Symphony of strife

It is not easy to find the UC Santa Cruz Music Center without help, and it is not easy to find help. And maybe that is as it should be. The performance at the University’s Music Hall three weeks ago was billed as a “preview of the world premiere” of a symphonic work, “Manzanar: An American Story” -- a work that will be performed again Thursday night at UCLA. This is not an easy subject. This has not been an easy project.

Manzanar, in Central California’s Owens Valley -- 200 miles north of Los Angeles along Highway 395 -- was the site of an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. From 1942 to 1945, more than 11,000 Californians were imprisoned there within a square mile, surrounded by barbed wire. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had signed an executive order that allowed the Army to round up American residents of Japanese descent and forcibly relocate them in concentration camps around the country. Many lost their houses, farms, possessions. None was ever charged with seditious activities.

Three years ago, Kent Nagano told me about his mission to create a musical theater work reminding people of Manzanar. The state of California, surplus-rich, had originally offered to fund it. For Nagano, whose parents and grandparents had been interned in various camps, the project had deeply personal overtones. A native Californian, he had never severed his roots here even as his career blossomed in Europe. Though music director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, he had remained faithful to the small Berkeley Symphony, which gave him his start in the 1970s, and he had just signed on as music director of Los Angeles Opera.

For the Manzanar project, Nagano invited the innovative stage director Robert Wilson to create a theatrical vision. What exactly the work was going to be or who might compose the text or music, nobody yet knew. But the budget was to be in the millions.

Much had changed between that optimistic time and the evening when I was agitatedly trying to find my way around the idyllically verdant Santa Cruz campus. The booth at the campus entrance was deserted. There were neither maps nor useful signs. Driving over miles of mountain roads, I made many wrong turns but after half an hour found the correct one, which brought me to a concrete bunker with prison-like slits for windows: the Music Center. Outside, the view was of the sun setting gorgeously over Monterey Bay. In the concert hall lobby, plump, sweet organic strawberries were for sale. Santa Cruz’s smugness can be infuriating, but the place wins you over.

It would be a terrible misstatement to in any way compare this site of privilege to dusty Manzanar, where loyal Americans were unjustly confined simply because of their ethnicity, where large families were forced to live in single rooms in barracks that did little to protect them from the cold and wind of winter or the blazing sun of summer, where lives were interrupted and careers ruined. The university is where lives and careers begin.

But some parallels are striking. One poignant irony is that the original “Manzanar” project had its life abruptly interrupted when the state suddenly withdrew funding after the energy blackouts and other fiscal crises. And an intriguing coincidence is that it was to Santa Cruz, the most idealistic, most experimental UC campus, that Nagano, who grew up on a farm in Morro Bay, came as an undergraduate in the 1970s to study sociology and music.

A few days after the preview, I asked Nagano how much all this -- “Manzanar,” returning to his alma mater, confronting a painful and crucial part of his family history -- was a kind of tying up of loose ends or whether it reflected a need to come to terms with his roots. Next year, he will leave Los Angeles Opera and begin to extricate himself from Berlin to assume two major new positions, the music directorships of the Montreal Symphony and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Germany.

We were, moreover, at UC Berkeley, sitting in Zellerbach Hall where the Berkeley Symphony would give the official premiere of “Manzanar” in a couple of hours. There are still players in the orchestra who remember Nagano from a quarter of a century ago, when he became music director, as an unusually serious surfer kid who sported what looked like Army surplus concert dress and wore his long hair in a ponytail.

And though he may be “Maestro” in Berlin, in Munich, in Paris, in Montreal -- cities where he is a superstar conductor -- he is Kent to everyone here. Once or twice, quiet-spoken, ever-polite Nagano almost loses his temper in rehearsal. Time is short, the players aren’t all top-notch, and he demands quiet and concentration. But his warm musicianship, his command of color and eloquently expressive phrasing, his innate sense of drama turn some dicey playing around remarkably quickly. Once “one of them,” he clearly is no longer.

“Any aspect of going back to my roots,” Nagano replied to my question, “never crossed my mind.” The Santa Cruz performance was nothing more than a coincidence; the university happened to be staging a Pacific Rim Festival and got interested in the project.

“Even the Manzanar internment camp does not, in one sense, have a personal aspect to it,” Nagano continued. “I’m of the generation that wasn’t alive when it happened.” Nor is it something that he remembers being much spoken about in his childhood. Still, it shaped the world in which he grew up.

