. This is not Jazz.' I discovered their names later in the week when I ran into one of them again in Westwood (how does this happen in a city of 12 million??)

And of course, then you get the monologues from bus drivers: 'Good morning again. We are approaching Javier Ave. This is a far side stop but if you'd like to alight at the red light you may do so. Passengers who wish to alight at the regular stop, please stay on board and I'll drop you on the far corner.' Funnily enough, every driver we asked a question of in Sydney responded with a surly grunt. 'Does this bus go to Wynward?' And the driver voices something like a 'yes' with an inflection that suggests you're a bloody idiot. There was one bus driver who was spectacularly bright and affable - who seemed to relish life like an American. 

 

Distinguishing details

You know you're in Sydney as opposed to LA when (a provisional list):

- you're woken by raucous birds;
- you burn out the drier on 'high' because of the different voltage;
- you smell grilled fish (and other meat) from Pub Bistros as you pass;
- you come across areas called 'cove', 'bay' or 'point' as opposed to 'pass'...

- of course, you have eucalptus in LA, but not signs like this:

 

Experimental City - Los Angeles

Experimental City – Los Angeles’ operatic dimensions

When people think Los Angeles, they often think Hollywood and ‘Hollywood’ tends to be a byword for glitz and superficiality. But Los Angeles is also a home to musical experimentation. The groundbreaking Monday Evening Concerts that started on the roof of Peter and Frances Yates’ home in Silver Lake in 1939 are still going strong (though no longer on the rooftop), and I try never to forget that John Cage was born in the Good Samaritan Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard in 1912. 

One of the significant ways in which Los Angeles contributes to musical life is in opera. Composer Anne LeBaron, who is interviewed later in this article, has written that living in Los Angeles, she’s ‘fortunate to be in physical proximity to nimble companies that embrace risk-taking, companies that are beginning to make history (or have been doing so for some time) by presenting challenging new work’[i]. She mentions Long Beach Opera (soon to do Peter Lieberson’s ‘campfire opera under the stars’, King Gesar), Opera Povera and also The Industry, which established itself last year with a production of her ‘hyperopera’, Crescent City. 

Founded by director, Yuval Sharon, and producer, Laura Kay Swanson, The Industry aims to ‘present new and experimental productions that merge music, visual arts, and performance in order to expand the traditional definition of opera and create a new paradigm for interdisciplinary collaboration’ (according to their website). In October they’ll be presenting Invisible Cities, an opera by Christopher Cerrone based on the book of the same name by Italo Calvino. As The Industry’s kickstarter fundraising campaign said of this work, ‘Imagine yourself in LA’s historic Union Station, surrounded by passengers and passersby, wearing a comfortable pair of top-of-the-line Sennheiser wireless headphones with crystal-clear sound technology, listening to a new opera while discovering the live singers and dancers appearing and disappearing throughout the space.’ It’s a project that takes cognizance of Sharon’s desire to exploit opera’s capacity for multi-perspectives. It also has the support of the City and new mayor, Eric Garcetti - the kind of collaborative experimental work that Los Angeles is ripe for.

The big buzz last year, however, was Crescent City, the Industry’s first production in an old warehouse in Atwater Crossing[ii]. Its composer Anne LeBaron is a New Orleanian who now teaches at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) based in Santa Clarita in one of Los Angeles’ northern valleys. A former student of Mauricio Kagel and György Ligeti, LeBaron has pushed the boundaries not only of opera, but of instrumental music. I heard her monodrama Some Things Should Not Move (about her experiences in a haunted apartment in Vienna) at The Colburn School’s Zipper Hall in March and can well understand how an eventual production of that opera, when it is complete, might make a virtue of positioning the audience in a haunted space (if indeed that’s the direction it goes in). 

Crescent City is what LeBaron calls a ‘hyperopera’. Not so much a genre, says LeBaron, as a ‘state of mind’, hyperopera takes opera’s collaborative potential and ‘ramps it up to another place that is more collaborative than anything you might imagine’. Hyperopera grew out of LeBaron’s courses at CalArts where students from various disciplines would get together and create an opera in a semester. There might be several writers, a composer for each character, negotiated ensemble writing...Crescent City took that concept to the highest professional level. Though there was only one composer, LeBaron and director Yuval Sharon storyboarded the opera before the final libretto was drafted. Sound designers and visual artists became members of the collaboration, ‘the creative family’, at an early stage of the process. They created the city that was the character behind everything else that went on in the opera[iii].

