A Museum’s Bowl Full of Memories

With a brand-new look and double the space, the 12-year-old Hollywood Bowl Museum reopened last month as part of the festivities celebrating the 75th anniversary season of al fresco music in Los Angeles.

“It’s essentially a completely new museum,” says Anne Parsons, Bowl general manager.

Only the fireplace and the “footprint” from the museum’s original building on the exact spot, a single-level 1930s-era stone-and-stucco structure, remain. The 3,000-square-foot facility, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is a sleek contemporary metal-and-glass two-story structure that also carries a new name: the Edmund D. Edelman Hollywood Bowl Museum, in honor of the county supervisor who, with L.A. Philharmonic managing director Ernest Fleischmann, was most responsible for the museum’s creation in 1984.

The goal of the remodeling was expansion, Parsons says. “We simply needed more space to fulfill the museum’s mission,” she explains. “Besides a place for a permanent Hollywood Bowl exhibit, we wanted space for rotating shows.”

Like the building, the contents of the museum have also gone through some changes. In previous years, the museum, with just one exhibition space, concentrated on creating temporary shows on a wide range of musical topics, from instruments to L.A.’s emigre musicians, one per summer season.

The enlarged museum has two galleries, one upstairs for temporary shows and a main gallery downstairs, which has been devoted solely to the life and times of the Bowl.

“This is the first time since the founding of the museum 12 years ago that we have put together an exhibition detailing the history of the Bowl,” says Carol Merrill-Mirsky, who has been the museum’s curator and director since 1989.

“And this one is much more complete now, because, while the museum was closed [for reconstruction], starting in the fall of 1994, I traveled all around Southern California picking up more materials dealing with this history. Ninety percent of the collection is new.”

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Leading a tour through the downstairs exhibit, which features four audio stations and constantly running video snippets as well as posters, still photos, programs, contracts and other Bowl memorabilia, Merrill-Mirsky points out a few of the museum’s permanent holdings.

There is, for instance, a 10-minute compilation of Bowl “home movies” from the archives of the late violist and onetime L.A. Philharmonic member Phil Kahgan. Taken between 1929 and 1948, the footage, mostly of Bowl rehearsals, offers never-before-seen backstage views of such notables as violinist Ruggiero Ricci (as a child virtuoso), conductor Bruno Walter, soprano Lotte Lehman and many others.

What does ethnomusicologist Merrill-Mirsky consider to be the collection’s real treasures?

“So many possibilities,” she says. “I would say, the audio recording of [composer] Arnold Schoenberg, speaking at the 1937 memorial concert shortly after the death of George Gershwin, when the performers included Oscar Levant, Fred Astaire and Todd Duncan.

“Also, the telegram negotiating the terms of the Philharmonic’s offer to Otto Klemperer to become music director [in the mid-1930s]. Letters to Ernest Fleischmann from Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez, Eugene Ormandy and others regarding their Bowl engagements.

“And the first recording made at the Bowl, in 1928, with Eugene Goosens conducting the L.A. Philharmonic in the Adagio from ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ ”

The exhibit, which is divided into five historical sections, covers the Bowl from its days as a natural amphitheater with a temporary stage to the construction of boxes and the familiar tiered semicircular shell.

It also documents its aesthetic evolution, from community sings in the ‘20s to the establishment of the Bowl as the Philharmonic’s summer home and to the earliest intrusions of pop, in the form of a much-debated appearance by then-teen-heartthrob Frank Sinatra with the Philharmonic in 1943 and the creation of the separate Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in 1991.

Upstairs, in the temporary exhibition space, this season’s show is also about Bowl history, in this case its connections with Tinseltown.

“Hollywood Goes to the Bowl” features a selection of 25 images by L.A. photographer Otto Rothschild,, who in the middle decades of this century was an official picture-taker for the L.A. Philharmonic, Hollywood Bowl and Music Center. The exhibit documents stars who appeared onstage and in the audience over the years.

In addition to gallery space, the second floor is designed to accommodate performances and meetings. And there are plans to add a Resource Center so the public can look at materials in the still-growing museum archive and listen to their choice of Bowl recordings.

“This is still in the planning,” Merrill-Mirsky says, “because we still need funding and all the equipment. We are seeking a donor for the computers and electronic stuff.”

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With an estimated price tag of $1 million, the redone museum is a small but relatively visible part of an ongoing $25.5-million Bowl-wide face lift begun in 1994. Paid for by Proposition A, the Safe Neighborhood Parks Act of 1992, the renovation work has concentrated mostly on infrastructure, adding bathrooms, upgrading water, sewage and electrical service and improving wheelchair access to all parts of the park.

The way Merrill-Mirsky sees it, the museum remodel is also a matter of improved access--to information.

“When we were doing just the temporary exhibitions,” she says, “we found people showing up at the museum expecting and wanting to know more about the Bowl. It was a case of the audience telling us what they wanted.”

* Edmund D. Edelman Hollywood Bowl Museum, 2301 Highland Ave., Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Special events: “Chamber Music Unplugged,” Sept. 7, 2 p.m.; and a discussion of Bowl history from Philharmonic members, “Anecdotes From the Orchestra,” today at 2 p.m. Free, but reservations necessary. Information: (213) 850-2058.