That’s life in the big city

Most Americans -- the last census says about 79% -- live in cities. We love them for the choices they offer in where to live, play, shop and dine. We hate them when we’re stuck in traffic.

And when it comes to weighing in on the pleasures and perils of urban life, composers are as expressive as any of us. That may be because, as the American composer Michael Gordon put it recently, “the orchestra is something like a city. It has all the advantages and disadvantages, just like when you move into a place and you don’t know who your neighbors are. Similarly, in the orchestra, you’re sitting next to people who have landed up there next to you.”

This week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is preparing to embark on a two-week festival of concerts and other fare that will explore the symbiosis between music and the urban experience. “Concrete Frequency,” which begins Friday, will comprise three orchestral programs, one featuring a collaboration between Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison inspired by Los Angeles. It will also include concerts showcasing singer-songwriters and electronic music; a film series; an art exhibition, and a symposium with Walt Disney Concert Hall architect Frank Gehry and festival director David Robertson, conductor of the St. Louis Symphony.

Coincidentally, the festival will kick off almost exactly when construction starts across the street from Disney Hall, the Philharmonic’s home, on the first phase of the $2-billion Grand Avenue project, designed by Gehry for the New York-based developer Related Cos.

“It’s an interesting juxtaposition that we didn’t plan for,” Philharmonic President Deborah Borda said. “But we’re always thinking about the effect that Walt Disney Concert Hall has had on downtown Los Angeles.

“We think a lot about our city and what an intriguing place it is. But sometimes it’s a hard city to grasp and understand in its complexity and change. That is really where we took off from.”

Robertson, for his part, described the festival as a “series of snapshots.”

“It starts back at the idea of the idealized modern American city, which so impressed French composer Edgar Varese,” he said, “going right up to Morrison and Gordon taking a look at that idealized American city and saying, ‘So, what’s the report card?’

“And then there’s everything in between.”

That range includes composers who see the city as a place where silence is disappearing and loneliness is increasing, despite the crowds, and others who love the overstimulation of urban life and revel in technological progress and change.

In “Central Park in the Dark,” for instance, Charles Ives paints an oasis of calm with mysterious, quiet events occurring on its periphery. “We suddenly realize there isn’t just one thing happening,” said Robertson. “There’s this simultaneity of events all the time.”

Morton Feldman, on the other hand, doesn’t merely suggest simultaneity in his “Turfan Fragments.” “It throws you right onto the brink of this teeming universe of sounds, as though you suddenly opened the door of your silent apartment and there all sorts of masses are streaming in front of your door, and you join them.”

To contrast composers who love modern technology and those who might have doubts, Robertson has paired Pierre Boulez’s high-tech extravaganza “. . . explosante-fixe . . .” with the premiere of the Gordon-Morrison collaboration, “Dystopia.”

“For Boulez and his generation, man’s technology is so cool: ‘Look what it allows us to do,’ ” Robertson said. “It allows us to create a sound world that is unimaginable without it. But then we use that same technology to address the question of what happens when we become so heavily indebted to technology in the way we live our lives. That’s going to be an absolutely fascinating juxtaposition.”

A certain poetry to it all

To leaven these heavy concerns, Robertson has also included rocker Frank Zappa’s “Dupree’s Paradise.” Zappa, he said, “is someone who says, ‘Don’t worry about any of that baggage. This is where we are. This is what we’ve got. Let’s enjoy ourselves.’ ”

Other modern troubadours -- among them John Doe, late of the punk group X; actress Zooey Deschanel; and Bob Mould, a founder of the rock band Husker Du -- will get to express their views in the singer-songwriter concert.

“I couldn’t imagine having something like this where we don’t have these song possibilities coming in,” Robertson said. “These artists have this ability to sum up an experience in just a few lines of poetry and sometimes a simple presentation of ideas that moves us tremendously.”

Widening the lens on cities, the festival will include screenings of three films -- Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent, “Metropolis” (Jan. 7), Martin Scorsese’s 1976 “Taxi Driver” (Jan. 14) and Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 “A Clockwork Orange” (Jan. 15) -- at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood.

