A Musician's View

It’s only Thursday – but it might as well have been two weeks!  Visiting with my friend Chris last Sunday opened up an unexpected can of worms called I miss New York.  Chris lives in one of the ultra urban, ultra cool loft buildings downtown LA, and wouldn’t you know he lives on the “model” floor and the building was having an open house.  Think he planned it?  I don’t know.  Before I ever even managed to reach his apartment, I found myself wandering in and out of all of the open apartments looking at the floor plans – and then I wandered into the one room studio with the original windows (this building was built somewhere in the second decade of the 20th century) and an unobstructed view East of downtown.  All I could think of was New York.  And so it began, the search for a loft downtown.

As with most things with me, the search has taken a mere three days, and voilà, I found two more than suitable apartments, both the same price, one with an incredible view and the other a corner unit with a nice view and a ton of space.  Either one is more space than I’m living in now, a good thing.  Both have exposed brick and the old style windows.  One is the old Lloyds Bank building, constructed in 1910; the other is the old Pacific Southwest Bank building, built in 1913.  There are many upsides to this move, and then there’s the downside: parking.  It neither comes with the rental of the apartment, nor is it conveinent.  Well, I did say I loved New York, didn’t I…

Hard to say where this will land, honestly I don’t know.  I do know that there will most likely be a further discussion at the 94th Aerosquadran this evening.  Who doesn’t want to sit on a tarmac watching the airplanes fly in and out with a nice drink in one hand and a cigar in the other?  Perhaps this is why I want to live in a New York apartment in Los Angeles.

An interesting musical week for me, which comes as a surprise given the time of year!  Monday was spent at Sony recording the soundtrack to 2012, and really, has anything new been done in regard to disaster/end of the world flicks since Irwin Allen?  Well, yes!  The Vatican buys the farm; perhaps someone has an issue with Pope Benedict!  I’ll have to actually see the film in its entirety to know more about it – it’s hard to tell when you only see tiny bits and pieces.  I liked the music though, and was more than just a little thankful to have the work at this time of year, hooray!

The back half of the week was comprised mainly of me looking for musical clips for study of the music I have programmed for Los Robles Master Chorale this coming season.  My pulling out the dreaded raw DVDs of the LMU archives (1964-1991) began as a sign of desperation that I couldn’t find a decent recording anywhere on the internet of Halsey Steven’s Ballad of William Sycamore.  The raw recordings are in no way labeled and are not delineated by tracks, so literally you must play the digital version of drop the needle to find what you’re looking for – fortunately for me, I remembered that Ballad was performed at the 1976 Spring Chorale, so I at least knew what year I was searching for.  Of course, it wasn’t the only recording I needed, and once I began the madness of hunting and gathering, I wound up finding far more than I intended.

To my surprise, my search resulted in a stroll down the memory lane of my youth at Loyola Marymount University – admittedly one of the happiest and most carefree times of my life, which I believe is what undergrad years are supposed to be!  What was somewhat shocking was how memory had clouded some of the reality of the music: some pieces I remembered as being much more interesting than they actually are, and some that I didn’t appreciate at that time I now love.  But then, thinking that your sense memory of earlier years is right on the mark is one of the very follies of youth!  The other two things that struck me were 1) how young we sounded; and 2) how unique and transcendent a musical experience we were fortunate enough to have as young adults.

The choral tradition that so many of us were born into (as Southern California natives) is first and foremost amazing; add to that the team of Salamunovich, Trame and Hunter, and voilà, it’s soup!  I started thinking about how many of us at Loyola also went through the same LAUSD schools growing up in Westchester, and how from an early age, most of us were influenced by a particular school of music without even knowing it:  USCs Thornton School of Music produced not only our high school music teacher, Robert Wood (MM, piano performance, c. 1950s), but also gave us Mary Laumann (BA, LMU; MM, USC), Leroy Southers, (BM, MM c. 1960s; DMA, c. 1990s), Bob Hunter (BM, piano performance) and Beverly Kennedy (BM, piano performance, I believe).

Many of us were also fortunate enough to attend high school choral festivals and clinics that featured the talents of Howard Swan (Occidental Community College), Charles Hirt (University of Southern California), Frank Pooler (Cal State Long Beach), Dave Thorsen (Cal State Fullerton)  and Paul Salamunovich (Loyola Marymount University).  And then there was the very fact that we grew up in a city that has one of the oldest continuously operating professional choirs in the country (Los Angeles Master Chorale) that we often heard through our high school and college years at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  Some of us sang for Roger Wagner (UCLA), Robert Shaw (Pomona Community College), Dale Warland (USC), Bill Hatcher (UCLA) and God love him, Don Weiss (UCLA)!  Really, what an embarrassment of riches the Southern California region has always had in choral music, and what a truly amazing priviledge it is for so many of us to not only have grown out of these programs and experiences, but also to be the very people who are some of the stewards of its future.

I end this week confident in why I am here and what I am doing; and I know that many of my colleagues feel the same way about their lives and experiences.  I only hope we all remember to stop and taste the fruits of our labor now and again, and to take the time to nurture each other and to spend time together if only to share some laughs and memories of times past – it is perhaps the knowing that those who came before us sometimes didn’t remember to do those things that makes it so important for us to try and amend that oversight as we create a choral culture befitting our history.

I remember distinctly now why putting together a website is not only a huge job but also why I stopped doing this kind of thing!  Whew!:)  But in any case, welcome to the new website and especially the blog, A Musician’s View, where I hope to write occasionally about music, politics, food and anything else that comes to mind.  Len, this is still your fault…