Music History

In a steely and stressful time, geopolitically speaking, it is curiously refreshing to step aside for an evening or several, and contemplate the course of musical beauty from the 14th Century forward. Composer Leonard Rosenman's cathedral-ceilinged living room has a grand piano flanked by a pair of hi-fi speakers capable of raising the dead. There is on one side of the room an open stairway and an open mezzanine.

Deep within the high-security Iron Mountain storage facility in Hollywood, where nearly every doorway except for the restroom is protected by a security-card swipe lock, sits the Grammy Museum's permanent collection of pop music artifacts, recordings and memorabilia. Hundreds of 10-inch 78 rpm discs - some from Thomas Edison's record label - reside in archival boxes on 20-foot-long metal shelves, near antique radios and phonograph players, musical instruments, posters and some celebrity fashion items stored out of sight in sturdy garment bags.

Deep within the high-security Iron Mountain storage facility in Hollywood, where nearly every doorway except for the restroom is protected by a security-card swipe lock, sits the Grammy Museum's permanent collection of pop music artifacts, recordings and memorabilia. Hundreds of 10-inch 78 rpm discs - some from Thomas Edison's record label - reside in archival boxes on 20-foot-long metal shelves, near antique radios and phonograph players, musical instruments, posters and some celebrity fashion items stored out of sight in sturdy garment bags.

There was no mention of Sandy at the Israel Philharmonic's concert in Walt Disney Concert Hall Tuesday night. It wouldn't have hurt to play a little something in solidarity of the millions dealing with the storm's devastation, the Israelis having just appeared at Carnegie Hall last week. Then again, there was something comforting in an uncompromisingly traditional concert at which business was very much as usual. The Israel Philharmonic regularly appears in Los Angeles, where the orchestra has considerable support.

Graphix Zone Inc., the multimedia company best known for its interactive disc featuring singer Bob Dylan, said Wednesday that it has signed a deal with legendary jazz pianist and composer Herbie Hancock to produce a three-part CD-ROM series on the history of jazz. The four-time Grammy award winner has already been assigned an office at the Irvine company's headquarters.

A new line of Jazz 101 recordings -- "Jazz Legends" -- has arrived and it's as valuable as the series created for Ken Burns' "Jazz" documentary for PBS. This one's from a far less publicized source: Portland, Ore., distributor Allegro. All the recordings are from the first half of the 20th century, and all are the original versions. Selected and annotated by writer Scott Yanow, they are being released in groups of four. The first dozen are in stores now and more are coming later this year.

From a 1927 Broadway musical comedy to a 2008 basketball game in Anaheim is a big journey for a song to make. But that's exactly the trip that one of UCLA's fight songs will be completing tonight, thanks to its creators -- the incomparable Gershwin brothers. As the Gershwins might say, 's wonderful. UCLA's Varsity Band is expected to play "Strike Up the Band for UCLA" at Anaheim's Honda Center as the men's basketball team plays in the first round of the NCAA's March Madness tournament.

An Iowa music history professor has found portions of two little-known Viennese operas he says were written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the New York Times reported. The discovery was made by David J. Buch, a professor of music history at the University of Northern Iowa last year in the archives of the City and University Library in Hamburg, Germany. Mozart's compositions are included in "The Philosopher's Stone" and "The Beneficent Dervish."

It was as if the last 80 years of music history had never happened. So conservative were the pieces on the Winners Concert of the Pacific Composers Forum's Competition for New Music that they might have been written that long ago, and even then not caused a stir. Challenging their listeners would not seem to be among these composers' concerns. Pleasantness, accessibility, wistfulness would.

Musicians and critics view each other with morbid fascination. One group works with the incorporeal reality of sound and the other with the translation of that experience into personal opinion. The art of music is ultimately timeless while the craft of criticism is at best transitory.

