L.A. Answers a Holy Calling

In the fall of 1997, the Dalai Lama sent a message out into the world, inviting the global community to consider using music as a tool for ushering in a peaceful millennium.

“Among the many forms in which the human spirit has tried to express its innermost yearnings and perceptions, music is perhaps the most universal,” he wrote. “There is something in music that transcends and unites. This is evident in the sacred music of every community--music that expresses the universal yearning that is shared by people all over the globe.”

So with the Dalai Lama as muse, communities on six continents began formulating ways to stage community-driven festivals that would foster mutual understanding by celebrating sacred music in its many possible incarnations. Judy Mitoma, for one, heard the call. “The idea that music can be the catalyst to transform a consciousness in a complex urban behemoth like Los Angeles,” she begins, a little breathlessly. “Now some of us believe that.” Her tone shifts to giddy enthusiasm: “Other people think we’re crazy!”

Crazy or not, L.A. is going to give it a try with the World Festival of Sacred Music, a series of 85 concerts taking place all around town, Oct. 9-17. Back in February 1998, when a series of community meetings was held to mobilize support and gauge the feasibility of such an undertaking, some wondered how on earth Los Angeles could produce a citywide festival in just 18 months, with no money and no corporate sponsors. Undaunted, Mitoma, who is also founder of UCLA’s department of world arts and cultures and Center for Intercultural Performance, called everyone in her database, including those she had worked with on the now-defunct Los Angeles Festival, which she co-curated with Peter Sellars in 1990.

Some of those who attended the meetings, which took place over the following three months, recall the communal buzz as local organizers, civic and religious leaders, funders and artists gathered.

“People came initially because of [the Dalai Lama]; because they felt this loss after the L.A. Festival’s demise; because they felt the millennium coming on and nobody was doing anything that seemed to resonate with the people in the room,” Mitoma says.

“It was just thrilling to have all these people come together with this kind of common purpose,” says events producer Aaron Paley of Community Arts Resources, remembering a meeting of about 125 people at a church in the Mid-Wilshire area. “It functioned very positively for people to know this was a project that had the Dalai Lama’s support. Also, there’s a certain amount of celebrity attached to him that didn’t hurt in Los Angeles, either.”

The Dalai Lama will give the opening address at the kickoff event at the Hollywood Bowl on Oct. 10, a nearly four-hour concert that will feature about 600 performers ranging from the Halau O Kekuhi hula group from the Big Island of Hawaii, an assemblage of Tibetan monk choirs and Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

Despite his participation in the opening festivities, the Dalai Lama’s role in the festival has turned out to be largely a symbolic one.

Says Mitoma: “At the beginning, His Holiness became a very, very important gravitating force, but the more people got involved, the more they said this isn’t about somebody else, we’re living it, we’re activating it, we’re responsible for it.”

The Los Angeles festival is the first in a series of global events that are scheduled to take place between October and next April. Lama Doboom Tulku, the director of Tibet House, in New Delhi, says the “L.A. event materialized quickly because of the interest of the city of Los Angeles to include this in their millennium celebrations and the fact that a coordinator was available at UCLA.” Doboom Tulku, who chairs the Dalai Lama’s Foundation for Universal Responsibility, says that the idea has “developed a momentum of its own” in North America, where smaller festivals are now planned for Chicago, the East Coast and possibly Toronto.

But early attempts to organize festivals on other continents have been shaky. While Doboom Tulku says there will be festivals throughout spring and summer of 2000 in Milan, London, Moscow, Stuttgart, Helsinki, Hiroshima and Seoul, a European festival scheduled for Dresden, Germany, was canceled, and an African festival planned for Cape Town, South Africa, is struggling for support.

Not that it’s been easy in Los Angeles, a city whose vastness presupposes a hefty logistical and financial challenge for the organizers. Paley and his staff determined that the only way to make it happen was to get participants to cover the cost of their own productions, allowing them to charge nominal fees when necessary.

