Blending talk, music and location

Lending new meaning to the phrase “site specific” is “Building Music,” an ongoing project of the Getty and the Los Angeles Philharmonic examining the relationship between music and architecture.

The musical performance portion is underway with concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall and Brentwood’s Getty Center, some of which include world premiere compositions inspired by architectural sites -- including Disney Hall and the Getty Center.

And beginning Wednesday, the public will have a chance to join international scholars, artists, composers and architects for a series of lectures, symposiums and panel discussions.

Deborah Borda, president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., calls “Building Music” an appropriate conclusion for the orchestra’s first season in the new concert hall.

She says the Philharmonic’s collaboration with the Getty Research Institute, directed by Thomas Crow, began two years ago.

“We wanted to celebrate this sense of how architecture and music are interrelated and how one affects the other,” Borda says. “We wanted a musical cast to it, but we also wanted to cast a larger international and intellectual net, and they were the perfect people to help us.”

The series of talks, continuing through Saturday, begins with Wednesday’s 8 p.m. panel at Disney Hall featuring hall architect Frank Gehry, sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and Philharmonic music director and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen discussing the relationship between space and the art it is designed to contain. Tickets are $15.

On Friday, the public is invited to the Getty from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. for a series of free symposiums on such esoteric topics as “spatial thinking” in music and the visual arts, the impact of the Opera in Paris and Museum Island in Berlin on visual arts and music and the modern phenomenon of “signature architecture” in the arts.

The talk series concludes with a lecture from 3 to 8 p.m. Saturday at Disney Hall -- also free -- with three scholars discussing a different site-specific composition, including Salonen’s new “Wing on Wing,” informed by the hall’s Gehry-designed, sailboat-inspired curves.

For events at the Getty, call (310) 440-7300; at Disney Hall, call (323) 850-2000.