Last week we talked about groundbreaking modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg who died in Los Angeles in 1951. In 1965, Schoenberg’s son established Belmont Music Publishers to manage his father’s publishing rights. He also kept an official repository of Schoenberg’s scores from which orchestras worldwide could rent or buy copies. It operated out of a building behind the family house. That house was in Pacific Palisades, California. Earlier this month in the fires that have devastated the area, the house and the archive burned, and an estimated 100,000 scores and parts were destroyed.
The Belmont website posted simply that “We have lost our full inventory of sales and rental materials. We hope that in the near future we will be able to ‘rise from the ashes’ in a completely digital form.” Leon Botstein, the Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra, said that the Belmont archive played “an essential role in making Schoenberg’s music available to the public.” “It’s a catastrophe,” he said. Art galleries, studios, artists homes full of a lifetime of work, are gone.
In addition to the lives lost and artwork destroyed, there’s the architecture. More than 30 buildings that preservationists consider historically significant have burned. The New York Times says that “the diversity of destruction reveals, in a tragic way, the stunning diversity of the region’s architecture, including Modernist, Beaux-Arts, Spanish Revival, Craftsman, Art Deco, Victorian, Postmodern, and contemporary buildings.”
One of the last examples of early 20th century bungalow motels, The Topanga Ranch Motel, built in 1929, was destroyed in the Palisades fire. The home of Western novelist Zane Grey, built in 1907 and bought by the author in 1920, was destroyed in the Eaton Fire. The ranch house that Will Rogers built in the 1920s is gone.
It’s staggering and heartbreaking — I don’t know any other way to put it,” said Ken Bernstein, principal city planner at Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources. “This is widespread destruction of significant architecture and places that are cherished in our communities.”
Such a tragedy could be a reminder to other places to consider their own cultural histories and do their best to preserve them.
