L.A.’s New-Music Bastion

The archetypal variation of Monday Evening Concerts, the world’s longest-running new-music series, took spot connected April 23, 1939, successful a location connected Micheltorena Street, successful Silver Lake, Los Angeles. The hosts were Peter Yates, a functionary astatine the California Department of Employment, and his wife, the pianist Frances Mullen. The mates had commissioned the modernist designer R. M. Schindler to physique an enclosed, cantilevered show abstraction atop their bungalow home. Nineteen radical showed up for the archetypal concert, astatine which Mullen played works by Béla Bartók. Two months later, Evenings connected the Roof, arsenic the bid was initially called, presented a tribute to Charles Ives. Word had dispersed sufficiently that the mighty émigré conductor Otto Klemperer turned up, raving astir Ives’s originality. Soon, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, modernist giants successful exile, were attending programs of their ain music. The teen-age Susan Sontag, avid for novelty, became a regular. The bid yet moved to larger venues and changed its sanction to Monday Evening Concerts. Hundreds of scores were featured—most precise new, immoderate precise old. On 1 occasion, Aldous Huxley lectured connected the lurid beingness of the Renaissance visionary Carlo Gesualdo. The past of M.E.C. is affluent capable that it inspired a book, Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s “Evenings On and Off the Roof,” published successful 1995.

Although M.E.C. has had its ups and downs implicit the decades, it is present successful an ascendant phase. Since 2015, the bid has been nether the absorption of the percussionist Jonathan Hepfer, a forty-one-year-old Buffalo autochthonal with a flair for arresting programming. One of Hepfer’s signature offerings, successful 2017, paired the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen with the modern Italian maverick Pierluigi Billone. Another juxtaposed Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame, a fourteenth-century monument of ineffable music, with Michael Pisaro’s “asleep, desert, choir, agnes,” a partially physics evocation of the New Mexico deserts and of the paintings that Agnes Martin made wrong them. Furthermore, Hepfer has managed to bring successful startlingly young and divers audiences; M.E.C. events lucifer Arts District assemblage openings much than they bash world concerts. In 1939, Yates asked a friend, “Has anyone anyplace ever done thing similar this?” The question is inactive hanging successful the air.

For mid-January, M.E.C. had scheduled a brace of concerts featuring large caller works by Sarah Hennies and Chaya Czernowin. These were postponed connected relationship of the Los Angeles wildfires, which struck the philharmonic satellite arsenic violently arsenic they did the remainder of the city’s life. Several members of the L.A. Phil mislaid their homes. Lawrence Schoenberg, 1 of the composer’s sons, mislaid the full holdings of Belmont Music, a publishing cognition devoted to his father. Dozens of freelance musicians were made stateless by the fires. I decided to constitute astir M.E.C. anyway, due to the fact that it represents thing indispensable astir L.A.’s perennially undervalued creator identity. On January 15th, I went to San Diego to spot the maestro percussionist Steven Schick and his ensemble, reddish food bluish fish, play Czernowin’s “Poetica,” the caller portion that they had planned to bring to L.A. The enactment proved to person uncanny resonances with the catastrophe that overtook Pacific Palisades and Altadena connected January 7th.

The long-standing curse of the new-music performance is simply a inclination toward miscellany. A clump of pieces successful disparate styles are thrown together, leaving the assemblage to prime and take favorites. Hepfer, a erstwhile punk-rock drummer who fell successful emotion with John Cage’s euphony astatine the property of seventeen, searches retired connections, adjacent erstwhile the works successful question prevarication centuries and continents apart. He has a keen consciousness for the myriad entanglements of Los Angeles taste history. The information that M.E.C. came to beingness successful a abstraction designed by a pioneer of residential modernism, with a bevy of artists and writers looking on, is simply a exemplary for his thinking.

Consider an M.E.C. performance that took spot successful November astatine 2220 Arts + Archives, a multipurpose venue successful Filipinotown. The evening began with a screening of the soundless movie “Rabbit’s Moon”—a gentle Surrealist fable, begun successful 1950 and finished successful 1971, by the precocious avant-garde provocateur Kenneth Anger, featuring a Pierrot looking for emotion successful a nocturnal wood. Anger released the movie with a pop-song soundtrack. For the screening, Hepfer and his collaborators, including the pianist Vicki Ray, substituted a unrecorded show of 2 works by John Cage: “In a Landscape,” from 1948, and “But what astir the sound of crumpling paper . . . ,” from 1985. Divergent aspects of Cage’s language—hypnotically elemental harmony successful the first, percussive murmuring successful the other—complemented the film’s rapt aura. Anger and Cage, though vastly antithetic successful temperament, some emerged from the L.A. bohemia of the aboriginal and mid-twentieth century.

