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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

True Eclecticism with Wild Up

August 7, 2012 by Scott Timberg

ONE of the oddest and most beautiful concerts I’ve been to this year took place at the Hammer Museum a few weeks ago.

Here’s a bit of what was on offer as the museum and the musician’s collective wild Up (they don’t cap the “w”) came together:

The fruit of this union was a July concert that began with a conductor in a cowboy hat, a menacing toreador, the sound of tumbleweed being rolled through the museum’s courtyard, and the twangy strains of Ennio Morricone’s music for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.
By the end of the afternoon, the group had launched ping-pong balls into the air in a tribute to minimalist composer LaMonte Young, and offered a meditative, early-music version of Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” accompanied, as it happened, by helicopter in a particularly delicate passage. This was not the only place where the city seemed to be conflicting with – or filling out – the group’s music: What police sirens smashed through a song by indie-rock heroes Magnetic Fields, and what sounded like a fire truck roared through the climax of a gnarly early Schoenberg piece.


HERE is my story on the group, which has a concert at Schoenberg Hall this Saturday and a lot of stuff, at the Hammer and elsewhere, through December. I speak to Hammer curator Elizabeth Cline and the group’s conductor, Christopher Rountree.

Very much looking forward from more from these guys…

Filed Under: art, classical music, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, west coast

Comments

  1. anum harryson says

    October 14, 2012 at 11:16 pm

    Blogs to my mind are a good way to drive traffic to one’s main site.

    adipex 37.5

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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