Crescent City is set in a city like New Orleans, just after a post-Katrina type event. Expecting another hurricane, Marie Laveau, queen of the voodoos, rises from her grave and approaches the Loa, the voodoo gods, pleading with them to spare her beloved city. At first indifferent, they eventually agree to save the city if they can find one good man in the debris.

Marie Laveau (Gwendolyn Brown) emerging from her Tomb in The Industry's production of Crescent City (Photo: Joshua White Photography)

‘The overall idea of hyperopera,’ said LeBaron when I met her in Santa Clarita, ‘is to diminish the hierarchy in opera, so that it’s not top-down composer, director, librettist and then the servants.’ In fact, LeBaron’s desire to change the hierarchy is inspired by the free interchange and fresh results of jazz. (Her score for Crescent City was described by Culture Spot LA as ‘Preservation Hall on acid’.) The big thing with this Crescent City production, however, was the use and design of the performance space. Six installation artists – Brianna Gorton, Mason Cooley, Katie Grinnan, Alice Könitz, Jeff Kopp and Olga Koumoundouros actually evolved a city in the Atwater warehouse. There was a supervening authority (Brianna Gorton was the curator) but separate ‘architects’ for the ‘buildings’ - cemetery, hospital, ‘dive bar’, swamp, Good Man’s Shack and junk heap - eventually amounting to a distinctive ‘civic character’. 

What made this opera such a unique experience? Audience members sat in the city with various options on where to sit in relation to the performers and musicians. ‘Our Dive Bar, the “Chit Hole”,’ says LeBaron, ‘was actually a long tongue of a runway - the tip was a tongue - and we had some of the audience sit around it in beanbag chairs. The highest-priced tickets were the skybox where you could have an overview of the city. And you could get a pedestrian ticket, too, where you could walk on planks behind and around the action.’ So the audience was fluid. It was possible to come on separate nights and gain new perspectives on what you might already have seen and heard.  Views were blocked just as in a city but live video on large screens around the space provided insight into areas you may not otherwise have been able to see. Video also served for surtitles or enhancement of stage action. The Loa, for example, were first seen onscreen, nonchalantly munching on chicken legs, before assuming human dimension onstage with other members of the cast.

But why do this in an opera? Firstly, the maximum development of the opera’s constituent parts enlivened other aspects of the work. With regard to composition, different heterogenous configurations of instruments (including strings, woodwinds, didgeridoos and electronica) in varying spatial arrangements accompanied strikingly different scenes. Olga Koumoundouras’s desire to do the dive bar as basically one enormous anus got LeBaron thinking that the dive bar should be all trombones and this led to the idea of bringing in the chromolodeon, the Harry Partch organ that has 43 tones to the octave. A big part of the payoff for all the various elements knocking together like this was increased vigilance on the part of the audience, multi-perspectives keeping the audience’s critical faculties active. 

Yuval Sharon was the director of Crescent City. An Illinois native and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Sharon was Project Director for four years of New York City Opera’s Vox program where he first met LeBaron and presented concert presentations of Crescent City. He has worked at houses such as the Mariinsky and Komische Oper, Berlin, and was Associate Director for the world premiere of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht with Graham Vick for the London 2012 Cultural Olympics.

I asked him about the value of what LeBaron calls ‘meta-collaboration’. Why do it? ‘All operas are inherently collaborative,’ he says. ‘It’s not as if the composer is not being influenced by singers he or she is working with or the librettist and the source material. There are lots of influences. To take all of that away and say that this person is a monolithic creator is something that is not quite honest as to how operas actually come to life. It takes a village.’ 

