Music history and contemporary art devastated by the deadly Los Angeles wildfires

The wildfires still raging in Los Angeles have claimed at least a few lives 24 peoplerazed thousands of homes and historic monuments and destroyed countless treasured objects, including creative works stored in the area.

One of those losses is a collection of music written by a 20th-century Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenbergwhich the 12-tone techniquean innovative style of musical composition. An archive of approximately 100,000 scores and parts written by Schoenberg was kept in a building behind the home of his son, Larry Schoenberg, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, which was destroyed by the war. burn.

“It’s cruel,” Larry, 83, told the newspaper New York Times‘ Javier C. Hernández. “We have lost everything.”

Larry runs the company Belmont Music Publisherswhich rents and sells Schönberg scores. No original Schoenberg manuscripts were destroyed in the fires. But without the archive of copies, upcoming performances of Schoenberg pieces could be difficult. As Leon Botstein, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, tells us Timesthe collection was ‘an indispensable resource’. Belmont provided the orchestra with scores for Schoenberg’s performance Gurrelieder last year.

Born in Vienna in 1874, Schoenberg grew up in the European music scene in the early 20th century. Like the WashingtonPostMichael Dirda wrote in 2023 that the composer’s increasingly esoteric music “regularly provoked shouts and uproar from early audiences.” After fleeing the Nazis in 1933, Schoenberg landed in California, where he began teaching at several universities. Per reports from January 12, the composer’s old time At home in the Brentwood neighborhood was spared from fire damage.

Larry’s home and its archive – which contained photographs, letters, books and arrangements of Schoenberg’s works by other composers – were completely destroyed.

“There’s a finality here that’s amazing,” Larry says Times. ‘There is no longer any hope of finding or recovering anything. And that is a different kind of sadness.”

Los Angeles’s contemporary artists – painters, potters, sculptors and more – are also suffering the loss of creative works. As a multidisciplinary artist Kathryn Andries tells ART newsKaren K. Ho, “There Are Certain Things That Cannot Be Replaced.”

Like Larry Schoenberg, Andrews lives in Pacific Palisades. She evacuated her house before it burned down. This is the second time she has lost a house to a forest fire: in 2020, the Bobcat fire destroyed her home in Juniper Hills, north of Los Angeles. This time, Andrews lost her own “really beautiful art collection,” including works by Rashid Johnson, Jim Shaw, Fredrik Nilsen and others. She had built up the collection over twenty years.

“After the last fire I had the equivalent of writer’s block: creative block,” says Andrews ART news. “Many animals died there. … It’s not just the loss of stuff, you know, it’s the loss of nature, it’s the loss of a community, it’s the loss of dreams. It has a very intense impact.”

The fires destroyed numerous local galleries, including Altadena’s Alt Betawith an exhibition of ten paintings by artists Maria Anna Pomonis when it burned down.

Painter Rachelle Sawatsky tells Bred magazine that she lost her “entire archive of more than twenty years of work as a painter.” Artist Tara Walterswho lives in the Malibu Village neighborhood, says HyperallergicValentina Di Liscia, Matt Stromberg, Maya Pontone and Rhea Nayyar: “Everything has disappeared from my house. My car. My paintings inside. All my heirlooms. My wedding dress. Everything.”

Kelly Akashian Altadena-based sculptor of glass and bronze, lost her home and studio, reports the Times‘Robin Pogrebin, Julia Halperin and Zachary Small. The building contained recent and archival work, including pieces she had selected for her first exhibition at the museum Lisson Gallery later this month. According to the Times“She had considered giving one of her recent works a name Monument to loss. Now it’s basically lost.”

The fires also consumed the interdisciplinary artist’s livelihood Ross Simonini. As he tells Bredthe forest fire destroyed his family’s home, his studio and “almost all the work I’ve ever made.”

“That includes children’s drawings I made with my mother, the drawing that made me believe I could become an artist, and several new works,” Simonini adds. “I don’t think I will ever stop mourning that loss, but the loving response from the art community has already begun to transform that grief into something else: a sense of deep human connection that I have sought all my life. To get it, all I had to do was lose everything.”