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Intergenerational strains

Nagano’s mother and father, both born in America to families of Japanese emigrants, were in their early teens when they were interned with their parents, and they didn’t meet until years later when they were students at Berkeley. “Needless to say, their experience as young teenagers was very different from that of their parents, who had just begun to have a stable life within the state of California.”

In the case of Nagano’s mother, being in the camps put her in touch with a scholarship program under which she was able to attend a private secondary school in Boston. “Through the internment,” Nagano explained, “my mother had the opportunity to receive a level of education that who knows if she would have had that chance if she had stayed on the farm in Sunnyvale, where her family was. So the internment was a tragedy, but at the same time it provided an unexpected opening of a lot of doors.”

Both of Nagano’s parents were moved around to several camps, none of them Manzanar. His father’s family, which owned the farm in Morro Bay, was lucky, because neighbors helped take care of the land, and the family got it all back. “Through this wonderful act,” he said, “we formed friendships and relationships that continue to this day. Of course, many of our acquaintances were not nearly as fortunate as we were.”

Nagano described his childhood as that of a typical American kid. “I recall one afternoon my father asked if we children would like to give up our weekends to go to Japanese language school, and we children said no. And that was that.” But underlying his American childhood was still a connection with Japanese culture. He lived in an extended family and was close to his Japanese-born grandparents.

The Manzanar project, though, has prodded him to ponder the enormous generational tension between his parents and grandparents, which was common among the issei, the Japanese emigrants, and their children, the nisei, born in America. He notes that his generation, the sansei, in turn had their great differences with parents who had gone through the camp experience.

It wasn’t until he reached his 30s that Nagano first went to Japan. “It was surprising to me, truly surprising, how meaningful that visit was,” he recalled. In Japan, he realized just how complicated was his relationship with his heritage. The limited Japanese he knew, the words he had learned from his grandparents, turned out to be archaic, the Japanese of the late 19th century. “Yet the social rhythms and social mores were distinctly familiar to me and able to put me at ease.”

The one thing, Nagano said, that sums up his relationship with Japan as a third-generation Japanese American is that when he tours the country his name is spelled in characters reserved for foreigners -- even though his first name is Japanized to Kento.

All of this, Nagano said, came into play when Kevin Starr, then California’s state librarian and a well-known historian, first visited him and his Japanese wife, the pianist Mari Kodama, at their San Francisco home to propose a “Manzanar” symphony.

“I thought it was a terrible idea,” Nagano told an audience last fall at L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum. When he made his proposal, Starr was head of the library’s California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, or CCLPEP, which was funding various projects about the internment camps, and he wanted music included. He had known Nagano for 25 years and, well, he said over the phone, “fools rush in.”

In fact, Nagano later clarified his response as being a form of brainstorming. “My counterproposal to Dr. Starr was to incorporate some kind of theater or dramatic elements to it, so that there could be text. I proposed that I approach Robert Wilson, and Bob was very, very moved and inspired by the idea.”

With an exploratory grant of $70,000 from the state and additional funding promised, Wilson held summer workshops in 2002 at his Long Island arts compound, Watermill. Meanwhile, Nagano also approached Ernest Fleischmann, former Los Angeles Philharmonic executive director and then artistic director of the Ojai Music Festival, for advice. Naomi Sekiya, a doctoral music student from Japan studying at USC, had just won the Ojai Music Festival Award for young composers, and Fleischmann suggested she write the music. Fleischmann took on the role of producer.

The following year, then-Gov. Gray Davis dropped significant funding for CCLPEP from the state budget, and Wilson and Fleischmann could no longer be kept on. At that point, Nagano said, he started “a long and lonesome process of pushing this pea up the hill all by myself.”

He still wanted to apply Wilson’s idea, which he described as “having several speaking parts and of incorporating abstraction to make sure that the story was not told on only one level but on several levels, so that even if one doesn’t have a personal relationship to the experience, you could still apply your own personal experience.”

Nagano turned to the Berkeley playwright and filmmaker Philip Kan Gotanda for a text. But financial support proved harder than expected to find. “Those I thought would just naturally want to support a project like this didn’t want to commit themselves until it was up and running.”

