On what was likely a hot and humid summer day in Chicago, Percy Grainger hailed a taxi. The year was 1928, and the famed composer and pianist was leaving for Los Angeles to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl and for his wedding.
This was the sixth season of the L.A. Phil’s “Symphonies under the Stars,” and Grainger devised a flabbergastingly varied, contemporary, personal, showy yet serious, inventive and inclusive program. There was the “Nordic” Symphony by the up-and-coming American composer Howard Hanson, and Rubin Goldmark’s “A Negro Rhapsody,” both written as recently as 1922.
Rudhyar had come to L.A. to write music for a monumental outdoor spectacle on the life of Christ to be mounted in the Hollywood Hills. In 1918, Christine Wetherill Stevenson, a wealthy heiress from Philadelphia who was a member of the Los Angeles Theosophical Society — that spiritual admixture of Eastern religion, Platonic philosophy and occult — had built an amphitheater at the top of Argyle to stage Light of Asia” about Buddha and drew large crowds. She now wanted to go all out for Jesus.
and some men who were not. The result has been a century of unexpectedly shifting associations between aspirations of classical arts and popular entertainment. Most of all, Carter tapped into a revolutionary new decade in musical accessibility. Radio and recordings had begun to spread the word big time. Popular music books became bestsellers, producing what composer and critic Virgil Thomson dubbed “the music education racket.” Meanwhile, old-school stalwarts fought back. The first L.A. Phil music director, Walter Henry Rothwell, refused to make music “out of doors,” where too much of music’s essence would presumably be lost to the environment.
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
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