Appreciation: Frank Gehry was the architect who changed music

The street was very quiet. The moon, full. The ocean in the background, calm. All the lights inside were on as I walked by a Santa Monica house, when I thought I heard the famous theme from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Bach wrote this for a certain Herr Goldberg seeking serenity to put him to sleep.

The music was in my head or, if you are willing to get spiritual about it, in an unidentifiable ether. Inside the house, another Mr. Goldberg, one who changed his name to Frank Gehry as a striving young architect having moved from Toronto to Los Angeles, lay dying, leaving the realm he had remade like no one else in our time. Gehry died on Friday at age 96 following a brief respiratory illness.

The “Goldberg Variations” was Gehry’s favorite work. He loved its otherworldliness and its worldliness. He loved its invitation to dance and to dream. He loved its astonishing sense of design, complex yet flowing with the ocean’s grace, its depth and its inviting surface. He loved that it was unfathomable. All things that have come to describe Gehry.

I once spent a day in Gehry’s office where we had takeout salads for lunch and talked for several hours about the “Goldbergs.” He had been asked by Princeton University Press to contribute to a book in which 26 artists and writers wrote about a piece that meant something special to them. But Frank — he was Frank to all Angelenos — couldn’t put it in words. He only agreed if it could be a discussion.

Everything for Frank was a discussion — an ongoing discussion between a building and its place, between a building and all who saw it and used it. And the discussion between Frank’s buildings and music was on an exalted level. He will be well-lauded around the globe for his art and architecture, but beyond all that, Frank Gehry did more than any other single individual in the 21st century to benefit music.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, which was built for and by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and opened in 2003 was, of course, his crowning achievement. I watched it go up from the old Times building downtown, which offered a perfect view, and witnessed how attitudes changed as people who had thought this was some kind of crazy thing started to fall head over heels for it. Attending daily orchestra rehearsals the summer before the hall opened, I discovered for the first time the essence of great architecture: Simply walking into a building made you feel good.

We’ve just had no better example of how that has never gone away with the Dodgers’ World Series victory parade on Grand Avenue last month. It was not Dodger Stadium, not City Hall, certainly not L.A. Live, that was chosen for the city’s first occasion of collective joy this difficult year.

Disney is the most spectacular example of what Gehry’s halls have meant for music. But every one has made a huge difference to the art form, to music and musicians and audiences, to our youth and to our institutions. His buildings are meant for imagination while amplifying tradition. They guide us to the next step.

When it comes to Disney, that has been incomparable. In the mid 1990s, when fundraising had stalled, the city all but gave up on the hall. Esa-Pekka Salonen, then-L.A. Phil music director, decided to step down. But he was convinced to stick it out for a bit longer by the orchestra’s visionary head, the late Ernest Fleischmann, who was a close friend of Gehry and who had connived a mostly hostile Music Center board into choosing Gehry over more conventional name architects. Through more conniving, the hall got built.

Disney, with stunning acoustics, proved both a place of modernity for a new millennium and one of the world’s most acoustically engaging venues. It is very new and very traditional, and the best of both worlds. Its promise helped bring Deborah Borda to the orchestra as Fleischmann’s successor, and she and Salonen created in it the most vibrant, progressive and successful major orchestra in this country and beyond.

Disney then became the place where Gustavo Dudamel could grow into the venturesome conductor he has become. Dudamel would have become great wherever he landed, but it was Disney where he had the greatest opportunity for adventure. For Gehry, Salonen and Dudamel became family (Dudamel dubbed him “Pancho”). Of all his buildings, other than his home, Disney is the one Gehry spent the most time in, regularly attending concerts.

This is a story told to some degree wherever Gehry built for music. His hall at Bard College became a venue for the most imaginative summer music festival in country. Education, in fact, has been at the heart of Gehry’s musical activities (when it came to music, he considered himself a student to the end). He turned an abandoned bank and burger joint into the celebrated Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood and was eager to build more (all pro bono). The Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin was his gift to Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, bringing together young musicians from Israel and Arab countries.

Gehry’s latest musical masterpiece, the 1,000-seat Colburn Center, is currently going up across the street from Disney. After taking a hard-hat tour of it last month, I excitedly called Frank and predicted it would be a game changer for downtown. He then took a hard-hat tour and happily agreed.

There is much that Gehry was not able to realize. He had more plans for Disney, the Music Center and Grand Avenue. He has designed an opera house for Abu Dhabi, and wherever in the world he was building he was also asking about abandoned warehouses he could inexpensively turn into a YOLA center.

But the revolution Gehry began in creating spaces where music can be made and re-imagined and brought to life in ever new ways has caught on. Every concert hall that gets built these days, whether in Moscow or Munich, has to think about these things. In the meantime, let’s all listen to the “Goldbergs” to honor, full moon or crescent, our great and lasting Goldberg of music.