The Music Center of Los Angeles County: The First 50 Years

In this richly researched and vividly written narrative, Margaret Leslie Davis presents the story of how a major American region recentered itself on the arts in the second half of the twentieth century, transforming Bunker Hill into a virtual Acropolis of the arts. Davis recounts in telling detail the saga of how the Music Center brought Los Angeles County to a new level of social and cultural definition through vision, philanthropy, public-private cooperation, architecture, and the performing arts. This region, centered in the City of Angels, was brought to new maturity by the overland arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway in the 1880s and by the economic boom that followed, bringing an influx of dynamic migrants from older American regions along with immigrants to the United States. Then, in the early twentieth century, the region metropolitanized itself through water engineering, dams, and aqueducts, and through the cutting-edge industries of motion pictures and aviation. During World War II, Los Angeles was transformed into the Gibraltar of the Pacific, followed by a rise to global status in the second half of the twentieth century. And now a leading historian of this region relates the role played by the performing arts, and by those who believed in the need for these arts, in further defining the region in cultural terms. In the course of telling this story, Davis never loses her focus on either the Music Center or the arts being nurtured and presented there, whether that means the performances themselves or the shifts and evolutions of taste in music, opera, theater, and dance. Yet in doing this, she also achieves a history of region, philanthropy, politics, architecture, planning, crisis management, and public-private cooperation-and all this at the county level. Of all the fifty-eight counties of California, perhaps only Los Angles is large enough, diverse enough, wealthy enough, and culturally ambitious enough to sustain such a saga of art