“ ‘Metropolis,’ ” said Robertson, is “an amazing film, but it says more about what people thought about life at the time than about now. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Taxi Driver,’ on the other hand, have become rather compelling because we’ve actually seen all this stuff come true, whereas when the films came out it seemed rather outlandish.”

Those films’ shared anti-utopian view seems reinforced by “Dystopia,” the festival-commissioned Gordon-Morrison music-video collaboration. But the composer disagrees.

“We don’t necessarily mean it as a negative comment on urban life or urban living,” Gordon said. “Maybe it could be thought of as our art form looking at things people think are ugly and saying that they’re beautiful, and then trying to convince people that they are beautiful.

“One could look at a city that way, thinking, ‘Well, it’s not well manicured, it’s not neatly ordered, it is chaotic and disruptive.’ But it has a certain kind of energy, and that’s what we’re trying to capture.”

The piece, just under 30 minutes, calls for an organ, electric bass, piano, five percussionists and the usual complement of strings, brass and winds. Gordon didn’t work from sketches or a piano version but wrote out the music in full score. “What I basically set out to do was to start loud and fast and keep going. The instruction at the very beginning is ‘A mad rush.’ It’s basically like being on the freeway at 85 miles an hour -- and you can’t slow down. That’s the energy I tried to capture. So, hopefully, when it’s over, you’ll go, ‘Whew!’ and take a deep breath.”

Gordon and Morrison, whose “Decasia,” was seen during the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” festival in 2006, work for the most part independently. Morrison spent about a year collecting images from various archives -- among them USC, Fox Movietone News and the Academy Film Archive -- and also shot his own L.A. footage. He then cut the visual material to fit the music, making final edits over the last two months.

“The music dictates so much emotionally what you feel that the video can’t be spoken about separately,” he said. “That’s the nature of this collaboration. This isn’t a standard moviegoing experience.”

The footage Morrison assembled includes the first film shot here, “South Spring Street, Los Angeles,” which Thomas Edison made in 1898. It was restored to film by the re-photography of “paper prints” of each frame, which were made for copyright protection. (All original film copies are gone.) The “Dystopia” imagery, Morrison said, goes from “early pedestrian and surface-level congestion to everyone moving out of downtown Los Angeles and then people moving back in. People would always tell me, ‘Nobody lives downtown. It’s a complete ghost town.’ I knew they were joking, but at the same time it was this mysterious area.”

Gordon’s idea of going 85 mph on a freeway may be the tip-off that neither he nor Morrison is an Angeleno. In fact, they’re both New Yorkers. But that’s OK with Borda.

“They’re fascinating artists,” she said. “Sometimes it’s very interesting to have somebody from the outside look at your city.” Soon after completing the work, Gordon observed: “Writing music and especially writing for orchestra is the biggest, grandest kind of thing you can do. It’s like building an empire or a huge skyscraper but one that can’t fall down or can’t collapse. All that can happen is you like it or you don’t like it in the end.”

Still, can music really tell anyone anything about a city? Stravinsky once famously said that music expresses nothing except itself.

“Listen, it’s very nice to say that, but I actually am fundamentally opposed to that idea,” Robertson said. “It is not that you cannot have sounds by themselves, but in that case no human being is listening to them because human beings immediately create context.

“You could say I’m articulating things that someone else might feel quite differently and may not get from a concert, and I’m happy with that. But at the same time, I am convinced that if you listen to the three concerts, even if you don’t read the program notes, there will be an emotional narrative that you will engage with.”

In the end, he said, “The idea of the arts is not to be the response to what is going on. It’s to be a catalyst for thought and change and an opening up of experience. How’s that for a mission statement?”

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chris.pasles@latimes.com

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. next Sunday; 8 p.m. Jan. 10, 11 and 12; 2 p.m. Jan. 13

Price: $40 to $142

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or, for additional information on the “Concrete Frequency” festival, www.laphil.com