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New Year, New Music: Green Umbrella Echoes

Watch & Listen

During the 2023/24 season at Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA Phil Insight invited five visual artists to attend a performance in the new music series Green Umbrella. The artists were asked to create an artwork in a medium of their choosing that echoed their experience in the concert hall. With inspirations from opera to trumpet translated into ink and oil, these canvases and works on paper show the beauty, curiosity, and inspiration that reverberate long after a performance has ended.

The pieces, along with the artists’ statements, will be on display in Walt Disney Concert Hall at Green Umbrella concerts during the 24/25 season.

ARTIST: Mtendere “Teebs” Mandowa
TITLE: Untitled
MEDIUM: Gouache, charcoal, and oil sticks on paper
INSPIRATION: Chaparral and Interstates, New Music from California

After attending a concert inspired by the geography and climate of California, Mandowa sought to combine and blend three visions of the vast state. By way of Dylan Mattingly’s Sunt Lacrimae Rerum, M.A. Tiesenga’s Sketches of Chaparral, and Samuel Adams’ Eden Interstates, the program wandered through San Francisco’s fog, along Interstate 5, and into the shrublands of Southern California. Mandowa traveled those same paths: “The painting was first meant to be landscape format, but since each composer’s works were so distinct, I thought it best to work vertically to perceive the hill-like mounds as if they each belonged to a composer.… Trying to bring these thoughts to paper was a gift of an idea, and I enjoyed the exercise almost as much as I enjoyed the concert.”

ARTIST: Nora Berman
TITLES: Angel Fire Opening BB (TriStar Music 28), Humil Opening BB (TriStar Music 29)Opening BB (TriStar Music 30)
MEDIUM: Oil pastel, pencil, and ink on paper
INSPIRATION: Oliver Leith and Matt Copson’s opera Last Days

After attending Last Days, Nora Berman was inspired to create a triptych within her larger series, TriStar Music. Drawn onto memo pads, the series calls back to Berman’s godfather, Bob Buziak, a former executive at TriStar Music Group, and his stationery. “Unlike his memos,” Berman writes, “my work as an artist involves creating marks, symbols, images, and phrases—nonsense wrapped in beauty and delivered with confidence and style.” The process is fitting for Leith and Copson’s opera, Last Days, which deals with the torment of a musician’s final moments before his suicide. The opera, like Berman’s triptych, blends profundity and mundanity, piercing light and unavoidable dark. Of their similarities, Berman says, “I also thought there was an uncanny connection with the fact that these drawings were on a music company memo pad, thinking of the scenes of Last Days where the music industry is portrayed almost like a villain.”

Photo courtesy of: Ed Mumford

ARTIST: Lily Stockman
TITLE: Etudes for Piano
MEDIUM: Oil on linen
INSPIRATION: Philip Glass: The Complete Etudes, 1–20

Artist Lily Stockman began her painting not after the performances but as they were underway: “During the Etudes performance earlier this spring, I drew in the dark, transcendent heart of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall—my lines and marks responding to the shifting tempo and temperature of each piece—while experiencing the music in rapt communion with the audience around me.” Part of a larger series on display in New York, her oil reflects not only Glass’ etudes and their scope but also the experience of hearing five pianists in Gehry’s hall perform the 20 etudes. Like Glass, Stockman etches and reiterates thematic shapes and structures while somehow manipulating space and time. Echoing the architecture of the Hall, Stockman’s brushstrokes bounce and curve, making the reverberations visual.

ARTIST: Pearl C. Hsiung
TITLE: Untitled (I.Y.I.)
MEDIUM: Sumi ink, acrylic, and spray paint on watercolor paper
INSPIRATION: John Adams Conducts the LA Phil New Music Group

Hsiung was stirred by Anthony Davis’ You Have the Right to Remain Silent, an autobiographical composition that Davis, a Black man, wrote after a particularly tense traffic stop. The clarinet in Davis’ piece stands in for his own voice, as the orchestra swells with interrogations and interruptions. Moved by the lonely clarinet and “how it conjures the vitality, autonomy, and persistence of an entity entangled within a system and structure,” Hsiung created a piece that screams, hushes, and runs. Using three distinct media that are not watercolor on watercolor paper, she creates friction. With each stroke of a brush and each spray of paint, Hsiung conjures the frenetic and emotional state of You Have the Right to Remain Silent.

ARTIST: Eamon Ore-Giron
TITLE: Tin-Tan
MEDIUM: Gouache on paper
INSPIRATION: Pan-American New Music

Like Hsiung, Ore-Giron was particularly moved by one piece in a longer program: Gabriela Ortiz’s Tin-Tan-Fanfarria y Mambo. Inspired by a beloved Mexican comedian, Ortiz’s playful piece for solo trumpet is divided into two parts: a fanfare and a mambo. Ore-Giron’s gouache Tin-Tan is a reaction to the lone trumpeter; “the music seemed to fracture into a kaleidoscopic sound of horns, and my painting is a visual reflection of that sonic experience.” With an abstract style that frequently draws upon Native American and Amazonian art, Ore-Giron often repeats familiar images, mutating them slightly to transform their meaning. This iterative process was a perfect match for Ortiz’s prismatic explosion of sounds.

To see what's coming up in our Green Umbrella series, visit laphil.com/greenumbrella.

LA Phil Insight is generously supported by Linda and David Shaheen.