The first edition of Monday Evening Concerts, the world’s longest-running new-music series, took place on April 23, 1939, in a house on Micheltorena Street, in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. The hosts were Peter Yates, a functionary at the California Department of Employment, and his wife, the pianist Frances Mullen. The couple had commissioned the modernist architect R. M. Schindler to build an enclosed, cantilevered performance space atop their bungalow home. Nineteen people showed up for the first concert, at which Mullen played works by Béla Bartók. Two months later, Evenings on the Roof, as the series was initially called, presented a tribute to Charles Ives. Word had spread sufficiently that the mighty émigré conductor Otto Klemperer turned up, raving about Ives’s originality. Soon, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, modernist giants in exile, were attending programs of their own music. The teen-age Susan Sontag, avid for novelty, became a regular. The series eventually moved to larger venues and changed its name to Monday Evening Concerts. Hundreds of scores were featured—most very new, some very old. On one occasion, Aldous Huxley lectured on the lurid life of the Renaissance visionary Carlo Gesualdo. The history of M.E.C. is rich enough that it inspired a book, Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s “Evenings On and Off the Roof,” published in 1995.
Although M.E.C. has had its ups and downs over the decades, it is now in an ascendant phase. Since 2015, the series has been under the direction of the percussionist Jonathan Hepfer, a forty-one-year-old Buffalo native with a flair for arresting programming. One of Hepfer’s signature offerings, in 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 sacred music, with Michael Pisaro’s “asleep, desert, choir, agnes,” a partly electronic evocation of the New Mexico deserts and of the paintings that Agnes Martin made within them. Furthermore, Hepfer has managed to bring in startlingly young and diverse audiences; M.E.C. events resemble Arts District gallery openings more than they do academic concerts. In 1939, Yates asked a friend, “Has anyone anywhere ever done anything like this?” The question is still hanging in the air.
For mid-January, M.E.C. had scheduled a pair of concerts featuring major new works by Sarah Hennies and Chaya Czernowin. These were postponed on account of the Los Angeles wildfires, which struck the musical world as violently as they did the remainder of the city’s life. Several members of the L.A. Phil lost their homes. Lawrence Schoenberg, one of the composer’s sons, lost the entire holdings of Belmont Music, a publishing operation devoted to his father. Dozens of freelance musicians were made homeless by the fires. I decided to write about M.E.C. anyway, because it represents something essential about L.A.’s perennially undervalued artistic identity. On January 15th, I went to San Diego to see the master percussionist Steven Schick and his ensemble, red fish blue fish, play Czernowin’s “Poetica,” the new piece that they had planned to bring to L.A. The work proved to have uncanny resonances with the catastrophe that overtook Pacific Palisades and Altadena on January 7th.
The long-standing curse of the new-music concert is a tendency toward miscellany. A bunch of pieces in disparate styles are thrown together, leaving the audience to pick and choose favorites. Hepfer, a former punk-rock drummer who fell in love with John Cage’s music at the age of seventeen, searches out connections, even when the works in question lie centuries and continents apart. He has a keen sense for the myriad entanglements of Los Angeles cultural history. The fact that M.E.C. came to life in a space designed by a pioneer of residential modernism, with a bevy of artists and writers looking on, is a model for his thinking.
Consider an M.E.C. concert that took place in November at 2220 Arts + Archives, a multipurpose venue in Filipinotown. The evening began with a screening of the silent film “Rabbit’s Moon”—a gentle Surrealist fable, begun in 1950 and finished in 1971, by the late avant-garde provocateur Kenneth Anger, featuring a Pierrot looking for love in a nocturnal wood. Anger released the film with a pop-song soundtrack. For the screening, Hepfer and his collaborators, including the pianist Vicki Ray, substituted a live performance of two works by John Cage: “In a Landscape,” from 1948, and “But what about the noise of crumpling paper . . . ,” from 1985. Divergent aspects of Cage’s language—hypnotically simple harmony in the first, percussive murmuring in the other—complemented the film’s rapt aura. Anger and Cage, although vastly different in temperament, both emerged from the L.A. bohemia of the early and mid-twentieth century.
After intermission came Hennies’s “Motor Tapes,” which can be heard as a radical extension of the Cagean dialectic of tone and noise. Hennies, like Hepfer, is a former rock drummer who made a turn toward the avant-garde; she is also a trans woman who often explores queer identity in her scores. The title “Motor Tapes” refers to a neuroscientific concept of the brain as a network of perpetually unspooling tapes. Early on, the piece is spare and a bit 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 a world as surpassingly tranquil as it is commandingly strange.
Hepfer also hands over programs to creative performers who expound their own visions. In September, the brilliant bass-baritone Davóne Tines presented a version of his show and album “ROBESON,” a meditation on the life and music of Paul Robeson. Tines has the vocal power to approximate Robeson’s majestic lower tones, but this hard-to-classify project, which Tines created with the director Zack Winokur, is most potent when the singer abandons bass regions and reaches into his eerily piercing falsetto register. One extraordinary sequence begins with the pianist John Bitoy playing Ravel’s “Le Gibet,” out of which the spiritual “I’ll Fly Away” somehow unfurls. The hallucinogenic intensity of this number and several others evokes Robeson’s political and psychological crises, which culminated in a suicide attempt in Moscow in 1961. Whether or not Robeson had been drugged by the C.I.A. at the time, as his son believed, he had entered a zone of extreme danger, and Tines vividly conjures its inner contours.
Sometimes I think that Czernowin is our greatest living composer. Certainly, her work routinely inspires astonishment, bewilderment, and awe—reliable indicators of greatness in action. She was born to Holocaust survivors in Israel in 1957 and has taught at Harvard since 2009. Her first opera, “Pnima,” deals with the incommunicability of trauma; her second, “Infinite Now,” summons the terror of war. But Czernowin does not write Expressionist music—subjective impressions of crisis and disaster. Rather, her pieces suggest the beauty and terror of natural processes unfolding, with human chaos blended in.
“Poetica,” which Schick and red fish blue fish played at the Conrad Prebys Music Center, on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, is the first part of an instrumental-vocal triptych titled “vena,” after the Latin word for “vein.” The performers manipulate five batteries of drums, including timpani, snares, congas, bongos, tom-toms, and bass drums. They are also asked to vocalize, breathing into microphones and uttering nonverbal syllables. On a prerecorded track, you hear an octet of lower strings along with an array of found sounds—not only nature noises, such as rustling leaves, chattering cicadas, and drumming rain, but also anti-government protests that Czernowin witnessed in Paris and Tel Aviv. She said in an interview, “These recordings bring an external dimension to the piece and give the impression that the ensemble is trying to survive from the burning of the world.”
For long stretches, “Poetica” is very quiet. At times, you hear only the scraping of a mallet on the surface of a drum. (“Mimic the sound of writing,” the score instructs.) There are swells of noise, but they do not approach 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, trail off. As often with Czernowin’s music, I felt as though I were on unfamiliar, unstable terrain, yet each sonic flicker seemed to land exactly where it had to. I thought of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker,” in which a trio of seekers move across a landscape at once ruinous, mysterious, and sublime.
Afterward, I felt that I had approached “Poetica” in the wrong way. At first, I’d been tracking its structure, identifying its constituent elements. But the score is really about fostering a space of contemplation. This isn’t a hermetic kind of meditation, one in which outer havoc is kept at bay. I began listening in the right way when, toward the end, a recording of a downpour made me think of the thousands of L.A. homes that might have been saved had it rained over Christmas. I remained in the grip of that fantasy, bordering on prayer, until a ritualistic pinging of crotales brought the music to a close. ♦
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