Sharon was Assistant Director to Achim Freyer on the LA Opera’s Ring cycle. ‘Wagner is a huge part of my background,’ he says, ‘but much as I love the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk [Wagner’s theory of opera as a union of the arts], I can’t forget the Brechtian critique that Wagner takes all of the arts and throws them into one stew and makes a mush out of it. The music and text and scenography all become one general flow that puts the listener into a sort of catatonic state, whereas Brecht [whose plays and theories influenced 20^th century theatre] wanted to separate the elements, to really wake up the audience and keep them alert and critical.’ 

Mention of Brecht, who wrote his classics The Caucasian Chalk Circle and the American version of Life of Galileo in LA’s beachside city of Santa Monica, takes the discussion into deeper theoretical areas. It may be objected that most opera lovers go to opera for the emotional experience, but Sharon doesn’t see emotion being excluded from the equation. ‘The idea of breaks and disruption in Brecht’s work was not at the expense of emotion. They were something that made the audience realise the construction of the emotion and woke up their critical faculties. I think opera is an emotional experience but it shouldn’t be manipulative. I don’t go as far as other people to say that Puccini is super-manipulative. But Puccini’s music almost always only means one thing. His orchestral writing’s very deep but the emotional life is ultimately, somewhat one-dimensional. And depth doesn’t always have to be multiple things happening at once. Verdi can create depth but almost lengthwise through a piece.

‘But you talk about being able to view things from different angles?

   

‘Absolutely.

‘And this is part of the reason why the audience can re-position themselves?

‘I’m really interested in that.

‘They will see things differently?

‘That’s right. That’s a key idea for me really, because what opera really does provide is multiple perspectives and multiple viewpoints onto the same action, same idea or same character. The multi-headed beast that is opera actually really encourages this type of thing.’

Which is all well and good, but are we talking about an area opera could legitimately move into and attract a completely new audience? ‘Oh absolutely’, says LeBaron, noting that The Industry’s goal was that everybody in Los Angeles should have heard about Crescent City and just about did. ‘It was a very mixed audience,’ says Sharon. ‘I’m really excited about that because that’s certainly been the mission for The Industry. I see opera as being a very solid 21^st century possibility. And so I very much wanted to speak to people outside of the traditional world. There were certainly opera lovers who came. But we had just as many visual arts people. We had just as many people from all works of life who just wanted to see this spectacle. For a lot of people Crescent City was their first opera and they would come up to me and say, “Oh, is all opera like this?” And I’d say, “Well not exactly,” but that’s not bad either. We don’t want a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s exciting to see people’s gears turning a little bit and saying, “Oh wow, if this is opera what else is possible?”’

Sharon doesn’t believe the pieces he’s developing will replace the old operas or that the directorial ideas he came up with for Crescent City would necessarily be appropriate for them, but the sort of work he’s doing reveals directions for exciting new development in this 400 year-old form. After all, he says, ‘the potential for re-reading - that’s what’s really great about the standard repertoire.’

And the exciting thing is that there’s an audience for this in LA, and not just an audience but, as Sharon has noted before, ‘an amazing audience’ that has been developed here ever since Schoenberg and Klemperer came to town in the 1930s. Why look, even the Los Angeles Opera is doing the Robert Wilson/Philip Glass work Einstein on the Beach next season, right after that old favourite, Carmen.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

This article first appeared in The Podium, the e-newsletter of Symphony Services International (www.symphonyinternational.net) on 10 September 2013. 

If you'd like to read more of my articles from The Podium, please see

A Culture in Exile - European classical musicians in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s, 25 Apr 2013 
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-culture-in-exile.html

Noblesse oblige - arts philanthropy in the US,  published 26 October 2012
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/10/noblesse-oblige-arts-philanthropy-in-us.html

Doors slamming shut - where to for American opera, published 23 Oct 2012
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/10/doors-slamming-shut-where-to-for.html

Walking with Stars, published 10 Apr 2012
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/04/walking-with.html

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[i]  ‘Crescent City: A Hyperopera (Anne LeBaron), Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, Volume 19, no.1 2013, pp1-6

[ii]  See The Industry’s page on Crescent City at http://theindustryla.org/projects/crescentcity/

[iii] See Yuval Sharon’s blog Building Crescent City, chronically the construction of Crescent City’s set in The Industry’s warehouse theatre: http://theindustrylosangeles.wordpress.com/