But Jodie Evans, a festival volunteer in charge of fund-raising, estimates that the festival will incur $875,000 in additional costs, such as line producer fees, distribution of 300,000 brochures, and salaries for managing director Sara Wolf and her small support staff, who have been at work on the festival full time for more than a year. The Bowl opening event also will be costly: The Philharmonic is donating its time and not charging rent for the facility, but other overhead--such as paying union employees to run the show--will amount to approximately $150,000, and the festival is picking up transportation costs for the Dalai Lama and his entourage.

The organizers avoided corporate sponsorship, they say, to reflect the grass-roots spirit of the festival. Evans says that the city of Los Angeles donated $75,000 for start-up money and the festival has received donations from the Rockefeller Foundation and the California Arts Council, as well as private donations, including $25,000 from Fred Segal.

Mitoma, Evans and other friends of the festival also have hosted about 20 donor parties--Sacred Music in Private Places--which they say have raised $4,000 to $10,000 a pop.

Mitoma is counting on selling out the Bowl event, for which tickets will cost from $10 to $1,500. With a full house at the Bowl, this means the festival as a whole “will pay for itself,” she says. “And that is so beautiful.”

Mitoma, who is volunteering her time to the festival, says it is the altruism and goodwill of such artists as Salonen that have helped give the festival a boost so far.

Salonen brought the Philharmonic on board about a year ago, to lend support to the goals of the festival and to tap a new audience for the orchestra. “It’s one of those events where many different people come together from different disciplines, different artists, different nationalities, religions, ethnic backgrounds and so on and so forth,” he says. “For the Los Angeles Philharmonic and myself it is very important to appear in a nonconventional context from time to time. When there are events that are likely to pull a very sort of varied and diverse crowd, I think we should be there.”

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In some ways, the World Festival of Sacred Music reincarnates the spirit of the L.A. Festival, which grew out of the wildly successful 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, and like that event, always focused on producing as much diversity on as many stages around town as possible. The L.A. Festival was last produced in 1993. Says Paley: “It’s a very ambitious thing for any festival to take on the prospect of pulling together an event that has the scope and breadth to represent Los Angeles and also takes place in multiple venues throughout the city. I haven’t seen anyone try since 1993, because it’s really hard.”

To impose a sense of order, organizers divided the concerts according to two categories: Sacred Music in Sacred Places, which includes churches and temples, parks and community centers; and Sacred Music in Public Places, such as theaters, universities, museums and other more traditional performance venues.

Consultant Julia Carnahan, who got her festival chops working on the 1993 L.A. Festival, was in charge of the public places portion, negotiating with UCLA, Cal State Northridge and other sites that have budgets and regularly put on events.

“I’m just happy to see something happening citywide where there’s this kind of participation,” Carnahan says. “A performance can be a real exciting cross-town discovery or going two blocks up the street and walking into a church you’ve always wanted to go into but weren’t sure if you’d be welcome.”

Paley and his staff at Community Arts Resources (CARS), who have a decade of experience producing events such as the Fringe Festival in 1987 and the Open Festival in 1990 (both later absorbed by the L.A. Festival), was responsible for Sacred Music in Sacred Places, which includes venues that had never before staged events.

CARS also has been instrumental in organizing performers and matching them with venues. Paley began by formulating and sending out an application that asked would-be participants to describe the event they envisioned, whether they saw themselves as an artist, a venue or a producer, and how they planned to meet their production costs. A committee sifted through the 250 responses.

“We needed to say no to some people,” Paley says. “We wanted to have a vision, to reflect the principle of the festival which was sacred music, to get a flexible definition so we could apply it to various types of work. Even though it’s loose and broad, it’s not all-encompassing; it’s not everything goes.”

One group they turned down had proposed klezmer music, a Jewish-Yiddish celebratory music that Paley says he knows well. “Everybody spoke from their level of expertise,” he says. “I knew klezmer music because it’s Jewish music, but it’s not sacred, so that was an easy distinction.”