In the end, “Manzanar” became a grass-roots effort, and it was local community members, such as Dale Franzen of Santa Monica College, who stepped forward to salvage what they could of the original project. “Manzanar” became a work for symphony orchestra, six narrator-actors, solo soprano and girls chorus. Two more composers were included. Through the use of several voices, Gotanda’s text briefly sketches the journey of Japanese immigrants from their arrival in America to their arrival at Manzanar. The jazz musician David Benoit contributed elements of popular music from the period, including the kind of big band arrangements that inmates in the camps played.

The French composer Jean-Pascal Beintus, whose music is more easygoing and in a more popular idiom than that of Sekiya, was brought in to lighten the score for vignettes of camp life. Fortunately, most of the music -- intense, dramatic, masterfully colored, uncompromising -- remains Sekiya’s. She has spent the last season as composer in residence of the Berkeley Symphony, and she has clearly won admirers. The premiere received a moving standing ovation. The 2,000-seat Zellerbach was sold out, and people were turned away.

Having once anticipated a major new work from Robert Wilson, one may feel frustrated that the “Manzanar” project is now more modest. Still, Nagano and Starr have expressed little outrage at the state’s cavalier pullout. California and the U.S. government have apologized to Japanese Americans for an unconscionable lapse of democracy. An attempt at restitution has been made. In 1992, the Manzanar National Historic Site was established, and last year, a moving interpretive center, with interactive exhibits, opened on the grounds.

But that can hardly begin to right the wrongs. Manzanar is still little taught in school, still shockingly little known. It is far too easy to drive by without noticing the camp.

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Exploring democracy

For the Berkeley concert -- which is to be replicated at UCLA by the American Youth Symphony -- Nagano fashioned a statement about democracy that includes Ives’ “Unanswered Question” and music from Beethoven’s “Fidelio” along with a reading by Starr of Plato’s “The Apology of Socrates.”

“The question that remains unanswered,” Nagano explained, “has something to do with the human ideal, and the human ideal obviously has something to do with the story of ‘Fidelio,’ of [the hero] Florestan’s unjust imprisonment. Yes, it is important to recall a specific historical event, but what makes that particularly powerful is the universal relevance, which is also why I’ve included Plato.” Democracy, its uses and misuses, is not a new story and not without relevance to world events today.

But the oddest part of the “Manzanar” project, the one where where Nagano may have made the a great personal discovery, is its celebratory nature. Early on, Nagano went to see if he might interest Hawaii Sen. Daniel K. Inouye in the project. “When I first approached Sen. Inouye, he agreed to participate, but only if it was a ‘celebration’ of Manzanar. That shocked me.”

Nagano began to understand what Inouye, who will be a narrator at the UCLA performance, meant when he finally visited Manzanar. He had never been there, nor, it turns out, had many others involved with the project. So a year ago, a quick trip was arranged. Nagano, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and photographer and former Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti crowded into a small plane headed to the Owens Valley. I went along.

We didn’t have much time to tour Manzanar or view the interpretive center, which was due to open to the public in a few days. Nagano seemed reflective, especially as he carefully studied photographs of camp life. But there was also the unmistakable mood of an outing -- down to the box lunches. There was even a kind of ebullience.

Despite all the hardships it imposed, Manzanar has its inspirational side. Photographs (Ansel Adams took some great ones) and artifacts show less suffering than invention, leaving a record of ways people found not just to survive but to bring beauty and art into their lives, to honor the raw natural loveliness of the surroundings.

In Berkeley, Nagano reflected on how “Manzanar” relates to issues today, such as racial profiling. Clearly, we haven’t absorbed the lessons of the camp.

“One of the things that became very clear to me even as a child,” he explained, “is that, like so many historic events, it’s subject to so many different interpretations. There’s no single simple story of what happened, and the times were obviously extremely complicated -- like they are today -- and any number of interpretations or revisions can come out of it.”

On the plane to Manzanar, Nagano volunteered, with a big laugh, that he had called his mother that morning to tell her he was going to visit the site.

“ ‘Oh, have a good time,’ she said. She wasn’t very emotional about it.”

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Swed is The Times’ classical music critic. Contact him at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.

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‘Manzanar: An American Story’

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

When: 8 p.m. Thursday

Price: $35 to $58

Contact: (310) 825-2101 or www.UCLALive.org