Music History and Contemporary Art Destroyed in the Deadly Los Angeles Wildfires

The wildfires still burning in Los Angeles have killed at least 24 people, razed thousands of homes and historic landmarks and destroyed countless treasured items—including creative works stored in the area.

One such loss is a collection of music written by 20th-century Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg, who developed the 12-tone technique, an innovative style of musical composition. An archive of roughly 100,000 scores and parts written by Schoenberg had been kept in a building behind the house of his son, Larry Schoenberg, in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood, which has been devastated by the fires.

“It’s brutal,” Larry, 83, tells the New York Times’ Javier C. Hernández. “We lost everything.”

Larry runs the company Belmont Music Publishers, which rents and sells Schoenberg scores. The fires didn’t destroy any original Schoenberg manuscripts. But without the archive of copies, upcoming performances of Schoenberg pieces may be difficult. As Leon Botstein, the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, tells the Times, the collection was “an indispensable resource.” Belmont provided the orchestra with scores for its performance of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder last year.

Born in Vienna in 1874, Schoenberg rose up in the European music scene during the early 20th century. As the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda wrote in 2023, the composer’s “increasingly esoteric music regularly elicited catcalls and uproar from early audiences.” After fleeing the Nazis in 1933, Schoenberg landed in California, where he began teaching at several universities. Per reports from January 12, the composer’s longtime home in the Brentwood neighborhood has been spared from fire damage.

Larry’s home and the archive—which included photos, letters, books and other composers’ arrangements of Schoenberg’s works—was completely destroyed.

“There’s a finality here which is astonishing,” Larry tells the Times. “There’s no hope left that you’re going to find or retrieve anything. And that’s a different kind of grief.”

Los Angeles’ contemporary artists—painters, potters, sculptors and more—are also suffering the loss of creative works. As multidisciplinary artist Kathryn Andrews tells ARTnews’ Karen K. Ho, “There are certain things that can’t be replaced.”

Like Larry Schoenberg, Andrews lives in Pacific Palisades. She evacuated her home before it burned down. This is the second time she’s lost a house to wildfire: In 2020, the Bobcat Fire destroyed her home in Juniper Hills, north of Los Angeles. This time, Andrews lost her own “really lovely collection” of art, which included works by Rashid Johnson, Jim Shaw, Fredrik Nilsen and others. She’d built the collection over two decades.

“After the last fire, I had the equivalent of a writer’s block—a creative block,” Andrews tells ARTnews. “A lot of animals died in that one. … It’s not just the loss of stuff, you know, it’s the loss of nature, it’s the loss of a community, it’s the loss of dreams. It has a very intense impact.”

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The fires have razed countless local galleries, including Altadena’s Alto Beta, which contained a ten-painting show by artist Mary Anna Pomonis when it burned down.

Painter Rachelle Sawatsky tells Cultured magazine that she lost her “entire archive of over 20 years of work as a painter.” Artist Tara Walters, who lives in the Malibu Village neighborhood, tells Hyperallergic’s Valentina Di Liscia, Matt Stromberg, Maya Pontone and Rhea Nayyar, “Everything is gone from my house. My car. My paintings inside. All my heirlooms. My wedding dress. Everything.”

Kelly Akashi, an Altadena-based sculptor of glass and bronze, lost her home and studio, report the Times’ Robin Pogrebin, Julia Halperin and Zachary Small. The building contained recent and archival work, including pieces she’d selected to display in her first exhibition at the Lisson Gallery later this month. Per the Times, “She had considered naming one of her recent works Monument to Loss. Now it is actually lost.”

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The fires also consumed the livelihood of interdisciplinary artist Ross Simonini. As he tells Cultured, the wildfire destroyed his family’s home, his studio and “nearly all the work I have ever made.”

“That includes childhood drawings I made with my mom, the drawing that helped me believe I could be an artist and several new bodies of work,” Simonini adds. “I don’t think I will ever stop grieving that loss, but the loving response from the art community has already started transforming that grief into something else: a feeling of deep human connection that I’ve looked for all my life. It only took losing everything to get it.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.