Some Enchanted Evenings

It was a beautiful morning of unsettled weather; threatening storm clouds elbowed billowy white ones as I parked on Sunset Boulevard and began to hike up the steep hill on Micheltorena Street. I wanted to experience the walk pianist Frances Mullen took often in the early ‘40s, laden with groceries.

She and her idealistic husband, Peter Yates, couldn’t afford a car. They had spent all their money adding a rooftop music studio to their modest bungalow in Silver Lake. By the time I reached the former Yates house, I was panting, it had begun to rain and an angry dog was chasing me. Life could not have been easy for the couple.

An amateur pianist himself, and miserable in his job as a civil servant at the California Department of Employment, Yates had an insatiable musical appetite. At a time when it was rare to encounter concerts of the most advanced new music, of early music or even of cycles of the Beethoven sonatas and the keyboard music of Bach and Mozart, Yates desperately wanted to hear it all.

Eager as well to jump-start his wife’s stalled performing career (and to cajole her into playing the toughest new pieces along with vast swatches of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven), Yates took matters into his own hands. Along with his day job and their raising two young children, he began recruiting other local musicians, ingratiating himself with composers all over town and corresponding with others across the country.

And on April 23, 1939, the Yateses presented the first public concerts in their roof studio, which had been designed by famed emigre Bauhaus architect Rudolf Schindler with the aim of making listeners feel as if they were inside a piano. There was room for only a small audience and not much space for parking on the hill outside. Box-office receipts provided the only wages for the musicians (tickets were 50 cents). But nothing stopped Yates. That first program was all Bartok, a radical prospect at the time, and 19 people attended.

Yates called the series Evenings on the Roof. Its motto was “The concerts are for the pleasure of the performers and will be played regardless of audience.”

It found an audience, nonetheless, quickly outgrowing the rooftop studio (still visible from Micheltorena) and moving to larger venues. In 1954, Yates retired from administering the series, but under two more Los Angeles musical figures, Lawrence Morton (from 1954 to 1971) and composer Dorrance Stalvey (from 1971 to the present), it thrives as the Monday Evening Concerts. As of this month, the Little Series That Could has persevered for 60 years, a fact that will be celebrated in three anniversary events at Monday Evening Concerts’ current home, the Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

All this music-making has had an incalculable effect on the cultural life of Los Angeles and beyond. It created an interest in both very new and very old music, not only keeping Los Angeles up to date but making it a trendsetter.

The Roof, said the music critic for the Christian Science Monitor in 1947, turned Los Angeles into “the outstanding metropolitan center of chamber music in the United States.”

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The rapidity with which Evenings on the Roof caught on with the most important composers and musicians in Los Angeles was extraordinary but not surprising. With Europe erupting in war, those most important musicians and composers in Los Angeles happened to be among the world’s most important. This list is an often-repeated litany--12-tone pioneer Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, violinists Joseph Szigeti and Jascha Heifetz, pianist Arthur Rubinstein and so on. There were other noted emigres who wound up composing or performing for the film studios. All were homesick for the more substantial musical life they had known in Europe. All were hungry for the latest news of music from here and abroad, and Yates brought it to them.

The third roof concert, in June 1939, was all Ives, and it attracted so many people that tall, gawky Otto Klemperer, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director, could barely find a corner of a sofa on which to perch. A few years later, in gratitude for Yates’ championing of Ives, the composer’s wife wrote: “Mr. Ives says that were it 40 years ago he would ride a bronco over the Rockies & shake your hand.”

Yates was also an eager partisan of Schoenberg, and for another early program, this one all Schoenberg, he managed to entice the aloof Austrian composer, then living in Brentwood, to spend an evening listening on the roof. And Yates’ persuasiveness extended to performers: He drew first-rate musicians from the Philharmonic and the studios, despite the pay.

By all accounts, Yates was a character. The 82-year-old pianist Leonard Stein--who performed in that first all-Schoenberg program and who will perform again Monday--remembers how difficult Yates could be.

“I had a very emotional relationship with him,” Stein says. “As a non-musician, he was trying to dictate [what to play] to musicians. But, in retrospect, I have to say that if it had been up to the musicians to choose, they would have stayed with the run-of-the-mill. It was his baby, and Peter was always digging.”

Michael Tilson Thomas, born in L.A. in 1944, was too young to have attended the original Evenings on the Roof, but he, too, has memories of Yates. “He was this tremendously eccentric omnivore, who spoke in convoluted phrases of enormous erudition, the precise meaning of which often eluded me,” the conductor, now music director of the San Francisco Symphony, recalls. “But the enthusiasm was undeniable.”

A questing man, Yates underwent periodic spiritual crises. Like many intellectuals in Los Angeles in the ‘30s, he was attracted to transcendental philosophies, and he once trekked--literally--to Ojai to meet Krishnamurti, without bothering first to find out if the Indian mystic was actually there (he wasn’t). But Yates’ crusading proved irresistible to others. Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s indispensable chronicle of the series from 1939 to 1971, “Evenings on the Roof,” published four years ago by the University of California Press, reads like a Who’s Who of great music and great musicians--a tribute to all Yates’ “digging.”

Yates had a missionary zeal for unfamiliar chamber music of all sorts, not just the very new. Evenings on the Roof sponsored the first complete cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas in Los Angeles, which local virtuoso Richard Bulig came out of retirement to play; in the audience were Aldous Huxley and perhaps the century’s greatest Beethovenian pianist, Artur Schnabel. Evenings on the Roof also became a pioneering laboratory for examining early music and the nascent period-practice movement.

The effect these concerts had on listeners could be profound. Morton, who reviewed the programs in the ‘40s for a literate Beverly Hills magazine, the Script, wrote this in 1942 after a performance of an early Beethoven string trio: “Whatever it is that happens to an audience when good music is beautifully played, it happened here. I do not say that this audience would have been able to stand up to a Panzer division without fear after the performance, but I am sure that it was capable of some unselfish, if not heroic, action.”

As Yates’ successor, Morton was a very different sort of leader for the series, though no less the crusader. Yates, a Canadian educated at Princeton and a dabbler in everything from music and poetry to philosophy and aesthetics, always considered himself an outsider. Morton, a dapper pianist and organist from Minnesota, was a practical musician with a more orderly approach to the series and a more ordered sense of music. Although Yates had not ignored Stravinsky, he felt closer to Schoenberg (“I love the old man’s warped and ropy guts,” Yates wrote to a friend of the Austrian composer). Morton kept up the series’ ties to Schoenberg, but also developed a particularly close relationship with Stravinsky. And it was Stravinsky’s presence at the concerts and his championship of them that help set their tone in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

“A lot of what was heard then,” Tilson Thomas explains, “stemmed from the interests of Stravinsky. More than anybody else, Lawrence revered Stravinsky.”

For the opening concert of the Morton years, in September 1954, held in the Los Angeles County Auditorium in West Hollywood Park, Stravinsky wrote a new piece, “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas,” the first of a number of premieres he gave to Morton.

Stravinsky’s assistant, Robert Craft, who had a regular association with the series, conducted. The whole evening was devoted to memorializing the Irish poet, who had died the previous year, and Morton surrounded the new Stravinsky with old music by Purcell, Schutz, Gesualdo and Bach. Huxley delivered a personal reminiscence of Thomas. The 20-year-old Marilyn Horne, another Los Angeles native, was one of the soloists. Scanning the programs for the rest of that season and the next, one also sees the names of other young performers who would go on to significant local careers--tenor Paul Salamunovich (now music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale), pianist Natalie Limonick, percussionist and composer William Kraft.

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There was the music, and there was also the ambience.

“A wonderful party scene grew around these concerts,” Tilson Thomas, who began playing in the concerts while still a music student at USC in the ‘60s, fondly recalls. “Lawrence would make these little post-concert dinners--his liver dip and olives were absolutely famous--and there would be Huxley in one corner of the room holding forth in his typical stream of consciousness. There was almost a summer camp atmosphere, with a tremendous exchange of ideas by these experienced and masterful musicians curious about what was out there and what they didn’t know. It was extremely exciting to me as a young man, and it affected my whole life.”

Morton, who had played organ in silent-movie theaters in his youth and had come to hate the Romantic period music that was the mainstay of the silent film era, was especially attracted to the rebelliousness of the European avant-garde. It was through Morton that French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez began appearing in Los Angeles at the Monday Evening Concerts. And on March 18, 1957, Boulez conducted the American premiere of what has since become his most famous work, “Le Marteau sans Mai^tre.”

The premiere attracted national attention, and it attracted the attention of Stravinsky, who attended the concert and felt it pointed the way to the music of the future. The following month, Robert Craft conducted the premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet “Agon,” and it showed the influence of much of what Stravinsky had been hearing at the Monday Evening Concerts, from Elizabethan harpsichord music to Boulez’s serial music.

Under Morton, the series also remained a labor of love. Percussionist William Kraft recollects being paid $10 a concert when he first started performing in the mid-’50s and only later was that raised to $10 per piece performed. Yet highly paid studio musicians readily offered their services--a mixed blessing since they might be called away for sessions at the last minute, leaving the concerts in the lurch.

