Concrete Frequency 1
I believe there are people who don’t approve of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In fact, I know of them who, despite the artistic pedigree and the wonderful acoustics, consider it somehow unfit for the music played within. And indeed, for those who are champions of the way the building looks and feels, that is probably the building’s greatest asset, that it implies something about what kind of music should be made inside.
Well, tonight was a culmination of sorts for the kind of music that Gehry’s work brings to mind. However, to merely describe it as music would really ignore the way it was an incredible show of cultural outreach and a reveling in what it means to be in Los Angeles.
The concert kicked off what has been named Concrete Frequency, a series of concerts, symposiums, and cultural exhibitions that aim to connect what happens within Disney’s doors with what happens without. Conductor and curator David Roberston described the series as questioning the kind of city we want to live in. The perfect visual component to the proceedings was a video of a skateboarding crew gracefully traversing downtown LA without a care to the sounds of Cat Power and Philip Glass among others. It was precisely the image of concrete and its virtuoso denizens that both started the concert and ended it on a screen projection in the hall itself. I had to double-take, because it is probably one of the last things you’d imagine seeing on such a concert stage.
Yet the list of things you’d never thought you’d see is slowly diminishing as popular culture and classical culture are catching up to each other and intersecting. It was perhaps no accident that this kick-off night also happened to be a casual Friday concert, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians eschew their black tie attire for jeans and t-shirts of all colors. They were literally dressing down classical music, something rarely seen that has managed to become a staple here.
Jumping into my rush seats, I spotted UCLA musicology professor Robert Fink just a couple of seats away. For some background, Fink is really the intellectual man behind much of the rhetoric that has brought pop and classical closer than previously imagined. His class the History of Electronic Dance Music is a rather unique and thorough study of an often maligned genre of music, and it’s fun. He literally wrote the book on minimalism titled Repeating Ourselves, and helping lecture during the Minimalist Jukebox series that happened 2 years ago and is a bit of a spiritual predecessor to this series. He is giving pre-concert lectures for many of the Concrete Frequency concerts, including the night I attended.
First on the program was Copland’s score for a short 1940s 1939 propaganda film called The City. The basic premise of the film is that the quiet life of small town industrialism has allowed the building of tremendous cities of discordant life there are four different types of cities, with one being a metropolis filled with discordant life. The narrative is eerily similar to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyannisqatsi, which featured a seminal score by Philip Glass. Indeed, one of the most powerful images in the film is an industrial toaster providing mass toasting for a diner where everyone is eating the same thing day in and day out. It’s especially prescient given that Copland reverts to frenzied arpeggiation and ostinato rhythms that any Glass fan would recognize immediately.
The second was Varese’s Ameriques. Worth the price of admission, this piece really lets the orchestra loose with lots of crescendos and big hits that conjure up Carl Stalling but without the cute musical parodies. It’s action-packed music that really doesn’t let up with a vast array of percussion, something that might have opened the doors for music like heavy metal. It’s no surprise that on the repeat concerts on Saturday and Sunday, the Varese piece is accompanied by a Frank Zappa work, Dupree’s Paradise.
That was the end of the concert proper and the beginning of another that stretched into midnight. While in the concert hall Fink and Robertson discussed the importance of the festival to the faithful subscription base, outside on the floor where the pre-concert talks are held, the funk band Break-estra was doing James Brown by way of George Clinton. A b-boy crew somehow made their way in and was properly turning the dance floor into an exhibition hall. The band was loud and surrounded by many younger people in the audience (as well as older to be fair), but I found myself wondering where all these people came from. I imagine that seeing the $10 rush ticket combined with a film, orchestra, and break-estra, they saw that it was not only a good time and culturally sophisticated, but also a bargain. Funny enough, I remember being in this same exact space a couple of years ago hearing people talk about the potential for cross-cultural explorations. Today, I saw that potential fulfilled. I doubt anyone ever saw this in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
I can easily see many scoff at funk being somehow equated with the classical masters. And I could see that many of the subscription base was not entirely ready for having the street enter their church. But in a way, this is not only the fulfillment of the concert space’s potential, but of music itself. It was Varese himself who wanted to liberate music from the strictures of proper tradition. It was Varese who composed pieces with sirens and other loud percussion to get the raw sound of urban construction and life, a reflection of the New York skyline.
And as Disney Hall promised from the beginning, papa’s got a brand new bag.
