Suddenly, the Music of the Spheres Is Missing

Are you one of those people who show up at the Hollywood Bowl just for the Fourth of July fireworks, like those slackers who attend church only for the gaudy special effects of Christmas? Well then, you are in for a surprise this weekend.

Thanks to a $25-million, eight-month renovation, it’s an all-new Bowl. The aging band shell was cramped, stained, leaky, blah blah blah. It sounded bad, blah blah blah. And -- red alert! -- the balls are gone.

That’s right. Those familiar white globes floating above the stage have been replaced by an “acoustic canopy” -- a halo-like ring of adjustable plastic acoustic panels.

The Frank Gehry-designed bubble-like orbs, put up in 1980, were also intended for acoustic benefit, but new shell co-designer Craig Hodgetts says they actually “scattered sound every which way” -- code words for “the balls were underperforming.” They were downsized, outsourced.

You know the drill: Times change, progress marches on, age 24 is high time in L.A. to be replaced with a younger, hipper (leaner!) version. But is this what we want? Is this right?

Perhaps I sound a tad bitter and yammering and coot-like. Maybe -- but I’m also part of a long-standing Los Angeles tradition. Complaints about our dazzling Hollywood band shell have been going on as long as.... Well, we know Heifetz famously loathed our hillside venue, as did Rubinstein and Klemperer.

I’m sure that as far back as the 1700s, the master violin-maker Guarneri himself was already irked by the Bowl. It wasn’t built yet, but even deep in Italy, as he bent over to carve one of his matchless instruments -- some of which would go on to grace the Bowl stage almost three centuries later (along with the Monkees, Rod Stewart and singing Elmo) -- in his chest there was probably already a burning feeling.

The carping from classical music types tends to focus on the Bowl’s iffy acoustics, which seems to miss the point. I mean, let’s face it -- summer entertainment is the “Stars Wars” theme and wine-in-a-box. If uptight Webern-loving L.A. Phil string players want a pension plan when they retire, they’d better get used to it. Even the esteemed Santa Fe Opera House was originally sited by horsemen shooting pistols in the air to see how the sound traveled. You can put a tuxedo on it, but when classical music moves West, to the great outdoors, the aesthetics have to get a little more “big picture.”

And the balls, for me, were part of that Cecil B. DeMille-sized canvas. I for one was stunned to learn they had any acoustic function whatsoever. I’d always thought they were, oh, I don’t know, Pop Art scenery left behind at some long ago Playboy Jazz Festival by a lava-lamp-gazing roadie from Amsterdam.

We had plenty of time to contemplate such international fiascos in the good old days, we ticket-holders in the grassy nosebleed seats, awash in our sea of El Pollo Loco and not-even-quite-Trader-Joe’s- quality wine. To our eye, the stage was as a tiny glowing diorama: If Midori was sawing brilliantly away down there, one was not particularly aware of it. But the balls! Those you could see! And they changed color!

Well, since being fired, the balls’ first stop has been Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station, where they were on display decorated by, among other Los Angeles artists, Tony Curtis. Because they were for sale, who knows where they’ll show up next -- Las Vegas? “Queer Eye”? An auto show?

They’re anybody’s now, and actually, that fate’s appropriate. Unlike Disney Hall, which scares me because of its earth-shattering cultural importance, Gehry’s orbs will always be “We the people’s.”

I rented “Beaches” the other day and there they were, hanging portentously -- yet glamorously -- above Bowl-rehearsing Bette Midler like the tumor (or nameless virus-type thing) that was about to drop with a thud onto the plot line and Barbara Hershey. Dabbing my tears, I thought: “Yes -- and can an adjustable acoustic canopy do that?”

Sandra Tsing Loh’s commentaries are heard on KPCC-FM and PRI’s “Marketplace.”