We arrived from Phoenix late this afternoon; the flight back to Burbank lasted barely an hour. Most of our final day was spent driving around, our eyes soaking in as much of the city and its environs as possible before our departure.
For some reason, I kept thinking about the kind of music a composer could compose here. Would the heat, the ubiquitous grackle calls, the rock formations jutting amidst the cityscape, the wide boulevards somehow inform a resident composer’s music?
Donald Vroon of the American Record Guide made a snide comment in some review from over 20 years ago — I no longer recall the exact context; maybe it had something to do with Ernő von Dohnányi? He said to the effect that Florida was hardly an environment to inspire great art. That reminded me of a question once put to Stravinsky during a visit to Chile: did the country provide him with any musical inspiration? (Speaking of “snide”, Stravinsky was a prodigious master of bitchy commentary.)
While I listened to the newest Pentatone CD of Stravinsky’s late music, it occurred to me that this music might’ve sounded quite different — or would’ve never have existed — had its composer chosen to live anywhere else but in Southern California.
From Ventura to Riverside, the region today is relentlessly subjugated by human development. Hard though it may be to believe, especially to recent transplants from elsewhere, this urbanization, especially in the San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire, is relatively recent. There were unpaved streets well into the 1990s in Highland Park, where I was born and raised. Turn back the clock a couple of more decades and the contrast with today’s Manhattanization is even more dramatic. Jack Webb shows like Adam-12 and Emergency! reveal an environment that resembled the Midwest more than the East Coast, even in neighborhoods within the radius of Downtown. In the 1950s and 1960s, parts of the Greater Los Angeles area were still untamed enough that they plausibly served as rural backdrops in Perry Mason and The Andy Griffith Show.
So in 1940, when Stravinsky became a permanent resident in Los Angeles, he found a city that, geographically and, to an extent, culturally, was the furthest away he ever settled beyond his known world. He was far from the observation posts on the Old World in the East Coast, let alone the European capitals where the composer once strode through as a magnate.
It was Agatha Fassett, I think, who once said that among the aspects of American life that most chafed her teacher Bartók was the inescapable smell of chili con carne. Did Stravinsky have similar misgivings about the place that received him as a recent émigré? Or was he energized in some way by a place so distinct from cities like Paris and Berlin; a locale that upon his arrival must’ve looked like a cowtown overrun with tamale carts, improbably wedged between desert, mountains, and a Mediterranean coastline?
Stravinsky hung onto neoclassicism for another decade after he settled in Los Angeles, but almost immediately his American style evinced a break from the preceding French period. Further interesting transformations can be heard on this Pentatone disc, whose program spans Stravinsky’s transitional late-neoclassical and final serial periods. Is there a correlation between the composer’s ultimate development and the possibly concomitant transformation of his adopted hometown from relative backwater into a global cultural capital in its own right?
It’s something I’ll be thinking about as memories of Phoenix recede behind me during my drive up to San Luis Obispo tomorrow.