They chose groups on the basis of aesthetic quality and ability to self-produce, keeping in mind a balanced mix of musical styles and sacred traditions. And then Paley’s staff drove all around the city making house calls, checking potential venues for lighting, sound and other logistical factors, and getting a sense of which groups might fit in the various venues. “We really worked to put these pieces together of the puzzle,” says Paley, whose eccentric pairings--Chumash ceremonial rituals in Malibu or sitar and hand-bell music at a Presbyterian church in Tarzana--underscore the boundary-crashing mission at the heart of the festival.

“In many cases there are collaborations going on that wouldn’t have gone on,” Paley says. “We were trying to use the concept of the festival to open doors and expose people to other cultures, [and] to use the process to do that too, so that when the audience gets there, the performers are already in that spirit.”

In early September, several of the groups were still in the theoretical stages of collaboration.

Geri Keams, a Native American storyteller who was paired with a group performing Sri Lankan devotional music at the Temple Isaiah on West Pico Boulevard, says she plans to use the festival’s spiritual rubric to tell some longer sacred stories of her native Navajo people. But she hadn’t yet met her co-performers. “The idea is to put people together who normally don’t work together, to learn something from one another. I’ve never been to Sri Lanka. How I ended up with the Sri Lankans I don’t know. I’ve never heard the music.”

The Gwen Wyatt Chorale/Wilshire Cathedral Choir will sing traditional African American a cappella spirituals alongside the Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble. The groups will collaborate on “Amazing Grace” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

“I think it’s a perfect match,” says Omowale Awe of the Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble. “Gospel music was derived from African music. And the piece we do together we all know--’Amazing Grace’--but with an African flavor.”

“We’re both inspired by the concept of combining the two traditions,” says Gwendolyn Wyatt, whose two choral groups specialize in African American spirituals. She points out that that culture and Nigerian culture are similar, but says that attending orientation meetings of the performers has been an enlightening experience: “I was amazed and inspired by all the different types of musicians from the world living here in Los Angeles, and that in itself was an education for me. I like the concept of using music to get to know each other and appreciate each other and not be afraid of each other.”

Says singer Nobuko Miyamoto of the L.A.--based theater and music ensemble Great Leap, who is curating a day at the Senshin Buddhist Temple near USC that begins at sunrise with yoga sadhana and tai chi and offers workshops and performances by Miyamoto and others: “It’s great to be part of something that calls attention to L.A.’s positive aspects, rather than spotlighting racial disharmony. This is about people trying to elevate consciousness and bring people together.”

In the end, the lineup for the World Festival of Sacred Music is reflective of the diversity of Los Angeles, but noticeably short on the music you might encounter in a Western Civ course. Mitoma says that the participants reflect those who stepped forward and answered the call. But she acknowledges a dearth of classical Christian music, noting that she had hoped that groups such as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir might participate.

“It may be my own personal shortcoming in a sense that we didn’t know how to properly connect with those people,” she says by way of explanation. “I feel that’s a loss. It could be that the call of His Holiness attracts a certain kind of person, but probably I need to take responsibility for the lack of representation. We hope people won’t think we’re prejudiced [against] Western music, because we’re certainly not. We’re hoping the L.A. Philharmonic helps make up for that.”

Salonen says he had no trouble thinking up his entry for the quintessential piece of sacred music.

“It makes sense to be a part of this festival from a purely artistic point of view. A lot of our repertoire is based on either spiritual or religious themes,” he says. “But I don’t think we should treat the word ‘sacred’ in a narrow way--only religiously. I think sacred here also means types of ideology or philosophy which have a goal noble enough that it falls into the category of sacred. What’s being said in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth definitely belongs to the realm of the sacred.”

What’s more, Salonen says that the Beethoven is a piece of Western music that has traversed cultural boundaries in a big way.

“There’s no better piece for a concert like this because of the sort of universal message of brotherhood and understanding it sends. For many people, this is the classical piece; even in non-Western cultures like Japan, this piece has a cult status. This is a global message.”

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For a festival schedule: (310) 208-2784 or https://www.wfsm.org/americas.