MUSIC OF A FILM CITY: INTERWAR EUROPE IN LOS ANGELES, 1930S

Abstract
The musical culture of the city of Los Angeles, as it is seen today, developed not without the influence of outstanding musicians who came from Europe during the period between the world wars. The combination of European modernist ideas with American musical culture, which differed in many ways from European musical culture, led to unique results. During the 1920s and even more so in the 1930s, members of the Austrian-German artistic intelligentsia, particularly those of Jewish origin who felt insecure in their homeland, began to look for a safer place. The United States has become such a place for many, and many of them chose the second largest metropolis—Los Angeles. The most notable figure in this group was the modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Other famous musicians were conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter. How did these people acclimatize to a city whose culture and business revolved around filmmaking? What place did conductors Klemperer and Walter occupy in the city, state, and country? How could Schoenberg, whose musical style was little understood by the American public, realize himself? What path did he take when he was accepted into two universities as a professor of counterpoint and composition? Did he reconsider his own views on the development of Western music? And finally, how was the composer’s memory perpetuated at the universities where he taught? The oral presentation, accompanied by a Power Point slide show with few audio samples (scheduled as instructed, for 15 minutes, including questions and discussion), will be based primarily on materials found in four libraries at two Los Angeles universities, UCLA and USC, during my tenure as a visiting scholar at USC's Thornton School of Music (August 2023) and as an invited lecturer and scholar at USC's Doheny Memorial Library (August-September 2024), as well as interviews with people actively involved in efforts to preserve Schoenberg's memory on the USC campus. Keywords - Los Angeles, filmmaking, immigrant musicians, Arnold Schoenberg, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter.