Commentary: L.A. new-music groups tackle election angst with a chance to let it all out
Ahead of the 1952 election. Democrats were alarmed by President Harry S. Truman’s age (66), diminished abilities and unpopularity for his handling of the Korean War, but Truman insisted on running — until he ultimately was pressed to drop out. Sound familiar?
In support of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, Irving Berlin included the song “We Like Ike” in the 1950 Broadway musical “Call Me Madam,” with such lines as: “Harry won’t get out/He’s got squatter’s rights/But there’s Ike/And Ike is good on a mike.”
“We like Ike” was turned into Roy O. Disney’s hugely successful animated TV campaign commercial, “I Like Ike,” helping the guy good at the mike win in a landslide over Adlai Stevenson.
For more than 70 years, entertainment, art and politics have been enmeshed in a complicated web, with Los Angeles playing an often unexplored role. But two of L.A.’s most gutsy new-music ensembles prepared with prescient immediacy for last week’s stunning election results.
On election night, Brightwork newmusic presented “VOTE! (and then come to this concert)” for its monthly Tuesdays @ Monk Space series in Koreatown. Over the weekend, the avant-garde orchestra Wild Up hosted five “Democracy Sessions,” presented by the Museum of Contemorary Art in its Warehouse performance space at the Geffen Contemporary.
Independent Opera’s “The Stone Guest” is revelatory, L.A. Opera’s “Romeo and Juliet” is exhilarating and Pacific Opera Project’s super-rare production of “Don Bucefalo” proves a nutty delight.
I joined the small crowd at Monk Space eager to turn off phones rather than endure election coverage. An evening of historic campaign songs followed by a meditative group improvisation served as psychological preparation for whatever the outcome.
From the start, the campaign songs felt startlingly timely. The earliest on the program, “Jefferson and Liberty” from 1800, included the verse: “Here strangers from thousand shores/Compell’d by tyranny to roam;/Shall find, amidst abundant stores,/A nobler and a happier home.”
Jessica Basta sang all the songs with a flair for parody and proved ebullient in “I Like Ike.” Particularly striking is that much of the vitality of L.A.’s contemporary art scene is thanks to the cutting-edge influence of CalArts — Brightwork and Wild Up no exception — which happened to have been founded a prosperous decade after “I Like Ike” with financing by Walt Disney and his brother, Roy.
“Tomorrow,” after intermission, contained 24 blissful minutes of bass, percussion, flute, guitar and vocal noodling over a recorded soundscape of environmental noise. It provided a time to contemplate all the unanswered questions we understood we would soon face as a new day dawned. Its composer, flutist Sarah Wass, is the executive director of Brightwork and a CalArts graduate.
Coming after the election, Wild Up’s five “Democracy Sessions” conveyed an obviously different mood, the progressive movements in the arts typically going hand-in-hand with a progressive political outlook. The four sessions I attended were unsurprisingly partisan but surprisingly thoughtful and open-minded. Politicians of all stripes, our president and president-elect among them, make promises of unifying our divided nation yet rather than finding common ground, the public bifurcation continues to intensify. Christopher Rountree, the irrepressibly upbeat founder and music director of Wild Up, had other ideas. He gathered fanciful and downright utopian artists and thinkers suggesting a path forward.
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This was particularly notable in a reading of the libretto for a proposed new opera by Ted Hearn, one of our most politically outspoken composers, based on Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed.” Written in 1974 in opposition to the Vietnam War, the science fiction novel alternates between present and future civilizations on two worlds in a distant constellation. One civilization is authoritarian, which claims to rule in the name of the people; the other is an anarchistic society in which everyone looks out for one another.
The libretto by Chana Porter, still in draft, was powerfully read by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman. Four members of Wild Up, led by Rountree, added occasional improvised accompaniment along with the early fragments of Hearn’s score. This gave but a glimpse of what the opera may be as it is developed over the next year or two. By then we may well be ready for its patient interaction of opposing ideas, proposing utopian synthesis.
Another session revolved around a documentary video, “Ark of Bones,” by the poet Harmony Holiday, that looks at the way Black culture is being co-opted by pop culture, business and government. It was full of remarkable juxtapositions. One clip was from an interview with Nina Simone saying she no longer sang protest songs because she felt they no longer did any good. An adjoining clip was the moment in which Donald Trump stopped his speech and said, “Let’s just listen to music.”
All art, George Orwell once proclaimed, is propaganda. “Is Blackness itself,” Holiday asks, “becoming an asset to the propaganda machine before all else?”
After that, whence music, a protester might ask. On Sunday, Rountree mounted “The Democracy Bardo,” a live music installation with audience participation. We could write messages or slogans on sheets of paper, which were read aloud and improvised and danced to. For a strange hour, one could digest Sunday brunch, laugh, cry, reflect, bop along to the music, quietly listen or let it all out in a deafening collective primal scream.
The last session was Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Stimmung” performed by the vocal ensemble HEX. Two years ago, Black artists at Long Beach Opera accused the company of racial tokenism and LBO canceled the production, which was to have featured HEX. Here, though, “Stimmung,” a complex series of short sections revolving around “magic names” found throughout world cultures, became a session of healing.
Written in 1968, “Stimmung” comes from an era of protest and peace movements. The score is built around a single chord that over an hour explodes into kaleidoscopic, supernatural-sounding upper harmonic pitches associated with each note. Weird things never stop happening.
HEX artistic director Fahad Siadat said the score operates on the principle of listening to whatever is happening. The singers, he explained, are asked by Stockhausen to follow a leader in each section. But who the leader is may not be clear, so the singers must simply find their place. In doing so they must work though different harmonic polarities and figure out how to consolidate.
HEX needed no staging to produce a highly theatrical performance. All binaries are, Siadat suggested, one big thing. That one big thing in Stockhausen’s utopian vision is a new sense of community that evolves from the creation of this sacred space evoking otherworldliness.
Art as propaganda works both ways, and agitprop will likely follow from activist artists in the next few years. But for now, these first responses took the philosophical approach of gathering and finding unity. As one “Bardo” participant summed it up: “A community is not an algorithm.”
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