The common definition of the term “field recording” is pretty literal — it’s the art of capturing audio outside of a studio. Want to add the sound of a cow mooing to your soundtrack or symphony? Grab your tape recorder and head for the nearest pasture.
But when the Los Angeles Philharmonic chose “field recordings” as the theme of its fifth Noon to Midnight festival of new music — which takes place all day Nov. 16 in and around Walt Disney Concert Hall — the orchestra decided to go with a much broader definition.
While some of the dozens of pieces being performed incorporate sounds recorded on location, many others simply approach the theme metaphorically. Any attempt to evoke a particular time and place is “a sort of artistic recording,” said composer Ellen Reid, who is curating the event.
Fittingly, the centerpiece of the festival is the concert premiere of a film by visual artist Doug Aitken that covers both the literal and figurative definitions. Lightscape is an impressionistic, nonlinear work composed of footage taken at a variety of Southern California locations, underscored by music that imaginatively evokes those same settings.
“Lightscape is a hot-burning fever dream,” Aitken said. “I wanted to capture what it means to be alive right now.”
The 2024 edition of Noon to Midnight is part of PST ART, the festival formerly known as Pacific Standard Time that’s supported by the Getty Foundation. This year, more than 80 scientific and cultural institutions around Southern California are tackling the festival’s theme of “art and science collide.”
“How does a music organization participate in that?” asked Meghan Umber, chief content officer of the LA Phil. “We had brainstorming sessions with them on what might or might not fit the brief.
“We had already been working with [Aitken] and the [Los Angeles] Master Chorale on Lightscape. That felt like it could be an anchor. It’s a mixture of prerecorded tunes and found sounds that creates an immersive audio and visual experience.” The genesis of Lightscape goes back to 2018, when the Master Chorale’s artistic director, Grant Gershon, started talking with Aitken about a possible collaboration.
“We were originally talking about a live presentation — perhaps a song cycle or series of episodes that could be staged in various landscapes and venues, anywhere from the Disney Hall parking garage to Death Valley,” Gershon recalled. “We did a fair amount of recording together [based on this idea]. We would basically improvise on Doug’s prompts and record it.
“The idea was this would be a tailored, site-specific work. Some of the bones of that have made their way into the film, which uses locations in a lot of the kinds of places we were thinking about for the live performance.”
Of course, COVID-19 had to do with the change of plans. About two months into the pandemic shutdown, Aitken began discussing the idea of turning the project into a film.
“Around that time, he was approached by the LA Phil as well,” Gershon said. “So it started to look like this could be something larger-scale — a project that involved both organizations and utilized all the different aspects of Doug’s art.”
As is typical of his style, Aitken didn’t confine Lightscape to just picturesque imagery. Rather, the film is “an interesting juxtaposition of beautiful and evocative landscapes with, say, an Amazon factory warehouse,” Gershon explained.
“One of my favorite sites [in the film] is the airplane graveyard in the Mojave Desert. If you’re driving along [State Route] 14, you pass this vast area in the desert where various airlines park their sidelined airplanes. There are hundreds of 737s, 747s, and DC-10s rusting away. That’s the kind of site that produces complex imagery.”
The 65-minute film “flows in an almost surreal state,” Gershon added. “You’re generally in each scene for no more than a minute and a half and sometimes no more than 30 or 40 seconds. It’s enough to make an impression, but as soon as [Aitken has] done that, he moves on to something else.
“There isn’t a narrative in the traditional sense, but you do follow a number of characters through the course of the film. They reappear in different situations, or you return to them later in time. There’s definitely a sense of progression — day flowing into night, flowing into day again. It ends with a series of sunsets, mainly along the coast. It feels like everything is traveling in that direction — west.”
Lightscape reflects “how I see life, like a huge tapestry in which diverse moments are sewn together,” Aitken explained. “We’re moving through a kind of landscape that undulates back and forth between chaos and order.”
About half of the score consists of classic works by composers long associated with American minimalism, like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, and John Adams. Aitken said he is attracted to these composers because “the innovations of minimalist music kind of foreshadowed the digital world. [Their music’s] use of repetition and patterning is almost binary.”
Terry Riley, a close friend of Aitken’s, contributed a new piece for the film, which also contains fresh music from younger composers like Gabriella Smith. The rest of the score was written by Aitken himself — “based on the sessions we did pre-pandemic,” Gershon said. “At the time, we were looking at something made up of fairly simple material that we could replicate live without a score. So the newly composed music is generally looped, combined, and built up into large structures.”
For Saturday’s presentation of the film with live accompaniment, Gershon had to “reverse engineer” the score, as he puts it. He meticulously went through the recorded music and created a written score, which members of the LA Phil and Master Chorale are now set to perform.
Asked if he has worked on anything like this before, Gershon laughed. “I don’t think there has been anything quite like this!”
Innovation has been a key component of Noon to Midnight since its first iteration in 2016. New installments of the series took place in 2017, 2019, and 2022. This is the first one with a theme and the first to be curated.
Umber said this was necessitated by being part of the larger PST ART festival but added that “we were moving in that direction anyway. In my view, it’s important that we get new, fresh ideas into the space. It’s a great joy to invite someone else to come in and curate. There are so many new names that Ellen has brought to us.”
Reid began the complex task of putting the program and the many participating ensembles together a year or so ago. “There are some groups, like the Calder Quartet, that I came to [with a set list] and asked, ‘Can you play this program?’ They said yes,” she recalled. “There are others we asked, ‘What would you like to do?’ or ‘Would you be up for curating a program around this particular piece?’”
One challenge Reid faced is that concerts are on three separate stages: in the main hall, in BP Hall (where preconcert lectures normally take place), and in Keck Amphitheatre, a small outdoor space. That meant deciding what pieces should go where — and making sure a loud piece in one hall wouldn’t drown out a quiet one next door.
“It was like playing Tetris,” she joked. “But I’m really happy with the way it all landed.”
In addition, Umber noted that there will be installations in various places around the hall and “almost all of them have some sound associated with them. We’re turning the Founder’s Room, which is normally a private space, into a listening lounge where you can hear recordings and conversations. There will also be moderated discussions there featuring composers and people who specialize in field recordings.”
Which again brings up the question: What exactly constitutes a field recording? Some pieces obviously fit the category, such as Steve Reich’s Different Trains from 1988, which the Calder Quartet will perform at 4 p.m. in BP Hall. In this work, the composer not only utilizes train whistles but also recorded voices from porters and others remembering the era of rail travel. The rhythms of their speech are picked up in the music that follows.
“There’s also a piece I wrote for the LA Phil to mark its 100th anniversary,” Reid said. “It was created for Keck Amphitheatre and was inspired by the changes to that neighborhood over the past 100 years. It includes projected maps and images of the spot where Disney Hall [now] stands. That ‘placeness’ of the piece [fits the field-recording theme].
“There are also pieces that resonate with a specific place. An example of that is the set the Dr. Don Norfleet Trio is going to [play at 1:30 p.m.] in the garden. The musicians will respond to the sounds that are happening at that moment. It’ll be sort of an immediate field recording.”
Expect a sizable crowd. Umber said the audience for Noon to Midnight has “definitely grown” since 2016. “Thousands of people come through the space over the course of the day,” she said of previous festivals. “The lower price serves as an invitation for a lot of people.”
So what’s the best way to take it all in? “I would recommend picking a few things you definitely want to catch,” Reid said. Between those, wander around and discover what resonates with you, she suggested. If the answer is nothing, no need to fret: “There are also food trucks.”
