Los Angeles Music Center
The Los Angeles Music Center (officially the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County) is one of the largest performing arts centers in the United States.[1] Located in downtown Los Angeles, The Music Center is composed of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theatre (REDCAT), and Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Music Center
135 North Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
1.3 million per year
1964
- Ahmanson Theatre
- Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
- Mark Taper Forum
- Walt Disney Concert Hall
- REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater)
- orchestra
- opera
- drama
- musical
- chorale
- lecture
- dance
- family
- participatory
The Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County
Each year, The Music Center welcomes more than 1.3 million people to performances by its four internationally renowned resident companies: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Center Theatre Group (CTG) as well as performances by the dance series Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center. The center is home to on-going community events, arts festivals, outdoor concerts, participatory arts activities and workshops, and educational programs.
The main venues of the complex (which also includes some outdoor amphitheaters) are:
Public art[edit]
The 10-ton, 29-foot bronze sculpture Peace on Earth (1969 by Jacques Lipchitz, a Cubist sculptor who fled the Nazi occupation of Paris, was dedicated on May 4, 1969, and originally installed as the focal point of the Music Center plaza. His mammoth bronze sculpture shows a dove descending to Earth as a spirit of peace, further symbolized by a Madonna standing inside a tear-shaped canopy, supported by reclining lambs.[7] Lawrence E. Deutsch and Lloyd Rigler donated $250,000 to commission a work for the fountain. The architects of The Music Center, Welton Becket and Associates, opposed placing sculpture in the plaza between the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Mark Taper Forum. However, after a two-year search, the Art Committee of The Music Center commissioned Lipchitz.[5][8] In 2019, the sculpture was re-installed 100 feet west to accommodate a major Plaza renovation to improve accessibility.[9]
Three years after the Peace on Earth installation in 1982, Frederick and Marcia Weisman donated the bronze sculpture Dance Door (1978) by Robert Graham to the Music Center. It consists of an ornamented hollow-centered bronze door hinged on a bronze frame in an open position. The door is constructed of approximately seven welded case panels on each side, containing low relief abstracted figures of dancers.[10]