Changing Los Angeles: Inspiring Art in Our Backyard

In their 2011-2012 Season, Southwest Chamber Music, a 25-year-old institution in Los Angeles, has been presenting a series of John Cage concerts. The next ones will be held this weekend in Pasadena at the Art Center College of Design, and the Pacific Asia Museum. On weekend of March 24 at the Colburn School opposite Disney Hall, there will be more performances. If you have never heard John Cage performed, find a way to these landmark events.

Last weekend we were given a beautiful performance of One6, and One10, duets with kinetic sound sculpture by Mineko Grimmer at the Japanese American National Museum. I am unable to describe the grenades still going off in my little brain as a result of that performance.

Cage is not for those of us with a short attention spans. But if you are willing to let him lead you, the rewards are large. This is not trance music, but rigorous intellectual pathways into the unconscious space where music itself was born. It eludes me why music students are not taught Cage as a fundamental element in the development of the impulse to music in humans. Why bother to love Mahler, or Beethoven or Mozart if you do not have some understanding of how we were able to have them in the first place? This is the territory Cage explores. His profound understanding of the music that came before him, his relentless study of non-Western music informs the breathtaking chances he took. We think of music in terms of different relationships to pattern, clearly derived from our own pulsing heartbeats. Cage understood the connection of that tide with the randomness, the entropy which ultimately rules our universe. Take a chance, unhinge your thinking. Go hear what Cage has to say.

For a more linear art adventure, get to the Downtown gallery drkrm before the end of the month at 727 S. Spring Street on Gallery Row.

There you can be astonished at a collection of rare 1940 Ansel Adams photos of Los Angeles. The gallery drkrm, in association with Edgar Varela Fine Arts, The Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection and The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, has created 60 new hand-made silver-gelatin prints from original negatives. You can buy a print. Part of the proceeds will benefit the Los Angeles Public Library system.

These are not the famous landscapes. They are black and white photos of prewar L.A., from Santa Monica to Downtown. Fortune magazine commissioned Adams for an article about the L.A. aviation industry. Instead, he seems to have wandered around the city shooting whatever struck him. I like the Good-Humor truck. This exhibit is part of Pacific Standard Time. Don’t miss it.