ART / Cathy Curtis : Photographer Is Able to Bring Artists’ Complexities Into Focus

The guests--a cross section of contemporary music lovers from Los Angeles and a few from out of town--sit on rows of chairs beneath a huge Sam Francis painting. The speaker is lanky 37-year-old composer Paul Dresher from San Francisco, introducing recent work he is about to play on the tape deck.

The elegantly attired woman with platinum blond hair who is so furiously snapping photographs is Betty Freeman, patron extraordinaire of American composers. . . .

Freeman, who (with Los Angeles Herald-Examiner music critic Alan Rich) holds such by-invitation-only musicales every month in her Beverly Hills home, is no amateur shutterbug. A longtime collector of contemporary American art and a veteran of workshops with Ansel Adams and other master photographers, she has a splendid eye for the kind of detail that brings complex personalities into focus--as well as the advantage of getting to know them in a close and sympathetic way.

A selection of Freeman’s photographs of composers, performers, writers, dancers, theatrical wizards and visual artists (including Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney and Adams) continues at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Feb. 4.

The other day she strolled through the gallery, talking about the unconventional, often bravely iconoclastic creative people who figure in her photographs.

“The first (composer) I was interested in was Le Monte Young,” Freeman said, pausing in front of her photograph of the broad-faced, bearded man who was an originator of so-called “minimal” music, based on extended passages of repetition.

“It was 1961, and someone wrote me that . . . Le Monte was picked up on a marijuana charge on a highway in Connecticut. They were asking people from the art world for (bail) money, and so I donated $100, which in those days was a substantial donation.

“He sent me his tapes, and I liked them very, very much. The music struck me right away as something original, inventive and forceful without being noisy.

“He has spent the last 10 years on one piece, ‘The Well-Tempered Piano’ (an allusion to Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’), which was just released on five CDs. It’s based on the infinite number of possibilities that exist within one tone. Almost nothing happens on the surface--no obvious melody or harmony or rhythm.

“The only thing I’d say (in general) about contemporary music is that you really don’t know what to expect. It’s an adventure. You’ve never heard it before.”

In 1964, Freeman began working with Encounters, a group sponsoring concerts of contemporary music at the former Pasadena Art Museum, where she met the hugely innovative composers John Cage and Henry Partsch. A year later, she stopped pursuing her own studies on the piano and began to devote the bulk of her time to organizing and promoting new music concerts, commissioning compositions and producing records.

The beneficiaries of her work are young composers who stubbornly insist on pushing the legacy of classical music in new directions, despite their appeal to only a narrow band of listeners. Not that every inch of new territory is necessarily worth exploring.

“I’ll go to 100 concerts,” Freeman said, “and if I hear one really good piece, well, when it happens, it’s very exciting.”

The oldest photo in the show is of electronic-music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen, young and clean-cut in 1966 as he squinted into the sunlight at Disneyland, where Freeman snapped him with a Brownie camera. “He wouldn’t pose, so I pretended to take a picture of the Magic Castle,” she said.

Since then, Freeman has come a long way, beginning in earnest in 1972 when someone thrust a Nikon in her hands while she was producing a documentary film about Partsch, “The Dreamer That Remains.” She shoots exclusively in 35 millimeter (she owns a battery of Leicas and an Olympus), only recently gave up developing and printing her own work and is particularly fond of shots using only available light.

In one of these, white-haired American expatriate Conlon Nancarrow--a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant whose rhythmically and harmonically complex scores are created exclusively for player pianos--sits deep in the gloom of his Mexico City garage-studio. His patient-looking face is sculpted by rays of light from the window and a goosenecked lamp.

The frozen posture suggests that he is an exceptionally quiet man. “Oh yes,” Freeman said. “He speaks only in monosyllables.”

One of Freeman’s images of John Cage shows the impish grand maverick of contemporary music in his kitchen, cluttered with an improbable array of implements as he whips up one of his macrobiotic feasts.

In another shot, he flashes a beatific grin while jostled at a reception next to clamp-jawed Virgil Thomson, the elderly composer and dean of American music critics who was then not on speaking terms with his colleague. The shot is particularly memorable because it illustrates the curious ways of chance--Cage’s key compositional device.

Partsch, who died in 1974, was self-taught and so impecunious that he was living on $30 a month in the mid-’60s. He devised a 43-tone scale (the traditional Western scale has 12 tones), which required him to invent his own instruments. One photograph shows him in sandals and a peculiar cap, surrounded by several of his creations, including a marimba made from a set of 12-gallon Pyrex bowls.

“He was a magical man,” Freeman recalled. “Mesmerizing. He just had this magnetic power. He never asked for anything, but I found myself driving all over (Los Angeles) looking for a studio for him because he was living in Van Nuys, a residential, yuppie place. He couldn’t stand it. I found him a laundromat in Venice and he moved in there.”

Freeman’s passion for the new does not rule out the old, however. Speaking of the Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel, a specialist in the works of his 18th- and 19th-Century countrymen Mozart and Schubert, Freeman acknowledges with a laugh that she’s “his groupie.”

Because she “never heard anyone play with such passionate intelligence,” she made up her mind to photograph Brendel. When he asked if he could come to her house to practice for an upcoming concert, she was delighted.

“I turned off the refrigerator so there would be no noise. I took the telephone off the hook. But the pictures were awful,” Freeman said. “The next day he gave a lecture at USC’s Schoenberg Hall. It was the right time, the light was right. You could say he’s the homeliest man in the world--with his thick, thick glasses and buck teeth and badly receding hairline--but he’s so terribly appealing.”

In an extraordinary shot, perhaps the best in the show, Freeman captures Brendel lecturing from the piano, his faintly sorrowful face registering a mysterious, ultimately impenetrable complex of emotions.

“Music People and Others” continues at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Feb. 4. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 856-6610.