An ancient architecture of sound

If Frank Gehry had his say as to what would go on the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall, and not merely around it, you might imagine the result would be music as connected to our time and place as his architecture. But you would be wrong.

Gehry did get a choice, for at least one evening, and what he opted for was music from a time and place far, far away. The concert, Tuesday night, will feature the American debut of Reigakusha, an ensemble from Tokyo devoted to the ancient Japanese court music known as gagaku.

Gehry says Japanese architecture was all the rage when he studied at USC in the early ‘50s, and that excited him about other aspects of Japanese art (did you ever wonder where his fish motifs came from?). At the time, his sister was a harpist studying at UCLA, and she introduced him to an ethnomusicologist, Robert Garfias, who had just formed a student gagaku ensemble. Gehry joined, playing the shoko, or small brass gong, in this formal, 1,000-year-old music for wooden flutes, eerie double reeds, koto and lutes.

“To get past all the words, building departments, codes -- everything can become sterilized,” the architect says in explaining how gagaku has influenced his own work. “How do you control it and keep the passion? That’s what gagaku represents to me.”