After intermission came Hennies’s “Motor Tapes,” which tin beryllium heard arsenic a extremist hold of the Cagean dialectic of code and noise. Hennies, similar Hepfer, is simply a erstwhile stone drummer who made a crook toward the avant-garde; she is besides a trans pistillate who often explores queer individuality successful her scores. The rubric “Motor Tapes” refers to a neuroscientific conception of the encephalon arsenic a web of perpetually unspooling tapes. Early on, the portion is spare and a spot forbidding, with relentless repetitions of solitary figures. Later, it assumes a spacious, dreamlike atmosphere: lush guitar arpeggios, free-roaming instrumental cadenzas, chiming open-fifth intervals. At the end, rich, ambiguous, detuned chords are interspersed with silences. It is simply a satellite arsenic surpassingly tranquil arsenic it is commandingly strange.

Hepfer besides hands implicit programs to originative performers who expound their ain visions. In September, the superb bass-baritone Davóne Tines presented a mentation of his amusement and medium “ROBESON,” a meditation connected the beingness and euphony of Paul Robeson. Tines has the vocal powerfulness to approximate Robeson’s majestic little tones, but this hard-to-classify project, which Tines created with the manager Zack Winokur, is astir potent erstwhile the vocalist abandons bass regions and reaches into his eerily piercing falsetto register. One bonzer series begins with the pianist John Bitoy playing Ravel’s “Le Gibet,” retired of which the spiritual “I’ll Fly Away” someway unfurls. The hallucinogenic strength of this fig and respective others evokes Robeson’s governmental and intelligence crises, which culminated successful a termination effort successful Moscow successful 1961. Whether oregon not Robeson had been drugged by the C.I.A. astatine the time, arsenic his lad believed, helium had entered a portion of utmost danger, and Tines vividly conjures its interior contours.

Sometimes I deliberation that Czernowin is our top surviving composer. Certainly, her enactment routinely inspires astonishment, bewilderment, and awe—reliable indicators of greatness successful action. She was calved to Holocaust survivors successful Israel successful 1957 and has taught astatine Harvard since 2009. Her archetypal opera, “Pnima,” deals with the incommunicability of trauma; her second, “Infinite Now,” summons the panic of war. But Czernowin does not constitute Expressionist music—subjective impressions of situation and disaster. Rather, her pieces suggest the quality and panic of earthy processes unfolding, with quality chaos blended in.

“Poetica,” which Schick and reddish food bluish food played astatine the Conrad Prebys Music Center, connected the field of the University of California, San Diego, is the archetypal portion of an instrumental-vocal triptych titled “vena,” aft the Latin connection for “vein.” The performers manipulate 5 batteries of drums, including timpani, snares, congas, bongos, tom-toms, and bass drums. They are besides asked to vocalize, breathing into microphones and uttering nonverbal syllables. On a prerecorded track, you perceive an octet of little strings on with an array of recovered sounds—not lone quality noises, specified arsenic rustling leaves, chattering cicadas, and drumming rain, but besides anti-government protests that Czernowin witnessed successful Paris and Tel Aviv. She said successful an interview, “These recordings bring an outer magnitude to the portion and springiness the content that the ensemble is trying to past from the burning of the world.”

For agelong stretches, “Poetica” is precise quiet. At times, you perceive lone the scraping of a mallet connected the aboveground of a drum. (“Mimic the dependable of writing,” the people instructs.) There are swells of noise, but they bash not attack the engulfing pandemonium of “Infinite Now.” At moments, the recorded strings grope toward a recognizable tonality, with trembling triads superimposed. Nothing stays fixed, though: tones slide, decay, way off. As often with Czernowin’s music, I felt arsenic though I were connected unfamiliar, unstable terrain, yet each sonic flicker seemed to onshore precisely wherever it had to. I thought of Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie “Stalker,” successful which a trio of seekers determination crossed a scenery astatine erstwhile ruinous, mysterious, and sublime.

Afterward, I felt that I had approached “Poetica” successful the incorrect way. At first, I’d been tracking its structure, identifying its constituent elements. But the people is truly astir fostering a abstraction of contemplation. This isn’t a hermetic benignant of meditation, 1 successful which outer havoc is kept astatine bay. I began listening successful the close mode when, toward the end, a signaling of a downpour made maine deliberation of the thousands of L.A. homes that mightiness person been saved had it rained implicit Christmas. I remained successful the grip of that fantasy, bordering connected prayer, until a ritualistic pinging of crotales brought the euphony to a close. ♦