Typically, the series weathered one financial emergency after another. Even Stravinsky contributed a fund-raising note in 1955, after the death of its most substantial benefactor, Oscar Moss, a wealthy tax attorney. The concerts, Stravinsky wrote in his plea for dollars, “give Los Angeles international prestige of a kind you would know about only if you traveled abroad as much as I do.”

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Times and the town changed, and so necessarily did the Monday Evening Concerts. Stalvey, a composer with a Modernist bent, notes that he fell into running the series by chance. He had been on its board of directors when Morton resigned in 1971 and was a member of the search committee for a new artistic director.

“The pay was so lousy,” he says, “that we couldn’t find anybody to take the job. By the time we were getting down to the wire for programming the next season, I accepted [the] role as custodian, simply to help keep the series running until we found someone else. Well, we never did, and I’ve now spent a major part of my life here.”

Stalvey emphasizes how different the environment had become by then. For one thing, early music was no longer news. When Yates and Morton had presented it, there were few recordings or printed available scores. Stein remembers copying parts from microfilm of old manuscripts for performances. No one knew how it was supposed to sound, either, although one local violinist, Sol Babitz, who had became interested in cutting-edge scholarship about period instruments and performance, thought he did.

But Babitz proved a problem, according to Stein. “A self-appointed authority for playing early music, he had the unfortunate quality of discouraging others from getting into the act,” Stein explains. “So most musicians associated with old music in Los Angeles remained amateurs.” When the early music movement went professional in the ‘60s elsewhere, Los Angeles was not prepared to follow.

Stalvey also had more difficulty attracting local performers than Yates and Morton had had. The era of the emigres was long over, and the younger generations of studio musicians were less enamored of the noble cause of New Art. And once the Los Angeles Philharmonic established its own new music group in 1981, Philharmonic musicians were no longer available to perform in the series. Stalvey’s response was to present touring groups, often very fine ones such as the Arditti String Quartet. But that also diminished the series’ local feel.

More financial crises took their toll as well. After the loss of its entire state grant in 1984, Stalvey found that his only option was to let LACMA take over the series, since it had already been using the museum’s Bing Theater for the past decade. Many of the old guard viewed that situation with alarm, given the fierce anti-establishment autonomy of both Yates and Morton, and stopped participating or attending.

But while not, perhaps, displaying the crusading flair of his predecessors, Stalvey has proved their equal in tenacity by keeping Monday Evening Concerts alive. Now in charge of all LACMA music programming, he oversees four different series, focusing the Monday Evening Concerts exclusively on new music. Stalvey also feels that Morton, enamored as he was with the European avant-garde, may have slighted American music, and he has attempted to redress that by establishing long-term associations with two venturesome local groups, the California EAR Unit and Xtet.

Still, it may no longer be possible for the Monday Evening Concerts to regain its place as the center of trend-setting musical life in Los Angeles. There is simply too much competition--from the glitzy Green Umbrella concerts that the Philharmonic supports to the Southwest Chamber Music Series, which operates not unlike the old Roof concerts, setting off mostly new music with a smattering of unusual old, along with an annual Beethoven marathon. Nor is there a composer like Stravinsky these days, one whose very presence would create the requisite buzz and excitement. And finally, the Modernist music Stalvey favors, but doesn’t exclusively program, is less a sensation.

Yet the series remains a phenomenon. Nothing like it anywhere has had such longevity. And despite everything, Stalvey unapologetically continues to espouse the series’ tradition of art for art’s sake, of presenting music that he feels should be heard, no matter what. When asked about the future of Monday Evening Concerts, he draws a blank. “That’s a good question, but frankly, I am so concerned with the present, I haven’t thought about it much.”

Doesn’t it ever get easier? “The answer to that is no. It is just me and one assistant, and it is ever an uphill battle.”

But then today’s Monday Evening Concerts would hardly be a proper descendant of the Roof concerts without a steep hill to climb, a lot of weight to carry, unreasonable expectations and the possibility of storm clouds appearing at any moment.

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The Monday Evening Concerts Anniversary Events

All concerts at the Bing Theater, 8 p.m., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6010. $6 to $15.

Monday

MEC Duos, Trios and a Quartet

Music by composers heard often on the Roof or at Monday Evening Concerts--Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Tuesday

Radical Recapitulations

California EAR Unit plays works by Mel Powell, Earle Brown, Arthur Jarvinen, Frederic Rzewski, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Louis Andriessen.

April 19

MEC Ensemble, Gerhard Samuel, conductor

Chamber ensembles of from six to 16 players, with works by Aaron Copland, Anton Webern, Luciano Berio, Gerhard Samuel and Dorrance Stalvey.