Singer Julie Fowlis is typically used to songs that are a tad older than the ones she sang in Disney/Pixar's  "Brave.  "Her comfort zone is about eight centuries ago. There's plenty of fanciful elements in "Brave"  -- magical wisps, a crafty witch and a mother turned into a bear -- but when it comes to music, the film is grounded in history. Along with composer Patrick Doyle, Fowlis is part of the Scottish contingent working on the film's score, aiming to marry Gaelic traditions with  its symphonic elements.

Levon Helm is most widely known for the songs he sang that found their way onto the pop charts during his long tenure as drummer and singer for the Band: "Up On Cripple Creek," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Don't Do It," earthy and infectious conglomerations of gospel, country, blues, folk and rock music. But the one that might crystallize his approach to music throughout his life was "The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show," an ode to the kind of freewheeling gatherings in which the musician, who died of cancer Thursday at 71 in New York, thoroughly reveled.

It had been a long night ? a concert, a reunion with an old friend, a midnight meal ? but as the clock ticked past 2 a.m. Quincy Jones sat in a rare state of silence in his estate at the very top of Bel-Air. The man they call Q nodded at the cellphone sitting on the kitchen counter. "I've deleted 188 names this year ? all the people who died, all these friends of mine," Jones said. "That's what happens when you're 77, man. That's life, man. You start out playing in bands and doing duets and then you worry that in the end it's all going to be a solo.

At a time when the relationship between African Americans and American Jews seems largely irrelevant to the national conversation, the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation is directing its gaze back at a different era. Not the early 1990s, when tensions between the two communities exploded into riots in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, but to the days more than 30 years prior, when blacks and Jews reached across the divide to embrace commonalities....

History, it's often been observed, is written by victors, which might explain why an especially compelling chapter of the Mexican-American War remains so infrequently told, at least in the U.S. The chapter in question is about the San Patricios, a company of Irish immigrants pressed into service by the U.S. Army. Ideologically opposed to the fight, they switched sides, choosing to stand alongside the Mexican military rather than the forces of their newly adopted homeland. When the conflict ended, the members of the battalion were executed for their desertion.

Unless you happen to be David Letterman, little of value tends to come from making top 10 lists. But violinist Gil Shaham has lately turned this common time-waster into something of a consuming passion, and music lovers are the beneficiaries. One of the era's star fiddlers, Shaham began musing about his favorite 20th century violin concertos at the turn of the millennium. He found to his surprise that most were written in the 1930s. This led to a decision to devote several seasons almost exclusively to these works, specifically concertos by Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Alban Berg, Sergei Prokofiev, William Walton, Benjamin Britten, Samuel Barber and Paul Hindemith.

There was no mention of Sandy at the Israel Philharmonic's concert in Walt Disney Concert Hall Tuesday night. It wouldn't have hurt to play a little something in solidarity of the millions dealing with the storm's devastation, the Israelis having just appeared at Carnegie Hall last week. Then again, there was something comforting in an uncompromisingly traditional concert at which business was very much as usual. The Israel Philharmonic regularly appears in Los Angeles, where the orchestra has considerable support.

For traditionalists, the Pacific Symphony's Halloween effort includes Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" and Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice," both familiar from the film "Fantasia" and countless seasonal concerts. Children are invited to wear costumes to the performance Saturday morning at Orange County Performing Arts Center. The event is part of the "Mervyn's Musical Mornings" series.

AN EXPANSIVE new work from one of the world's leading choreographers, set to an original score by a high-profile composer making his first foray into the world of dance -- this is hardly American Ballet Theatre's usual fare these days. The multi-part programs that once were the troupe's standard offerings have given way for the most part to full-evening narrative works, especially for touring engagements, as presenters prefer to play things safe.

From a 1927 Broadway musical comedy to a 2008 basketball game in Anaheim is a big journey for a song to make. But that's exactly the trip that one of UCLA's fight songs will be completing tonight, thanks to its creators -- the incomparable Gershwin brothers. As the Gershwins might say, 's wonderful. UCLA's Varsity Band is expected to play "Strike Up the Band for UCLA" at Anaheim's Honda Center as the men's basketball team plays in the first round of the NCAA's March Madness tournament.