How his architecture has advanced music

AN APPRECIATION

- MARK SWED MUSIC CRITIC

FRANK GEHRY'S sketch of Walt Disney Concert Hall hints at the revolutionary energy in buildings he designed for performers.

(FRANK GEHRY)

The street was very quiet. The moon, full. The ocean in the background, calm. All the lights inside were on as I walked by a Santa Monica house, when I thought I heard the famous theme from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”

Bach wrote this for a certain Herr Goldberg seeking serenity to put him to sleep.

The music was in my head or, if you are willing to get spiritual about it, in an unidentifiable ether. Inside the house, another Mr. Goldberg, one who changed his name to Frank Gehry as a striving young architect having moved from Toronto to Los Angeles, lay dying, leaving the realm he had remade like no one else in our time. Gehry died on Friday at age 96 following a brief respiratory illness.

The “Goldberg Variations” was Gehry’s favorite work. He loved its otherworldliness and its worldliness. He loved its invitation to dance and to dream. He loved its astonishing sense of design, complex yet flowing with the ocean’s grace, its depth and its inviting surface. He loved that it was unfathomable. All things that have come to describe Gehry.

Once I spent a day in Gehry’s office where we had takeout salads for lunch and talked for several hours about the “Goldbergs.” He had been asked by Princeton University Press to contribute to a book in which 26 artists and writers wrote about a piece that meant something special to them. But Frank — he was Frank to all Angelenos — couldn't put it in words. He agreed only if it could be a discussion.